Posted January 30, 2017
I just tried this game.
I was confused because it showed the xbox buttons instead of keyboard keys even though I had no gamepad plugged in. I then plugged in the gamepad and restarted the game, yet the game does not recognize any button presses.
I think I figured out what is going on, but it is really odd. Here is part of the console output:
Controller 0, SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad, will use generic MonoGameJoystick support.
Controller 1, Xbox Gamepad (userspace driver), will use generic MonoGameJoystick support.
Yep, it looks like the game recognizes my touchpad as controller, which is really stupid. And indeed, the game reacts to the touchpad, but it's obviously unplayable this way.
Does someone know a fix or workaround?
It seems like the issue with random devices being detected as joypads is quite common:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/173376/how-do-i-disable-joystick-input/624151#624151
A programmer from Brazil came up with a solution and shared it on GitHub:
https://github.com/denilsonsa/udev-joystick-blacklist
It blacklists udev devices from being wrongly detected as joysticks. You should be able to add the problematic touchpad using it's vendor and product hexadecimal IDs. You can obtain them by running the following command:
cat /proc/bus/input/devices
Let me know what you think about using this workaround!