CtrlAssist – an open source project to bring more accessible, collaborative gaming to Linux! Inspired by PC gaming sessions with my own family, where both young and old relish exploring rich stories with immersive worlds (like Witcher 3, RDR3, Hogwarts Legacy, etc) but find coordinated combat or movement control too challenging to play solo, CtrlAssist lets you combine multiple controllers into one virtual gamepad, much like assist features on dedicated game consoles.

Whether your helping grandparents through tough boss fights, or co-oping with nieces and nephews to level age gaps, CtrlAssist aims to make PC gaming on Linux fun and accessible for everyone. While I’m certain similar utilities exist, I also just wanted a holiday hobby project to practice Rust development while scratching a personal itch.

Please give it a try, share your feedback in the relevant discussion categories, or check out the open issues if you’d like to contribute, help is always welcome!

#RustLang #LinuxGaming #Accessibility #OpenSource #CtrlAssist

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[–] 6 points 10 months ago

What a nifty idea! Nice job <3

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  • 3 comments in c/gamedev@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    That's an awesome idea! I think, this would be awesome to be able to play single player games with your friends!

    But I do have to mention, that your cool project get's slightly ruined by the AI generated banner on your GitHub page. Is that really necessary?

    Thank you so much for making this though! Your creativity and dedication is exactly what makes the open source community so great!

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    Indeed it's just a placeholder logo until a real human artist would like to contribute, as I'm no talented graphics designer myself. I still think it serves a purpose to quickly and visually illustrate what the project does, as all of the key words and terminology used by similar efforts never reached a consensus or becoming a household names.

    Xbox initially called this Copilot (lol, on brand), Apple calls this buddy mode, PlayStation just filled it under Access™, so something to link words to an intuition is better than nothing at the moment. If you have any suggested SEO for folks to find this is that's what their looking for, let me know. I've been in the trench for too long to know less technical jargon folks would use.

    I'm also already transparent in using AI for rubber duck sessions in the public pull requests, so anyone agents AI would already probably object to its origins.

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  • 3 comments in c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    This looks nice for gaming with my kid, though I find that most games on Steam allow me to have two controllers connected and both working as a single player input. I can already help my kid control the camera while they are doing the majority of the movement.

    It's probably a function of Steam input.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 10 months ago

    Indeed, I've encountered a few games on Steam that gracefully switch multiple controllers, but only by giving exclusive input on a first come-first-serve bases (i.e. which ever controller moves first after some cool down of inactivity from both). Hollow Knight: Silksong being one such example, as I couldn't necessarily drive separate axis from different controllers simultaneously, thus one such motivation for passing the game only one virtual controller and optionally hiding the rest to avoid input conflicts.

    I'd be happy if Steam were to adopt such an accessibility feature into Steam input directly, much like Xbox and PlayStation. Perhaps they'll take more of an interest in multi controller configurations with the upcoming refresh of the Steam Controller, given the wireless dongle is meant for multi device pairing.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    I think it is neat!

    This is also something InputPlumber supports.

    https://github.com/ShadowBlip/InputPlumber

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  • 1 comment in c/linux@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    Thats fucking rad!

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