A new DS4 layout from SViking

[SViking]

Hi again CMDRs,

I’m glad to see that my recommended DS4 layout has been a useful resource for some of you.

Since posting that here, I got more into advanced flight and dogfighting, which forced me to make some changes in my controller layout. Eventually I went back to the drawing board altogether, and I’ve been thrilled with what I came up with this time around. In fact, I can honestly say that I think my current setup will perform as well as any HOTAS in a PvP situation.

Bold claim, I know. So I thought I’d drop in and share it with you so you can give it a try for yourselves.

Enjoy,
SViking
o7


TECHNICAL NOTE ON DS4 COMBINATIONS

I am including this for those people who might want to experiment with their own DS4 layouts; feel free to skip this section if you’re not interested in the internals.

Suppose you bind a command to the combination A+B, where A and B are any two buttons. It is not possible to press A and B perfectly simultaneously, so for definiteness let’s assume that we want to first hold down A, and then press B.

In this situation, the game will ensure two things: 1) the command bound to A+B does trigger, and 2) the command bound to B does not. However! In almost all cases, the command for A will ALSO trigger, before A+B does. This is almost certainly not what you want to happen.

There are only two ways to avoid this extra triggering of A, so that you get a properly working combination A+B. The first way is simple and obvious, but not often used: just make sure that A has no binding of its own.

The second way is to pick A to be one of {T, C, X, S}, and B to be one of {d-pad, L1, R1}. In these 24 cases, and only these cases, the game uses special logic to ensure that the command bound to A will NOT trigger, even if it has its own binding. Incidentally, this is why the commands bound to TCXS alone do not trigger until the button is pressed and released.

This means that we can give a binding to X, and also to X+R1, and they both will work the way we expect; but X+R2 will not (X will trigger, and then X+R2 will trigger). It also means that if we want d-up+L1 to work properly, our only option is to leave d-up unbound.

Hopefully this technical note explains the motivation behind the following bindings.


UNBOUND

For the reasons described in the previous section, we do not bind any of the four d-pad buttons or any of the four touchpad buttons:

d-up, d-down, d-left, d-right
t-up-left, t-down-left, t-up-right, t-down-right


MOTION

We keep control of all six axes at all times:

L-vert: pitch
L-horiz: roll
L1/R1: yaw
R-vert: U/D thrust
R-horiz: L/R thrust

L3/R3: throttle down/up (continuous)
LANDING OVERRIDE: B/F thrust

Yaw is digital, not analog, but yaw is slow enough that this makes no difference in practice.


COMBAT

Our motion setup has our left thumb continually busy during any kind of dogfight or advanced flight maneuver. This means we need to ensure that we can do every other combat-related task without taking our left thumb off the stick:

L2/R2: secondary/primary fire

TCXS: power distribution

T + L1/R1: shield cell / boost
C + L1/R1: charge ECM / toggle FA
S + L1/R1: chaff / throttle 50%
X + L1/R1: target highest threat / target ahead

t-up-right + L1/R1: prev / next fire group
t-up-right + L2/R2: prev / next subsystem

t-down-right + L1/R1: prev / next target
t-down-right + L2/R2: prev / next hostile

To anyone who has never been able to adjust your power settings while steering at the same time: you’re in for a treat. Similar comment to anyone who has been trying to master the bootlegger’s FA-off turn on the DS4.

Full disclosure: I am torn about whether it is better to swap X and X+R1, so that X alone would be “target ahead”, and X+R1 would be “balance power”.


COMFORTABLE COMBINATIONS

Now we have 40 (!) combinations that are quick and easy to execute, but which do interfere with steering to a greater or lesser extent. I have 25 of them defined, and there are 15 for you to use how you like:

T + d-pad: (FSD/nav related)
up: supercruise
down: hyperspace
left: throttle 75%
right: target next system in route

C + d-pad: (ship functions)
up: cargo scoop
down: landing gear
left: ship lights
right: night vision

X + d-pad: (HUD related)
up: toggle orbit lines
down: toggle HUD
left: decrease sensor zoom
right: increase sensor zoom

S + d-pad: (head related)
up: comms panel
down: role panel
left: target panel
right: system panel

t-up-right + d-pad: UNUSED

t-down-right + d-pad: UNUSED

d-pad + L1
up: throttle 100%
down: throttle 0%
left: toggle hardpoints
right: toggle headlook

d-pad + R1
up: silent running
down: deploy heat sink
left: FSS mode
right: open discovery

d-pad + L2
up: camera suite
down: UNUSED
left: UNUSED
right: UNUSED

d-pad + R2: UNUSED


UNCOMFORTABLE COMBINATIONS

Finally we have 16 more combinations which are awkward to execute, but which are available to define however you like:

t-up-left
+ L1/R1: UNUSED
+ L2/R2: UNUSED
+ d-pad: UNUSED

t-down-left
+ L1/R1: UNUSED
+ L2/R2: UNUSED
+ d-pad: UNUSED


SRV CONTROLS

For the SRV, I make the following changes:

R-vert: speed
R-horiz: steering
L1/R1: vertical thrusters / handbrake
C + d-down: dismiss/recall ship


CONCLUSION

There you have it. My current, state-of-the-art, super-fun, super-deadly DS4 layout, with all of my bindings, plus room for 31 more of your own.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year,
and be safe out there, CMDRs!

 

[stormyuk]

Must admit, bit confused by 'landing override' for thrust? Do you need to bind something else here to get forward and backward thrust? B/F thrust is essential for dog fights.

 

[Stinja]

You can bind it as continuous or recentering (might not be correct term), and for landing override it means you can tap thrust to adjust your forward/back motion, which makes docking much easier.

Not sure what you mean by B/F thrust for dogfights? FAon one can use continuous to keep a set motion, in FAoff it depends on preference, and you're not moving if you don't thrust

 

[SViking]

You can bind it as continuous or recentering (might not be correct term), and for landing override it means you can tap thrust to adjust your forward/back motion, which makes docking much easier.

Yep, what he said.

B/F thrust is essential for dog fights.

I would say that being able to finely adjust your forward/backward speed is essential. One way to do that, as in my old setup, is to bind some buttons to increase/decrease throttle by a discrete chunk (like 25%), and then use a stick bound to forward/backward thrust to change your speed as long as your thumb is deflecting the stick.

The problem with that setup is that I need that thumb to do lots of things in a dogfight, other than deflect a joystick. Arguably the whole motivation for this new layout is: I want my left thumb never to be interrupted from its job of pointing the ship, and I want my right thumb as free as possible to do everything else. There are some situations where the right thumb will be tied down: for example, charging ECM, or performing an evasive roll+lateral thrust maneuver. But by binding continuous throttle to L3/R3, I can finely adjust my speed by tapping them, and then my right thumb can go do something else.

A final comment, which Stinja already alluded to... it is a useful (although possibly confusing) artifact of the control system that when FA is off, a button bound to continuous throttle up/down behaves the same as a button bound to forward/backward thrust: you tap the button, and your aggregate speed is changed only while the button is being held down. So the L3/R3 bindings work equally conveniently for FA on and FA off.

 

[stormyuk]

Unfortunately I don't want to fly FA off all the time, so guess that setup is not for me. I like to have thrust available like your old setup but, hear what you are saying on thumbs. Maybe if I can spend sometime relearning again. I don't invest the hours I used to.

The actually question remains, what is landing override bound to in your setup?

 

[SViking]

Unfortunately I don't want to fly FA off all the time, so guess that setup is not for me. I like to have thrust available like your old setup but, hear what you are saying on thumbs. Maybe if I can spend sometime relearning again. I don't invest the hours I used to.

The actually question remains, what is landing override bound to in your setup?

Oh, I don't use FA off all the time either; I just switch back and forth to it very quickly to do fast turns in combat, and sometimes I leave FA off to practice maneuvers like station tethering and whatnot.

But I think we might be misunderstanding each other: there's nothing about this setup that assumes you want to fly with FA off all the time. Try binding only the motion controls the way I described, and I think you'll see that it's very convenient whether FA is on or off. Certainly if you liked my previous setup, I would think this one would be at least as comfortable for you.

As far as your question: there is a section in the control bindings called "Flight Landing Overrides". If you set anything in that section, then whenever your landing gear is deployed, those bindings will be used instead of your standard ones. In that section I set L3/R3 to backward/forward thrust. The effect of that is that when I put my landing gear down, L3/R3 stops acting like throttle and instead acts like thrust; this is convenient for incremental movements when you're coming in for a landing, or taking off. Once the landing gear is retracted, L3/R3 goes back to being throttle again. (Again, via an artifact of the control system, this landing override makes no difference if you're flying with FA off, but that's not how I usually fly... and it's definitely not how I usually land and take off.)

Does that make more sense?

EDIT: I should mention that this layout still works if you prefer to switch L3/R3 for R-stick-up and R-stick-down. It's just a question of whether you imagine your controller as being horizontal or vertical, with respect to the motion of your ship.

 

[stormyuk]

Ahh no get it now. I used to use a landing overide as well. I blame the over indulgence at Christmas. I might print this out when back at work and have a play, cheers.

 

[Nerix]

Thanks for this setup. Is there a way to save different setups for your DS4? I would like to try this without overriding my current setup.

Eventually uploading your local save to the cloud and restore it later? Wondering what is stored locally anyhow...

 

[stormyuk]

Thanks for this setup. Is there a way to save different setups for your DS4? I would like to try this without overriding my current setup.

Eventually uploading your local save to the cloud and restore it later? Wondering what is stored locally anyhow...

Let me know if that works because I've not found a way.

 

[Nerix]

Let me know if that works because I've not found a way.

Can confirm that the controls are stored locally. So saving the file with your old settings in the cloud and downloading it later will reset your controls. Keep in mind to deactivate auto-upload for the ED save (settings -> application saved data management ->auto-upload), so that the cloud save won't get overwritten accidentally.

Haven't tested Vikings settings so far, just tested the resetting method.

 

[stormyuk]

Thanks Nerix, good to know.

 

[Nerix]

Tested the layout, really well thought-out.

Didn't have that much time, but I guess I'd prefer switching

- yaw to R-Stick horizontal
- left/right thrust to L3/R3 (generally I dislike using L3/R3 for settings I use often)
- and throttle down/up to L1/R1

Any drawbacks coming along with these changes from your point of view?

And: was confused as well with the landing overwrite setting. I get that this is good for maneuvering, but you can't set throttle to zero anymore with the dedicated throttle bindings (L3/R3). The thrust you have in the moment you lower your landing gear is the "base thrust". Probably you use the 0% throttle binding during landing?

 

[stormyuk]

Tested the layout, really well thought-out.

Didn't have that much time, but I guess I'd prefer switching

- yaw to R-Stick horizontal
- left/right thrust to L3/R3 (generally I dislike using L3/R3 for settings I use often)
- and throttle down/up to L1/R1

Any drawbacks coming along with these changes from your point of view?

And: was confused as well with the landing overwrite setting. I get that this is good for maneuvering, but you can't set throttle to zero anymore with the dedicated throttle bindings (L3/R3). The thrust you have in the moment you lower your landing gear is the "base thrust". Probably you use the 0% throttle binding during landing?

I am going to try these this week I think, need to print out the controls and go through them myself but your changes look.

I will also probably keep my old d-pad setting for throttle 0% d-pad down and d-pad left and 75% d-pad up and d-pad right. I'll use the uncomfortable binds for things like camera and such, things which don't need accessing much but need a bind.

Still not sold on the thrust settings too. I'd prefer to have all available in one set as I have got used to dog fighting with a fixed throttle setting and then fwd / back thrust.