need help with Logitech G27 Racing Wheel

Unity Engine
1

I have a client project where I need to make use of a Logitech G27 Racing Wheel in our Unity app. The wheel itself works fine (it reports as a joystick +/- X axis), as do the gas and break pedal (which report as + and - Y axis, respectively). But I can’t find any way to detect the third (clutch) pedal, or any of the gears on the gear shifter. I may not need the clutch pedal, but I really need those gears.

Here’s what I’ve tried:
• Under Windows 8 control panel “set up USB devices,” in the “Test” panel, I pushed all the buttons and the d-hat on the gear shifter, and they were all reported fine as various button inputs. But the gear shifter itself produced no response. Moreover, the setup shows only 12 buttons, which are the 4 red buttons, the 4 black buttons, and the 4 d-pad buttons… leaving nothing leftover for the gear shifter at all.

• Using High Frontier, which has configurable controls via cInput2. This lets me select an input need in my game, and then scan for any supported input, including joystick buttons, axis movements, etc. Same result: buttons on the shifter, steering wheel, and gas/brake pedals work fine, but the gear shifter itself, as well as the clutch, are not detected.

I don’t use Windows all that much, and I’m certainly not a Windows gamer, so it’s quite likely I’ve failed to set it up somehow. I did go to the Logitech support site referenced in the manual, and it downloaded and ran their installer.

Any idea how what I’ve done wrong with my configuration, or how I can access that shifter in my Unity game?

2

OK, I’ve learned something about this device: it can work in either “standard” (which means limited) or “native” mode. The clutch and gear shifter don’t work at all in standard mode, and the steering wheel only reports about 240° of rotation instead of the usual 900°.

On the Mac, there is a utility called FreeTheWheel that fixes this. On Windows, I still don’t know how to do it. I haven’t been able to find the source code for FreeTheWheel yet, but I’ve written to them to ask (it’s a GPL utility, so the source must be available somewhere).

I suspect that either most Windows games send the “go to native mode” command from the game itself, or else this is something you’re supposed to do in the Logitech manager, which doesn’t even see the G27 for me. So maybe I need to install or troubleshoot that.

Anyway, thought I’d post my findings here in case somebody else runs into the same thing (it’s a fairly frequent question in the Unity community, but not one that’s resulted in many answers).