Unity Developing New Input System… Seeking Input

 

Ok, bad pun to start the day, I’ll freely admit.  While groan inducing, the title of this thread is accurate.  Unity have a new Input system in the works, and are looking for users to try it out and give feedback.  In a nutshell, they appear to be taking the now nearly universal action mapping approach to input, which allows you to bind multiple controls to a single generic input action.  The other major change is the ability to define control states or modes to switch between.  For example you could define a set of control states for driving, shooting, multiplayer, menu navigation and switch freely between them.

 

An overview of the project from the Unity blog:

The new input system will consist of two parts. The low-level part is integrated into the C++ core of Unity. The high-level part is implemented in managed (C#) code that will be open-source in the same way as e.g. the UI system.

Our development process for the new input system is to design and implement large parts of the high level system first. Initially this is based on top of the current input system that already exists in Unity. For now, we call this the input system prototype. Later, once the new low-level core is more mature, we’ll change the high-level part to be based on the new low-level system.

This means that the current high-level system (the prototype) lacks specific features that depend on the new low-level core, such as robust registration of connected and disconnected input devices while the game is running. However, many features of the design can already be used and tested, and this is particularly what we want early feedback on.

 

This video illustrates the new input system:

 

You can read a great deal more about and download the new experimental input system here.  It can be used with regular Unity 5.3 without requiring a special build.

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