Gamepad: buttons property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since March 2017.

Secure context: This feature is available only in secure contexts (HTTPS), in some or all supporting browsers.

The buttons property of the Gamepad interface returns an array of gamepadButton objects representing the buttons present on the device.

Each entry in the array is 0 if the button is not pressed, and non-zero (typically 1.0) if the button is pressed.

Each gamepadButton object has two properties:

pressed

A boolean indicating whether the button is currently pressed (true) or unpressed (false).

value

A floating point value used to enable representing analog buttons, such as the triggers on many modern gamepads. The values are normalized to the range 0.0 – 1.0, with 0.0 representing a button that is not pressed, and 1.0 representing a button that is fully pressed.

Value

An array of gamepadButton objects.

Examples

Depending on the type of button, we need to access the GamepadButton.value or GamepadButton.pressed properties. This example supports both:

js
function gameLoop() {
  const gp = navigator.getGamepads()[0];

  if (gp.buttons[0].value > 0 || gp.buttons[0].pressed) {
    b--;
  } else if (gp.buttons[1].value > 0 || gp.buttons[1].pressed) {
    a++;
  } else if (gp.buttons[2].value > 0 || gp.buttons[2].pressed) {
    b++;
  } else if (gp.buttons[3].value > 0 || gp.buttons[3].pressed) {
    a--;
  }

  ball.style.left = `${a * 2}px`; // ball is a UI widget
  ball.style.top = `${b * 2}px`;

  requestAnimationFrame(gameLoop);
}

Specifications

Specification
Gamepad
# dom-gamepad-buttons

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
buttons

Legend

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Full support
Full support

See also