Blamcon Lightguns for Unreal Engine
A light gun that aims, shoots and kicks in your game — absolute aim, four players, recoil, rumble, RGB and the ammo display, from a handful of Blueprint nodes. This page is for game developers: what the plugin does, what state it is in, and how you can help.
- 2.0.0 beta
- UE 5.4+
- Windows · USB
- MIT, source only
- Unity package too
Why light guns, why now
Light gun owners mostly point their hardware at emulators, because very few modern games support it. The hardware exists and the players exist; engine support has been the missing piece.
The Unreal plugin closes that gap. Your game sees a light gun as a first-class input device, and it can drive the hardware a gamepad cannot match: a recoil solenoid, a rumble motor, addressable RGB and the ammo counter on the gun itself.
What it costs you
- An afternoon for a basic integration: aim, fire, recoil on shoot
- No HID code, no device handling, no threads
- No hardware for the team — the same bindings work on a mouse
Build the whole game on a mouse
One Aim action binds to both the gun's aim and the mouse cursor. One Fire action binds to the trigger and the left mouse button. Nobody on the team needs hardware until you want to try it on a cabinet, and the bindings do not change when you do.
Feedback a gamepad cannot do
A solenoid that kicks the player's hand, a rumble motor, addressable RGB, and a physical ammo counter that ticks down as they fire. Five Blueprint nodes cover it: Play Recoil, Play Rumble, Set Led Color, Flash Led and Set Ammo Count. Force Feedback Effect assets you have already authored drive the gun as well.
No HID to learn
The plugin owns the transport, the background writes, hot-plug detection and the diagnostics. You never see a report byte, a device path or a worker thread.
It hands the gun back
While your game runs it holds recoil, rumble and the LED, then releases them when play stops or the window loses focus. A player's gun behaves normally the moment they alt-tab or quit, which matters on a cabinet that runs several games.
Yours to inspect
MIT licensed, ships as source, no prebuilt binaries, no royalties, nothing phoning home. hidapi is bundled under its BSD-3-Clause option. There is a companion Unity package with the same model, so a studio shipping on both engines learns it once.
The plugin sits between the gun's HID reports and the parts of Unreal your game already uses.
The writer thread matters more than it looks: HID writes block, so they never happen on the game thread. Calls made in the same frame are merged into one report, because the gun services one report at a time.
For the engineer who will actually wire it up.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Aim | Absolute screen position, 0 to 1 on both axes, no deadzone |
| Buttons | Trigger, A, B, Y, Start, Select, D-Pad |
| Players | Up to four guns, each its own input device |
| Recoil pulse | 15–200 ms on, 45–200 ms off |
| Rumble pulse | 100–2400 ms |
| LED flash | 20–5000 ms |
| Wire format | One 40-byte HID output report, sent off the game thread |
| Engine | Unreal Engine 5.4 or later, Windows, Visual Studio 2022 with C++ |
| Gun firmware | 2.1.0 or later over USB; mouse-mode feedback needs a coming release |
A Blamcon gun can present itself as a game controller or as a mouse. The plugin supports both, and your game does not need different code for each.
| Gamepad mode | Mouse mode | |
|---|---|---|
| Aim and buttons | Read by the plugin as light gun keys | Arrive as the system mouse |
| Force feedback | Yes | Yes, on firmware with mouse-mode feedback |
| Multiplayer | Each gun is its own player | All guns share one cursor |
| Best for | Two to four player cabinets | Single player, and players who prefer mouse mode |
Use Gamepad mode for multiplayer. Either way, the mouse mapping means a developer without a gun can still play the game.
Version 2.0.0 beta. Everything below was checked with one gun, over USB, on one machine: Windows 11 and Unreal Engine 5.6. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find it.
| Verified on hardware | Not tested yet |
|---|---|
| Builds and loads on Unreal 5.6 | |
| Gun detected; light gun keys appear in Blueprint | |
| LED and recoil fire from Blueprint | |
| Trigger input reaches Unreal | |
| Control taken during play, released on stop | Unplug and replug mid-session |
| Works in gamepad mode and in mouse mode | Bluetooth, which needs a coming firmware release |
Windows only for now;
We want light guns to feel like arcade hardware in a modern engine, not like a mouse with extra steps. That takes developers who ship games people aim at a screen.
- Plug it into a project you already have. Drop the plugin in, bind fire and aim, fire recoil when your weapon shoots. Tell us where it got in the way.
- Tell us if the API is the wrong shape. It is not frozen. Are the nodes right for the way you build weapons? Is something missing?
- Break it and send the log. A log line and what you did is enough; the testing guide says what we need.
- Then tell us what would make a light gun mode shippable. Integration help, promotion to the light gun community — say what is actually in the way and we will work on that.
Open an issue at github.com/Props3D/UnrealLightguns/issues, or contact us directly on Discord.