Gamepad

Setup

• Windows > Package manager. Select Unity Registry.

  

• Look for Input System and install it

• Restart Unity as requested

Control

A control is a specific input element on a device (such as a key, button) that can produce an input signal, for example:

• <Keyboard>/space

• <Mouse>/leftButton

• <Gamepad>/leftStick

The Unity Input System provides a unified naming scheme for controls, allowing the same bindings to work across different consoles, mouses and gamepads:

Gamepad

The Unity Input System uses standardized names for gamepad controls:

Unity Input System	Xbox	PlayStation	Nintendo Switch
<Gamepad>/buttonSouth	A	Cross (✕)	B
<Gamepad>/buttonNorth	Y	Triangle (△)	X
<Gamepad>/buttonWest	X	Square (□)	Y
<Gamepad>/buttonEast	B	Circle (○)	A
<Gamepad>/leftShoulder	LB	L1	L
<Gamepad>/rightShoulder	RB	R1	R
<Gamepad>/leftTrigger	LT	L2	ZL
<Gamepad>/rightTrigger	RT	R2	ZR
<Gamepad>/start	Menu	Options	+
<Gamepad>/select	View	Share	-
<Gamepad>/leftStickPress	LS	L3	Stick press
<Gamepad>/rightStickPress	RS	R3	Stick press

To clarify the naming, the following diagram shows the standard control names for an Xbox gamepad:

Warning: In Unity, leftStick refers to the stick located on the left side of the gamepad, not to the stick being pushed to the left. Leftstick and rightstick are analog controller that return a 2D vector describing the direction of the stick. The directional pad is a discrete directional control that can return only nine possible directions.

Analog stick values represented as a Vector2.

The directional pad can be used either as a 2D directional control using <Gamepad>/dpad or as four individual buttons: <Gamepad>/dpad/up, <Gamepad>/dpad/down, `<Gamepad>/dpad/left, and <Gamepad>/dpad/right but not simultaneously.

Mouse

Unity Input System	Description	Typical Use
<Mouse>/leftButton	Left mouse button	Primary action / Fire / Select
<Mouse>/rightButton	Right mouse button	Secondary action / Aim / Context menu
<Mouse>/middleButton	Middle mouse button (wheel click)	Camera control / Special action
<Mouse>/scroll	Scroll wheel axis	Zoom / Weapon switch
<Mouse>/position	Cursor position on screen	UI interaction / Cursor tracking
<Mouse>/delta	Mouse movement delta	Camera look / Free look
<Mouse>/press	Any mouse button press	Generic mouse input detection

Keyboard

As you know, a game is distributed internationally, which means it must work with any keyboard layout. To handle this issue, two approaches can be used for choosing a control:

• By the physical Location of the key on the keyboard

  

• By the character: 'A', 'b'…

The first approach is commonly used in games. This way, whether you are using a French or an English keyboard, the keys used for movement (ZQSD or WASD) are located in the same physical positions. The second approach is better suited for text input, such as a chat or a text field, where the character produced by the key is what matters most.

Avertissement

To locate a key on the keyboard, the system does not use an ID or coordinates. Instead, it uses the character ('A', 'M'…) associated with the key in the US keyboard layout. This may create confusion between the key location system and the character-based system.

Actions, Bindings and Action Maps

An action represents a gameplay operation (for example move, jump, or fire) that can be triggered by different input controls.

A binding associates one control (key, button, or axis) with an action.

For example, the Fire action can be triggered by:

• <Mouse>/leftButton

• <Keyboard>/space

• <Gamepad>/buttonSouth

All actions and their bindings are organized in an Action Map. The structure can be summarized as follows:

Action Map
    ├── Action 1
    │      ├── Binding 1
    │      └── Binding 2
    ├── Action 2
    │      ├── Binding 3
    │      ├── Binding 4
    │      └── Binding 5
    └── Action 3
            └── Binding 6

In practice, a production-ready game defines different Action Maps for different gameplay contexts such as walking, swimming, or driving. Each map contains the actions and bindings relevant to that context.

Note

In the program, the code you write only interacts with actions. Keyboard, mouse, or gamepad inputs are no longer handled directly. This abstraction makes the action logic independent from the underlying hardware.

Binding Types

An input control can be linked to an action in 3 differents ways, depending on the number of controls that must be pressed: 1 2 or 3 Another type of binding is used to handle directional input. It allows keys such as WASD (or ZQSD-fr) or a gamepad stick to generate a Vector2.

Name	Information	Keyboard	Gamepad
Add Binding	1 control triggers the action	Space	buttonSouth
Add Binding With One Modifier	2 constrols required	Shift + W	leftShoulder + buttonSouth
Add Binding With Two Modifiers	3 controls required	Ctrl + Shift + S	leftShoulder + rightShoulder + buttonSouth
Name: Up/Down/Left/Right Composite	return a 2D movement vector	W A S D or Z Q S D	leftStick

Build your own action map

• In the asset folder of your project, right click and select: Create → Input Actions

• Name it PlayerControls

  

• Double click to open the PlayerControls in the Input Actions Editor

  

• Click on the + button to add a new Action map, name it MyGameplay

• Add these actions:

  • Move : Action Type = Value, Control Type = Vector2

  • Jump : Action Type = Button

• Click on the + icon to Add Binding

  

• Configure your bindings to obtain the following map:

  

Last words

In the Assets folder, open the file associated with your PlayerControls asset in a text editor. You will notice that it is a JSON file containing all the required information.

During the game, we can provide a UI to change bindings. In that case, a script can apply binding overrides at runtime:

var fire = actions.FindAction("Fire");
fire.ApplyBindingOverride(0, "<Mouse>/leftButton");

Finally, we save the current binding overrides to a JSON string (or a file) to persist the player’s custom bindings, and reload them the next time the game starts.