Ps4 controller trouble

General Discussion
1

I bought a nice, new ps4 controller and ego shooters play so much better instead of a common keyboard.

Some of my games use xbox-controller specific configurations, and:

  • misplace buttons
  • don’t see many buttons at all.

Since controllers are very user specific and I really like Ps4 controllers, I am NOT going to buy a xbox controller just to play some of my games (Dishonored 2, Achilles Legends untold, Mirrors edge, etc). Also I don’t want to use the keyboard anymore for these titles forcing me to use an xbox controller.

Usually a keyboard remap is the very best choice, in fact it works great because you can configure buttons as you like, vs xbox controller preset configs. The problem arises when your game detects a gamepad and switches automatically from keyboard input to controller input AND you cannot deactivate the controller input.

So I tried a remedy installing xboxdrv but was unable to get it working with my ps4 controller. After setup, xboxdrv tells me always errors like:
No Xbox or Xbox360 controller found
Damn, I know myself my controller is a ps4 one but I know also xboxdrv is able to detect ps4 controllers too, not just xbox controllers.

The best solution would be to deactivate controller input in all games all times. So my controller could use reliably and always the settings of my keyboard and mouse input.

Is it possible to deactivate controllers completely?

Some games allow you to deactivate controller input in the game preferences itself or their preference files on disk, usually they are found in *.ini files.

2

In the case of Windows games launched from Lutris, it launches under WINE, and it’s WINE that will take the joystick device from Linux.

You’ve got a highly specific set of circumstances. The PS4 controller you say won’t work with specific games when mapping buttons to what they expect - which is usally an XBox controller - this may mean that may not even work well under Windows.

You can try and track down a driver that makes your PS4 pad look like an XBox controller for the purposes of running games (check GitHub for ds4drv) or, the last suggestion, there may be a WINE launch option that disables joysticks, and finally you can always create a switching shell script that puts in a udev rule (and performs a re-init) to temporarily remove the device before launching the game of your choice.

Other than that, it’ll be whatever each game offers as a supported option.

3

Hey thanks to pin down all these points!

Meanwhile I installed ds4drv and modified some wine settings too.
Since controllers are just some quality of life thing for gaming, I won’t switch to gamepads I don’t use and don’t wanna use.

Pip installed ds4drv with some warning, suggesting me to install in a name space. I really should check udev rules, maybe this way gamepads are easier to configure. The perfect solution would be to block gamepad input completely, always and forever in favor to keyboard input.