[garbear]

I gave http://www.recalbox.com/ a quick try on my PI2 today. They also have a button mapping feature which we could adopt. What they do is that you open up a mapping dialog where they ask you to press any button of the controller you'd like to use for mapping for 4 seconds (device identification).

Joysticks show up in the peripherals dialog, so it makes sense that you'd be able to configure each controller from there. We should also probably include a generic keyboard in this dialog so it can be configured too. I think we should *also* have a "Configure game input" action in settings that does exactly this; opens a dialog and prompts for a button or keyboard press, then opens the configuration GUI for that controller.

Alternatively, what if the configuration GUI allowed all controllers to be configured at once? e.g. when prompted for the A button, any controller can press A and that button will be mapped for that controller.

After that they switch to a mapping window that's trapping ALL input from the according device and is running through an automated step by step mapping wizard. So they show a list of let's say 10 buttons and ask you one after another to press the button you'd like to map this function/virtual key to. We could do the very same, but in addition to the button labels we also highlight the related button of the virtual controller. So only trap controller input when in active mapping mode. The identification of the physical controller/device to be mapped by pressing any button of a connected device (could have also been keyboard I suppose) for X seconds is a really nice idea as well. Like when you have a XBOX and PS4 controller connected and like to map both individually.

I like the idea of a wizard. Can we have both a wizard and free button selection? How would this work?

doing it in a simmilar way would also allow us to split up the windows for game/emulator selection and the mapping window which is showing the virtual controller. So in the screenshots of current version the horizontal menu would not be there but in a separate "overview/selection" window

I posted this video earlier... is this what you had in mind with a window for emulator selection and a separate dialog for mapping?

Ideally, you will have default mappings for common controllers on different platforms anyway, so the mapping to the default controller should only be brought up when an unknown device has been connected that kodi thinks is a control pad and prompt the user for buttons needed for basic navigation. Then all other pads should map against the default one.

My original strategy was to map the virtual 360 controller, then apply heuristics to guess how the other controllers should be mapped. See OP, and try not to vomit. The only advantage is potentially less data to store [with N physical controllers in existence, this is O(N)].

Instead, I want to have the user map every controller individually. This will drastically reduce the complexity. But this is a lot more work for the user. Also, this scales worse [with M emulators, this becomes O(N*M)].

However, I plan to allow users to "vote" for configurations. This means that only 1 user (with a new, unseen controller) has to configure M emulators. After that, the controller's most popular configuration becomes the default, meaning the controller works out of the box for everyone else with no configuration.