neverball chase camera with gamepad

[Jim Bauer]

I recently noticed a change in behavior in neverball (Ubuntu 21.04) from what it was last year or so (circa 19.10 and/or 20.04) the joystick/gamepad doesn't work like it use to.

When using the joystick and setting camera mode to chase (I see the same behavior with lazy) everything looks ok until using the joystick to manually move the camera. Once that happens, it is like chase mode gets disabled (i.e. it acts like manual). Even changing the camera mode to something else and back to chase doesn't correct the issue.

This does not happen if doing the same thing (manually moving camera angle while in chase or lazy mode) with keyboard or mouse.

After moving the camera angle on the joystick, if I then move the camera angle via keyboard or mouse, then chase mode will start working again. I also noticed that sometimes, when doing the camera angle change via the keyboard (after doing so via joystick), it'll keep turning after releasing the key until the other direction key is pressed.

I tried unplugging the joystick and plugging it back it, but that didn't change anything. Nor did rebooting.

I installed Ubuntu 20.04 in a VirtualBox VM and installed the neverball package. It worked as expected there using the same gamepad/joystick.

Description: Ubuntu 21.04
Release: 21.04
neverball:
  Installed: 1.6.0+git20180603-3
  Candidate: 1.6.0+git20180603-3
  Version table:
 *** 1.6.0+git20180603-3 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Bus 001 Device 013: ID 046d:c216 Logitech, Inc. F310 Gamepad [DirectInput Mode]

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 21.04
Package: neverball 1.6.0+git20180603-3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.11.0-7620.21~1626191760~21.04~55de9c3~dev-generic 5.11.21
Uname: Linux 5.11.0-7620-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu65.1
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Thu Aug 12 12:36:02 2021
SourcePackage: neverball
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to hirsute on 2021-06-22 (51 days ago)
modified.conffile..etc.default.apport:
 # set this to 0 to disable apport, or to 1 to enable it
 # you can temporarily override this with
 # sudo service apport start force_start=1
 enabled=0
mtime.conffile..etc.default.apport: 2015-11-30T17:42:30.112000

[Jim Bauer (jfbauer-d)]

Gave this a quick try on Ubuntu 21.10 (in a VirtualBox VM), and the bug still exists.