USB H pattern shifter conflicts with custom USB button box

So I made a button box using a zero-delay USB joystick board. It works great. Windows sees it as 'generic USB joystick', as does beam. Today I got one of those chinese USB H pattern shifters. It also works great, in Asseto Corsa lol. In beam, it is recognized as a separate 'generic USB joystick' controller, same as in windows, and the same as the button box, same name but individual devices. The hardware screen shows that everything works. But when I try to bind the shifter to the gear inputs, it conflicts with the button box inputs I mapped. Beam treats the button box and the shifter as the same controller, even though the hardware page shows them individually.

For example, button0 on my box is mapped to the engine starter. 1st gear is mapped to the shifters first gear (also button0). Beam gives me a warning of a conflicting binding, I set it anyway, and in game when I put the shifter into first, my car turns off. Put it back in N, back to 1st, my car turns back on. That seems like the expected behavior for 2 controls mapped to 1 button, but that 1 button (button0 on both devices) is on separate devices. So how do I get beam to treat the button box and the shifter as individuals?

I'm also using a G920 wheel and pedals, realistic gearbox mode is on.

 

OK, so i just found this thread with the exact same issue: https://www.beamng.com/threads/odd-controller-issue.77592/

Well that explains it. It would be nice to have the option to unlink controllers marked as identical. But I'm curious, how popular is multiseating with BeamNG? Without the ability to splitscreen, why would anybody need to have multiple controllers? They could just pass the one controller. Linking identically named controllers, seems like a design choice meant to support an activity that isn't implemented in the game, ie. splitcreen local multiplayer. Is that more popular than the people that might have a standalone shifter and button box?

Personally I'm excited by the interest the sim racing community is starting to show in BeamNG. A change like adding the option to unlink the controllers would make it more inviting. As is, I cannot use the $90 shifter I just bought and my custom button box at the same time. If I want to swap them out, I would have to remap all the bindings every time I switch. My opinion is that forcing the people that want to play local multiplayer to share a controller is the better compromise. What is more inconvenient? Handing the controller over to your buddy so he can take a turn on the non-splitcreen multiplayer? Or having to choose if i want buttons or a shifter and then remapping 8 bindings?

Now on the other hand, how might I go about changing the ID values?

 

Ok so apparently the ID values cannot be changed without flashing the firmware on the controller encoder board. I don't have the means to do this with the zero delay joystick encoder, so I bought a STM32 'Bluepill' dev board. There is a github project called FreeJoy that is written to use the Bluepill board as a controller encoder with many features and customization, including changing the device ID. This will be a nice upgrade for the button box, supporting more buttons, encoders, potentiometers and a very nice GUI. I would recommend anyone building a button box to use the Bluepill.

Thanks BeamNG devs for making the best game ever!

 

Multiseat adds a camera angle that looks over the two cars making sure both stay in the screen as much as possible. It's not practical at all but the best we have for now (excluding mods such as beammp). This update added support for multiple cameras anyways so we might see split screen at one point.