Hotplugging Joysticks And Gamepads On OSX

Question

I've tested the cross platform joystick support features on GLFW, SDL2 and SFML. SDL2 appears to be the most complete, but it can't detect when joysticks have been unplugged on OSX. To me, this is a fundamental feature.

Joystick detection support appears to be much weaker on the Mac than in Windows. What can I do to overcome this?

Answer 1

Using the latest SFML from github (2.1 should also work but I didn't test with it) you can listen for the sf::Event::JoystickConnected and sf::Event::JoystickDisconnected events as described in the SFML Events Tutorial. I've tested the events and they are both fired on Mac and Windows.

A sample program to test this would look like:

#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>

int main()
{
    sf::RenderWindow window(sf::VideoMode(200, 200), "SFML Joystick Events!");


    while (window.isOpen())
    {
        sf::Event event;
        while (window.pollEvent(event))
        {
            if (event.type == sf::Event:: JoystickConnected)
            {
                std::cout << "joystick connected: " << event.joystickConnect.joystickId << std::endl;
            }
            else if (event.type == sf::Event::JoystickDisconnected)
            {
                std::cout << "joystick disconnected: " << event.joystickConnect.joystickId << std::endl;
            }
            else if (event.type == sf::Event::Closed)
            {
                window.close();
            }
        }
    }

    return 0;
}