[garbear]

Basically when the controllers are plugged in they appear at the top

This presents two difficulties.

First, we assume an infinite number of proprietary and DIY controllers, so it's not possible to have an image for every controller. Maybe we can show the image of the peripheral add-on presenting the controller?

Well we just have a generic image for all DIY controllers.

Sorry, I was thinking too abstract (stop me next time I do). I was pointing out a problem in your concept. We currently don't have a way to tell controllers from joysticks, so the thee images would be the same.

My suggestions:

• Use a default icon for all devices
  
• On windows, use the icon shown by Windows Control Panel (I think this can be done)
  
• Just display text. Here's what we know (and their caveats):
  • Name provided by the driver (sometimes missing, not localized, sometimes messy)
    
  • An alternative name could be current platform, e.g. "Windows joystick", "Linux joystick", "Android joystick"
    
  • USB VID/PID (missing on some platforms)
    
  • USB Vendor name (from this, possibly unknown)
    
  • Number of digital buttons and analog axes
    

Just to let you know what we have to work with

If you want to show something else just ask and I can think of a way to add it. But know that additional information is very hard to come by.

Second, some controllers use keyboard drivers. There's no way to detect these, so we have to assume a large, unknown number of connected keyboard-based controllers at any time. How can we modify your idea to include this assumption?

Can't we just have "generic keyboard controller" for all of these?

Yes, but we don't know how many are attached. We should ask the user for the "number of keyboard players", and show that many keyboard icons. Can you add a few keyboards to your concept image?

We could have this be a setting in the Game Input Settings, under "Configure input for game systems":

My vision is the ultimate zero-configuration bliss. Necessarily, we'll need to generalize to unseen data. More powerful generalization requires increasing complexity. Increasing complexity means increasing maintenance costs and reduced scalability. These are my two greatest coding offenses, because maintenance cost affects other people, and scalability affects future performance.

Therefore, generalization in Kodi is unacceptable. To avoid this, I've added the assumption of an "oracle" that always returns the most likely configuration. According to this assumption, all controllers are always mapped, so we can't indicate that a particular controller is unmapped. How should we handle this?

• Remove this indicator
  
• Drop this assumption, and therefore zero-configuration
  
• Make the oracle also return an "accuracy" (this is difficult). That way, we can still show this indicator when accuracy == 0
  

What you wrote here is WAAAY too abstract for me... what does this mean??

Haha, I do that often. Can you remove the "1 Controller mapped" part? We currently don't have a way to tell how many controllers are mapped, and I have deep philosophical misgivings against adding this option the easy way