A new type of controller support... MIDI!

[yithpistol]

MIDI surface controllers can be had for fairly cheap and I see the potential for all the knobs (potentiometers) and sliders and finger pads and buttons, if not the music keys themselves. These little controllers are just begging to be utilized for something like the ALCOR, or simple fuel transfers to say nothing of being able to assign toggle type controls to buttons and variable value controls to sliders. More complex control surfaces allow for display of digital labels over each control (little LCDs or LED displays). It would take someone with more programming experience than I, so I throw it out to the modders as an idea. To get an idea of the potential of these devices just head over to sweetwater.com and take a gander at MIDI Controller surfaces. Especially the ones without keyboards. You will see a spaceship controller board just begging to get out.

[Kerbart]

...aaand we've gone full circle

In the past, soundblasters came with a joystick (gamecontroller) port that doubled as a MIDI interface.

[Vorg]

MS as even removed the MIDI driver from 7. You have to provide it.

[somnambulist]

Do you want Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Because that's how you get Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

[yithpistol]

My USB keyboard works just fine and is detected by windows 8. Anyway, the point is that this is a potential for TONS of extra buttons and sliders. I'm not talking about keyboards. Just control surfaces. A lot of joysticks do have a lot of buttons, but you can always have more buttons. It's merely an untapped input source is all. Check out this page and tell me these don't look like something fun to use in this game? They do to me, which is why I brought this up. If not, then that's fine. http://www.sweetwater.com/shop/computer-audio/control_surfaces/

As for Close Encounters... that'd be a bonus.

[stibbons]

I'm mobile so haven't looked too closely yet, but it feels like this shouldn't be hard to achieve already. Get yourself an arduino, and set it up as a bridge between your MIDI bus and a PC via existing mods like Telemachus or KSPSerialIO.

Looks like a fun project to try, if I could get hold of a MIDI device to experiment with cheaply.

[sarbian]

It is a bit hard to code without owning a controler to see how it is seen by Windows...