TL;DR: I know the game is in super pre-alpha; I’d just love to see some better assignment of P1/P2 in the controller setup menus.
I wanted to play local with my wife earlier. Me - Player 1 using a keyboard. Her - Player 2 using a fight stick. When I held two buttons down to add a her fight stick (which works amazingly), it would only bind to player 1.
I may be a dummy, but this is what I ended up needing to do:
Unplug her fight stick
Insert a second/dummy controller (an unnecessary third input device) and bind that to player 1
Plug in her fight stick and bind her controller to player 2
I could then use my keyboard as P1 and leave the additional third controller resting on my computer.
I find this amount of effort unacceptable to just add a P2 with a controller. I know probably not many people use the keyboard as a primary input device. I’d just like to see the keyboard treated like a controller after another controller is already installed.
I hope my message finds whoever well. It’s a great game for pre-alpha right now and I’m really digging it.
There is currently no way to control which controller goes to p1 and which to p2. I’ve had it spec’d out for well over a year and we still haven’t had the development bandwidth to get to it. Still plan to implement that feature.
As a workaround, you can plug in the fightstick, sets its buttons to whichever player it ends up as (example: for p1), then set the keyboard controls for yourself for p2. It only takes like a few seconds set p2’s keyboard to whatever keys you’d normally use. Not ideal, but it does quickly let you play fightstick vs keyboard for the time being.
Playing with local keyboard vs. a controller is still a problem. Only a few weeks ago, I tried to introduce my friend to this game. We had only a single controller available, and my friend scoffed at the idea of playing a fighting game on the keyboard, so keyboard vs. keyboard was out. We ended up giving up on playing because it seemed like no matter how we set the game up, our keyboard and controller inputs both controlled Player 1. We couldn’t even get past the Local Play character select screen, because we couldn’t make Player 2 choose a character. We looked in Button Config and Options, tried unplugging and re-plugging in the controller, and even remapped all the keys, but none of that helped.
I looked into the problem again today, and I eventually figured out a solution I could have used. Though the controller is forced to control Player 1, I can use the Player 2 keys for the keyboard. I was forced to guess what the directional keys are for Player 2, though, as they aren’t listed in the button config. (It turns out A/D is for Player 1 and Left/Right arrows are for Player 2.) The problem with this solution is that it is not obvious: my friend and I couldn’t figure this out in the 10 minutes we tried to fix it back then. Also, the Player 2 controls are less comfortable than the Player 1 controls. If I tried to remap Player 2’s controls to Player 1’s default controls, I wouldn’t be able to change Player 2’s directional inputs, so that’s not an option.
Development team: since not being able to manually assign a controller to Player 2 lost you a chance to introduce a potential new player to this game, I suggest that you bump up the priority of this feature.
Bump
I have a similar problem. The controller (xbox) is working fine, but it is always assigned to player 2. I haven’t found a way to change this. When i setup the controller in the game (holding down two buttons) is there a way of switching from player 2 to 1?
It’s not possible for me to play the game using my controller anymore.
EDIT: I’m using a macbook pro retina, late 2013 model. Everything used to work without any issues. Haven’t played in a while, started steam and updated the game today.
The current state of the game is that (on purpose) the keyboard is always p1 and p2 (so that you can test both characters easily on the same keyboard in practice mode). And the first controller that you touch after launching the game is p1, while the second controller you touch after launching the game will be p2.
So if you want to use one controller and a keyboard, the way to do that is the controller will automatically be p1 and you’ll have to set the keyboard keys for p2 how you want. Note that by default the arrow keys are for movement on p2 keyboard, but you don’t have to know that. You can use the mouse (or p1 keyboard movement keys) to navigate to the button config, then click “combat moves” to toggle it to “other controls”, then click “keyboard movement” for p2 to set it to whatever you want.
