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From Patch Notes Corsair Keyboard Support??

rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
From the patch notes:

Hardware

Corsair keyboards with dynamic backlighting are now supported by the Neverwinter game client.
By default, the top row of keys have their lighting deplete as the player's health bar decreases.
The 1, 2, and 3 keys pulse as Daily Powers and the Artifact Power, respectively, become available.
The backlighting changes color as the player enters combat.

So how does one turn this on / use this?
Nixon the TR
Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
o1iHDN0.png?1
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Comments

  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    Hey @nitocris83 can you ask for info on this? Thanks!
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • nitocris83nitocris83 Member, Cryptic Developer, Administrator Posts: 4,498 Cryptic Developer
    Hi @rgladiato

    Do you have a corsair keyboard with the backlighting feature? I would suggest starting with their FAQs on how to enable it through the keyboard software.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User

    Hi @rgladiato

    Do you have a corsair keyboard with the backlighting feature? I would suggest starting with their FAQs on how to enable it through the keyboard software.

    Yes I do and it appears that it "should" work but I get nothing. I was wondering if some setting in NWO needed to be turned on so it knows I have the keyboard.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    rgladiato said:

    Hi @rgladiato

    Do you have a corsair keyboard with the backlighting feature? I would suggest starting with their FAQs on how to enable it through the keyboard software.

    Yes I do and it appears that it "should" work but I get nothing. I was wondering if some setting in NWO needed to be turned on so it knows I have the keyboard.
    And at the risk of talking to myself I ran a test app from Corsair and it worked so I know my setup is good.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    I have tried to activate this too, I have failed to activate this too.

    I downloaded the latest firmware and software and no luck.

    Please could you ask the person who created this feature to let us know how to use it.
  • miasmatmiasmat Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 318 Cryptic Developer
    I plugged in a Corsair keyboard into 2 USB 3.0 ports and started Neverwinter without installing any Corsair drivers or anything. The keyboard was red with WASD and arrows white. The NW-specific light patterns didn't appear.
    I installed the Corsair Utility Engine and made sure the "Enable SDK" option was checked in the Global Settings page of the Corsair Utility Engine tool, then started NW, still no NW-specific lights.
    Then I plugged it into a single USB 2.0 port and the keyboard turned rainbow colors, the USB driver installer triggered, the keyboard appeared in the CUE window as "K70 LUX RGB", and starting NW, I got the NW-specific coloring.

    So, I think my USB 3.0 ports are broken on my machine. But the Corsair keyboard lights on NW seem to work.
    Note: My Corsair keyboard has 2 USB plugs - one has a keyboard icon on it, the other has two arrows pointing away from each other with a dot in the middle. I had to plug the keyboard icon one in to make it work. The arrows+dot cord didn't seem to matter.

    Super-double-check that the "Enable SDK" checkbox is enabled in the Corsair Utility Engine (which it should be by default). Otherwise, games can't talk to the lights.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    miasmat said:


    Note: My Corsair keyboard has 2 USB plugs - one has a keyboard icon on it, the other has two arrows pointing away from each other with a dot in the middle. I had to plug the keyboard icon one in to make it work. The arrows+dot cord didn't seem to matter.

    All of Corsair's RGB keyboards have two USB plugs. If you are using USB 3.0 you are only supposed to plug in the single "keyboard" one. If you are using USB 2.0 you need both plugged in because a single USB 2.0 doesn't supply enough power for full functionality.

    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    rgladiato was correct that they needed both plugged in but later models like the LUX and Rapidfire just use either a single USB 2.0 or 3.0 and that second plug is just a simple USB pass-through for the port on the back of your keyboard. Either way though it still doesn't work for me.

    I have had "Enable SDK" on and off but neither option helps.

    I've tried different polling rates and still no luck.

    I've tried different ports and once again, no luck.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    A-ha! Success-ish! I found that removing or shuffling other USB "keyboard devices" would allow this to work intermittently. I suspect the code is not properly detecting the availability of the Corsair keyboard. Perhaps it is only checking the first keyboard it finds instead of cycling through them all or something similar.

    Why do I have other keyboards? Well if you have other programmable devices, such as a mouse with extra buttons, those devices show up as additional keyboards to be able to pass the key combos you program them with.

    I have not tried disconnecting all other devices because that would be a pain to do.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • beckylunaticbeckylunatic Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 14,231 Arc User
    Forgive me for saying so, but this seems like a poorly implemented feature if it can't reliably detect the keyboard if you use a gaming mouse.

    Who the heck still uses a standard mouse for this kind of thing?
    Guild Leader - The Lords of Light

    Neverwinter Census 2017

    All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
  • plasticbatplasticbat Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 12,461 Arc User
    rgladiato said:

    A-ha! Success-ish! I found that removing or shuffling other USB "keyboard devices" would allow this to work intermittently. I suspect the code is not properly detecting the availability of the Corsair keyboard. Perhaps it is only checking the first keyboard it finds instead of cycling through them all or something similar.

    Why do I have other keyboards? Well if you have other programmable devices, such as a mouse with extra buttons, those devices show up as additional keyboards to be able to pass the key combos you program them with.

    I have not tried disconnecting all other devices because that would be a pain to do.

    Well, if that is the programming logic, I guess it won't work with my laptop set up with a separated keyboard.
    *** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
  • nitocris83nitocris83 Member, Cryptic Developer, Administrator Posts: 4,498 Cryptic Developer
    Hey everyone, this is being looked at/tested by different people since we were getting different results on our end. I'll continue escalating the latest info and hopefully make it a smoother functionality.
  • miasmatmiasmat Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 318 Cryptic Developer
    I really like the idea that it was multiple keyboards, or keyboard + gaming mouse that were broken. Unfortunately, we just retested it with 2 keyboards, a gaming mouse and light-up mouse pad all plugged in together. They all changed colors like they're supposed to in NW.

    @rgladiato, Does your Corsair setup work in other games? Do they light-up in a game-specific way? Are you sure that USB port is working (like, when you changed around what was plugged in, did you move where the keyboard was attached and it started working?)
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    @miasmat Did you start with brand new keyboards when testing this? I'm wondering if already existing custom profiles might be causing issues. If not the profiles themselves then maybe having them stored to device memory might be a problem.

    @rgladiato Did you have any custom profiles? Are they stored to device memory?

    I would love to delete my device memory but Corsair in their infinite wisdom don't have an option to do that.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    @beckylunatic I agree but it's just my little theory. A hypothesis really because I have sample data of just me.

    @miasmat I didn't touch my Corsair keyboard connection. It's plugged into the back of my PC where I can't easily reach it. That's why I didn't totally disconnect all peripherals. Just ones I could reach. :smile:

    @miasmat Other games? What is this madness you speak of? I don't know if I have any other games that do the direct interface likes this. HOWEVER, I grabbed Corsair's CUE SDK, loaded it up in Visual Studio 2017, and made an app that does indeed work. (By "made an app" I mean I compiled one of their samples because I haven't even looked at C code for 20 years or more.)
    Specifically I used their Color Pulse app.

    Also my "other keyboards" are a Razer mouse, Logitech headset, a flight stick, and a Yubikey. I can get specific model names if you want but my point is I've lots of other non-Corsair equipment.

    @chadvaliant Hmm... you might be on to something. None of my custom profiles are stored in keyboard memory. The first success with NWO I had was when I deleted all of my custom profiles. I don't remember if I was successful when I had a custom profile active or not. I'll have to try when I get a chance.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    Just saw over on the Corsair forums forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=168044&page=3 there are issues with the K55 connecting and disconnecting to USB. They mentioned the issue doesn't happen if you have your keyboard lights set to full brightness. Don't know if it's limited to K55 or not but they are working on a firmware update.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • miasmatmiasmat Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 318 Cryptic Developer
    edited August 2017
    @chadvaliant Yeah, they are brand new keyboards we're testing with. I don't think anyone has saved a profile to the keyboard itself. We mostly installed the CUE SDK and made the lights work on NW. There was a little playing around in the CUE window with various light patterns.

    Maybe it's specific keyboard models that are broken/working? It works with a "K70 LUX RGB". Which model is working for @rgladiato and @chadvaliant?
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    @miasmat I have a K70 Rapidfire which I believe internally is the same as the LUX. The difference is just the type of key switch.

    @rgladiato I just tried to delete all my profiles but I can't delete the last one (there has to be one there) and I can't delete my device memory either (no option to do that). I made the remaining profile a blank fresh profile though. Still no luck getting it to work. If you have nothing stored to device then it might be worth you testing if a fresh profile makes it work. Not holding out much hope but it's something to try.

    miasmat maybe you could try the opposite, save something to device memory on one of your test boards and see it that breaks it.

    Only thing I haven't tested is forcing a firmware update despite already having the latest firmware. Really don't want to risk that though.
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    Ok mine is now fixed... Wish I could tell you what fixed it...

    I deleted all profiles and the re-imported them. I uninstalled CUE and then re-installed. I re-imported profiles again after that. I changed the brightness (thanks rgladiato for that suggestion).

    None of that seemed to do anything so I took a break and played some Borderlands. Got back to NW and bam, it was working!

    The only thing I didn't restart NW for was the change of brightness so it could have been that or it could have been playing another game (unlikely as Borderlands doesn't have dynamic lighting). Could have been a combo and could have been none of that.

    Thanks for your help though rgladiato and miasmat.

  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    More success-ish. This time with less "ish"!

    @miasmat First throw out all my previous guesses. I was able to get it working some of the time while leaving everything plugged in as I normally would be setup. In the course of restarting Neverwinter 20-30 times or more last night (I lost count) I noticed a pattern. I was able to predict success or failure by Watching the Cryptic loading screen with the progress bar. Normally my progress bar fills in about 3 seconds or less* and the keyboard wouldn't work. But sometimes for whatever magical reason the progress bar would take longer, say 5-6 seconds or more. Then the keyboard would work! So I experimented with adding delays when the gameclient.exe started loading. I did things like load other programs at the same time, lower the thread priority, etc. Now these didn't always significantly slow down the Cryptic loading screen but every time it did slow down the keyboard worked!

    I got the most success by changing the proxy server from it's default of blank/none to US. I'd say this setting caused the loading progress bar to take a few extra seconds most of the time,like 4 out of 5 times. Lo and behold the keyboard worked those 4 out of 5 times.

    My new and more data filled guess is it's all down to a timing issue. Perhaps when the game finishes loading the routine that searches for the keyboard is getting killed? Maybe before when I was shuffling around the USB devices it was causing Windows 10 to slow down just enough?



    *My load time is fast because I have multiple SSDs in a raid 0 stripe set.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    And bam! Broken again. No rhyme, no reason.

    On the plus side it was fun while it lasted.

    Have you considered switching the in combat colour scheme with the out of combat scheme though? Soothing, calming blue for combat?!?! Angry orange for out of combat?!?! Seems backwards to me.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    I figured the angry orange scheme was to match with the Chult color scheme.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • miasmatmiasmat Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 318 Cryptic Developer
    Dang! I was really hoping to put this issue to rest. I'll get someone to look at it again once we finish this week's deadline. I can't figure out how the load time being slow would affect it, since the loading code goes:

    load stuff
    init the keyboard lights
    if you found the Corsair dll
    if you have any Corsair devices returned by the CUE library call
    turn on the feature
    continue loading other stuff
    The loading can't continue until it has gotten the device list. I'll check with Corsair to see if we're doing something wrong with their API.

    Re: The color scheme. We picked it a long time ago, when we first added support for Alienware and Razer keyboards. We kept the Corsair scheme the same. I'm guessing the blue was picked because of the little blue circle that appears under your feet when you enter combat, and as a strong contrast with the red "hp low danger" color on the screen. And the orange was to match the lava theme on the loading screen. It's a cool idea to match the idle colors to the general color of the zone tho... I wonder if we could do that efficiently.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    Maybe the CUE SDK has a bug? Current version 2.10.91 didn't come out until 3/3/2017.
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    Is there a chance it has something to do with a priority setting? Are the already stored profiles competing with the game on the same level of priority?

    On the subject of colours... What about changing the colour to match the current chat colour when typing in chat (only when typing of course)? Make typing in the wrong chat more difficult. This sounds more difficult to implement but might be a nice gimmick.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    @miasmat Where are you looking for the DLL and what's the DLL name?
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
  • chadvaliantchadvaliant Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 35 Arc User
    edited August 2017
    rgladiato said:

    Maybe the CUE SDK has a bug? Current version 2.10.91 didn't come out until 3/3/2017.

    There is a newer version 2.15.83 (off the top of my head).

    Sorry you meant the SDK not the CUE itself, I should learn to read.
    Post edited by chadvaliant on
  • bigblackafricabigblackafrica Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 124 Arc User
    edited August 2017
    Wondering what progress has been made with this. It was working for me for the first few days, and I was really starting to love the changing colors and flashing buttons, but now the keyboard lights don't change then I launch NWO. When I launch the game, the keyboard just stays the static red that I use for a default.

    I am using the Corsair K70 LUX RGB with up to date software.
    I am also using a Logitech G500s gaming mouse running the most recent version of the Logitech gaming software.
  • miasmatmiasmat Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 318 Cryptic Developer
    We talked to the Corsair developers. They suggested a change that might affect it (use exclusive mode instead of the shared mode we're using). We'll try rolling that out as soon as we can safely include it in a build.
  • rgladiatorgladiato Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 313 Arc User
    miasmat said:

    We talked to the Corsair developers. They suggested a change that might affect it (use exclusive mode instead of the shared mode we're using). We'll try rolling that out as soon as we can safely include it in a build.

    Awesome. Thanks for the update!
    Nixon the TR
    Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    o1iHDN0.png?1
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