Users can move focus, activate widgets and emit dismiss intents which closes alert dialogs for example.

Not all flutter widgets fully can be operated with the global intents. For example the Slider widgets uses private intents with additional support for keyboard shortcuts.

Background

The widget GamepadControl in this PR is based of a widget OverlayGamepadControl I wrote in a flame game. But it has been reworked to be more generic and apply not just for flame overlays but any widget trees.

In this work I now mainly focus on pure Flutter first, and then would like to look at Flame overlays to see what has to be done there in terms of focus management. I have now extended the example with a Flame game and provided documentation on how flutter_gamepads can be used for overlays in a Flame game. The core flutter_gamepads package still remains independent of Flame.

How to use it

Wrap your widgets with GamepadControl to allow users to navigate it using their gamepad.

GamepadControl(
    child: YourWidgets(),
)

Please do read the README.md for more in-depth info.

README.md
GamepadControl
GamepadInterceptor
Example

Todos

• I am still not fully sure if I should use FocusScope.of(activateContext).previousFocus() or emit a PreviousFocusIntent().
• Applying GamepadControl to parallell widget trees => doesn't really work. So recommendation is now to have GamepadControl in the root and then use GamepadInterceptor if you want to receive onBeforeIntent() locally.
• Solve how to operate a ListView() without focusable elements with a gamepad => Tire 2 level support.
• More elaborate app than then initial sample app which is mainly AI generated.
• Key repeat support
• Performance optimizations
  • I use abs() a bit in the logic which possible could be re-written as conditional logic with a slight performance gain?
  • ~~It currently maintain previousAxisValue for all axeses, not just those used in current shortcuts configuration.
  • IMHO the gain is too margin compared to lost readability in both cases, so I skipped them.
• Finalize the default gamepad binding (shortcuts parameter)
• Decide on final naming of parameters and widget names.
  • Use concept of Intents? Does the average Flutter developer know about the Intent system?

Tier 1, Tier 2

Tier 1

There likely will be a tier 1 level support of certain things that just work out of the box.

Tier 2

But there will likely be things like the Slider where users of this package need to do some manual wiring up to make it work.

For this the package provides GampadInterceptor() and onBeforeIntent callback. There are examples of implementing tire 2 level support in the example app.