Gamepad Tester

For developers

If your browser supports it, using the Gamepad API in your own code is pretty simple.

The first thing to do is listen for `gamepadconnected` events on `window`.

This will fire once for every gamepad. It will fire when a gamepad is connected, or the first time it's detected by the browser, like if it was already plugged in and you just refreshed the page. The callback is passed a `GamepadEventInit` object.

window.addEventListener("gamepadconnected", (event) => {
  console.log("A gamepad connected:");
  console.log(event.gamepad);
});

window.addEventListener("gamepaddisconnected", (event) => {
  console.log("A gamepad disconnected:");
  console.log(event.gamepad);
});

More importantly, to get updates on the current gamepad state, you need to call `navigator.getGamepads()`, which returns an array of currently connected gamepads, and their current button and axis positions. Typically you'd call this function once per frame.

var gamepads = navigator.getGamepads();
console.log(gamepads);

What you get back looks like this:

[
  {
    axes: [0.01, 0.01, 0.02, 0.04],
    buttons: [
      { pressed: true, value: 1 },
      { pressed: false, value: 0 },
      { pressed: false, value: 0 },
      { pressed: false, value: 0 },
      [...]
    ],
    connected: true,
    id: "Xbox 360 Controller (XInput STANDARD GAMEPAD)",
    index: 0,
    mapping: "standard",
    timestamp: 177550
  },
  null,
  null,
  null
]

Some things, like right and left triggers on an xbox controller, are reported as buttons, with a floating point `value`s.

Recently, vibration support has been added in Chrome, which can be called like this on xbox and ps4 controllers (at least).

gamepad.vibrationActuator.playEffect("dual-rumble", {
  startDelay: 0,
  duration: 1000,
  weakMagnitude: 1.0,
  strongMagnitude: 1.0
});

There are more experimental APIs in the works, with things like VR pose data, haptic feedback, and more, but they are not widely supported at this time.

More resources

Gamepad API - detailed information about the Gamepad API including experimental features.