Focus Policy seems to be ignored for GIP devices and Raw Reports

[sanjay900]

I am using SetFocusPolicy(GameInputEnableBackgroundInput), yet i cant get raw reports unless my game is in focus

[falpizar99]

Hi @sanjay900;
Thanks for reporting this.

What you’re seeing is expected behavior: SetFocusPolicy(GameInputEnableBackgroundInput) should allow you to continue receiving background GameInput readings, but raw reports come from a lower (driver) path that only emits them while the app/game is in focus.
When focus is lost, raw reports are stopping even though other readings (i.e., gamepad, etc) may continue to be reported by GameInput.

Is there any specific device where you're observing this behavior?

[sanjay900]

Hi @falpizar99
I am using a Rock Band 4 guitar, thus the need for raw reports
My main want for raw reports in the background as there are some games that don't support these guitars, so an app was written that runs in the background and translates the inputs to xinput, but of course since background inputs don't work, we can't use it with later versions of gameinput

I also want to use this for Rock band 4 drums too.

[sanjay900]

One thing i do wonder though, is there a reason why this was working with gameinput v0?

[sanjay900]

Ultimately though, if #24 was solved, then we could just build games relying on SDL with newer gameinput headers, and this wouldn't be a problem anymore, but because of that licensing problem that currently isnt possible as a lot of software can't link against it with its current license

[falpizar99]

Hi @sanjay900;

Yes, the behavior change around background input was intentional:

GameInput moved away from the older, more permissive background-report model and now uses explicit per-process background opt-in with focus-policy enforcement.
This currently applies to both devices guitar & drums;

[sanjay900]

Hi @sanjay900;

Yes, the behavior change around background input was intentional:

GameInput moved away from the older, more permissive background-report model and now uses explicit per-process background opt-in with focus-policy enforcement. This currently applies to both devices guitar & drums;

Background opt-in would be fine if it was possible to opt-in to raw reports, since the guitars and drums don't send normal gamepad reports and can only be polled raw

[sanjay900]

@falpizar99 any ideas? Id be totally fine if it was opt in but as you pointed out, right now you can't opt into background raw reports, so right now its not possible to use these devices backgrounded at all.

[sanjay900]

Im curious if this one is actually possible due to the reports coming from lower level drivers, @lsalvadormsft

[lsalvadormsft]

@sanjay900 this is indeed due to a security restriction inside of the XboxGIP driver. We can relax GameInput to the minimum requirement set by the driver. This would mean that you could read background GIP raw reports for applications (1) running as SYSTEM or (2) running as Admin if developer mode is enabled in Windows setting. Would that work for your use case?

[sanjay900]

@sanjay900 this is indeed due to a security restriction inside of the XboxGIP driver. We can relax GameInput to the minimum requirement set by the driver. This would mean that you could read background GIP raw reports for applications (1) running as SYSTEM or (2) running as Admin if developer mode is enabled in Windows setting. Would that work for your use case?

That would at least give us some options, though then i have to wonder how v0 of GameInput worked, since with that we had full background reports?

[lsalvadormsft]

The inbox implementation is actually servicing the input from the GameInputSvc which runs at an elevated context.

[sanjay900]

Ah i see. Yeah if we can at least relax gameinput to the minimum requirement set by the driver, that means we can just add something about developer mode to our installation instructions.