HOTAS Throttle Key Mapping

[Stevoni]

As most HOTAS players know, any throttle buttons/switches appear as "JOY #" making it tough for a newbie (see: me) to know what is associated to what when looking through the default control settings and tutorials. Because of this, "JOY 1" could be the trigger on my joystick or a thumb button on my throttle. While, the prefix does make sense for some joysticks (include single unit HOTAS), it doesn't necessarily describe where the control is. To be honest, this is the biggest learning curve I've encountered and a contributing factor for my low play time. Most of my in-game time has been switching back and forth between the game and options menu trying to figure out what button is what.

An "easy" solution would reference mapping files for the devices similar to the current bindings but for the buttons display names. The community will more than like quickly define all the mappings and provide them for redistribution with the base game and/or through the community itself. Community involvement can even be completed before feature implementation since we (the community) would only need a schema defining the mappings. I think there should be a separate mapping for the each type of controller starting with those with default bindings. Thankfully, my x-55 falls into this category, hooray!


I probably explained this poorly and it doesn't make sense, so ask questions and I'll clarify.


And finally, I looked for a few hours for this type of suggestion and couldn't find anything, therefore, if this type of topic has been discussed before, please point me in that direction. Most of the search results were complaints without solutions or directions to reference sheet generators.

 

[Shadowdancer]

The problem (that you kind of discovered already) is that the mapping is not readily available unless you go through every single device and write it down. That information is already integrated for at least the X-52 sticks where the game will show little pictographs of the input.

 

[Stevoni]

The problem (that you kind of discovered already) is that the mapping is not readily available unless you go through every single device and write it down. That information is already integrated for at least the X-52 sticks where the game will show little pictographs of the input.

I'm trying to describe the values that are shown as mapped. For example, the "Fire Primary" is listed as "Joy 1" in the controls screen and "Joy 1" can describe the trigger on my joystick or a button on my throttle which causes confusion for new players, like myself. For some controls this isn't a problem, I implicitly know that "Joy 1" means trigger, but when I'm looking for "Landing Gear" which is on the throttle "Joy 4" doesn't mean anything. A better description would be "TGL 1 U" for the up direction for the switch labeled TGL 1.

The pictographs you mention are the blurbs in the menu or is the an actual image of the X-52?

 

[Stevoni]

After remapping some (a lot) of my HOTAS key bindings today, I wanted to reiterate my suggestion of allow users to change the display name for the key bindings.

There's no reason people should give "that's just the way it is" when it can certainly be better.

 

[DocLooshkin]

Hello, Stevoni.

Rest assured, your difficulties are fully understood and entirely sympathised with. I've been playing for over a year and getting the controls into some kind of sane, usable state has always been a major issue. ED requiring hours of patient rewiring before you can really use it is easily one of ED's biggest failings, although I can appreciate the stupifying workload that would be involved in fixing the problem.

I'm fully-versed in the arcane art of getting ED bindings together, but it still took me several hours of infuriating trial and error to get the SRV working 100% (and that doesn't even include the time spent trying to fix the not-wanting-to-go-forward-after-rolling-backward-a-little-bit thing, or the bug where having Fire Deploys Hardpoints set to 'off' permanently disables the SRV's Data-Link Scanner).

I believe it's been announced that they'll be finally be cleaning up the control options menu soon, so FD will hopefully get to fixing everything properly one day. We can but wait.