I started a thread a while back about significant latency with Wiimotes, how to diagnose the bottleneck, and what I might be able to do about it. Well, let me start out with some great news: I found the issue, and it was super-easy for users to fix! There were actually two bottlenecks responsible for the latency:
I'm totally fine without rumble. It's unfortunate, but when it comes down to it, I'm not really enjoying my games any less without it. But my real concern comes from having to keep continuous scanning disabled. I play my games on a gaming PC connected right to my TV, and I launch them through Steam Big Picture by creating Dolphin shortcuts with game launch arguments, so unless I'm tweaking the settings, I never actually have to interact with the Dolphin interface. Without continuous scanning, however, I will have to open the settings every time I launch a game just so I can manually refresh the controllers.
I'm going to assume that the latency introduced by the continuous scanning functionality is inherent, and that not much can be done about it. That being said, I've got a great intermediary solution: add a hotkey to enable continuous scanning for 1 or 2 minutes. That way, as soon as I start the game, I can hit a key on my keyboard to connect all of the controllers, and after another minute or so, the scanning will automatically shut off. Even better: if the continuous scanning could be automatically enabled for only 1 or 2 minutes as soon as a game launches. Scanning status could be indicated by the top-left yellow status text that appears for emulator status updates.
I'm a professional software developer, so I recognize this as one of those uncommon cases when a tiny amount of work has a huge positive effect on usability (I spent almost 10 minutes trying to get all of my Wiimotes connected at the same time while investigating this!), so I really hope this feature will be considered. I know that Dolphin has a very active developer community, but I don't hang around these forums often, so if there is a resident developer to whom I should direct this, please let me know.
- Disabling rumble. By unchecking the "Wiimote Motor" box in the controller configuration, I reduced a substantial amount of latency. This made motion-heavy games (like my all-time Wii favorite, Excite Truck) finally playable again.
- Disabling continuous scanning. This reduced a bit more latency, making cursor-based menu navigation and games (like Boom Blox) also playable again.
- I feel like I may have also gotten a tiny boost from unchecking "Enable Speaker Data," but the difference was so minor I might chalk it up to a placebo effect.
I'm totally fine without rumble. It's unfortunate, but when it comes down to it, I'm not really enjoying my games any less without it. But my real concern comes from having to keep continuous scanning disabled. I play my games on a gaming PC connected right to my TV, and I launch them through Steam Big Picture by creating Dolphin shortcuts with game launch arguments, so unless I'm tweaking the settings, I never actually have to interact with the Dolphin interface. Without continuous scanning, however, I will have to open the settings every time I launch a game just so I can manually refresh the controllers.
I'm going to assume that the latency introduced by the continuous scanning functionality is inherent, and that not much can be done about it. That being said, I've got a great intermediary solution: add a hotkey to enable continuous scanning for 1 or 2 minutes. That way, as soon as I start the game, I can hit a key on my keyboard to connect all of the controllers, and after another minute or so, the scanning will automatically shut off. Even better: if the continuous scanning could be automatically enabled for only 1 or 2 minutes as soon as a game launches. Scanning status could be indicated by the top-left yellow status text that appears for emulator status updates.
I'm a professional software developer, so I recognize this as one of those uncommon cases when a tiny amount of work has a huge positive effect on usability (I spent almost 10 minutes trying to get all of my Wiimotes connected at the same time while investigating this!), so I really hope this feature will be considered. I know that Dolphin has a very active developer community, but I don't hang around these forums often, so if there is a resident developer to whom I should direct this, please let me know.
