Playing Elite Dangerous with a steering wheel and pedals??

[Swiftyone]

As you can probably guess I play only driving games...I have a Fanatec wheelbase with Pedals and gear shifter...I really do just play racing games I have all my driving gear fixed, hard fixed to my PC desk and keep listening to my son "dad, dad get this game you gotta have it"...So bought it Yesterday on Steam and wondered if someone can walk me through setting this game up using what I already have (wheel and pedals) as controllers?
As a 65-year-old kid (my brain is slowing) or as the wife calls me "Your just a big baby, I mean, a steering wheel and pedals, oh com on how old are you"??
Anyway, I have watched the game on youtube and I kind of fancy myself as a space pilot Is anyone free to give this old kid a hand, please?
Thank you!
Steve

 

[Good Death]

Steering wheel and pedals? Any other buttons or switches that can be used? You could drive I mean fly one handed and use a keyboard for the other 97 key binds. Tell your son to get his but over there and make it happen.

 

[metatheurgist]

The wheel has to be analog. You can put roll on that. The pedals can do yaw. Throttle for power. That will get you the basics. You also need something for lateral thrusters but you can get away with not having them (you will be crap in combat) if you set up alternate landing controls to switch the pedals and wheel to do left/right and up/down.

The rest is going to be highly dependent on how many other buttons you have because you will need a buttload for things like fire buttons, lights, landing gear, cargo scoops,....

 

[Ashnak]

At your age, you'll fit right in (ok, I'm a few years younger, but not that many).
As for controllers - ED lets you use anything you can connect to USB. From keyboards to a 3 dof space mouse (like on the Rocinante in The Expanse). The only two problems you'll face are:

• for uncommon setups, you'll need to do all of the mapping yourself. EDRefcard can be very helpful for that.
• you'll need a lot of bindings. The 32-button limit imposed by the Windows model ED uses can become a serious issue here. Yes, you can fly in ED with a simple game controller - if you can live with double and triple used button combos. Having an additional keyboard makes things slightly better. KB&M is a reasonable combo - or go full out and get dual Virpil (or VKB) Joysticks (HOSAS) or a stick/throttle combo (HOTAS). Two Virpil Alphas (e.g.) give you almost enough axes and buttons to have everything you usually need at your fingertips.

 

[Swiftyone]

Hi, thank you for all the replies, it seems whatever way I go it will be a headache, but not so different to mapping in a driving sim I have altogether 37 buttons and toggles on the front of my dashboard and 12 buttons around my steering wheel and can all be mapped separately but never used all of them in any one game. @Ashnak ...Are you saying, that I can only map 32-buttons and Windows 10 stops at 32 button limit? A can't say I have heard of that limit before....Let's drive in as I have an hour before bedtime
Thanks
Steve

 

[Martyn W]

I have racing wheel and accelerator/brake pedals plus hotas with rudder pedals all plugged in at the same time. ED recognises them all. They do not interfere with each other. I use wheel and driving pedals for SRV and of course hotas plus rudder for ship - it all works perfectly. I also play racing games and flight sim. You could get a modest hotas and use as I do.

 

[metatheurgist]

Hi, thank you for all the replies, it seems whatever way I go it will be a headache, but not so different to mapping in a driving sim I have altogether 37 buttons and toggles on the front of my dashboard and 12 buttons around my steering wheel and can all be mapped separately but never used all of them in any one game. @Ashnak ...Are you saying, that I can only map 32-buttons and Windows 10 stops at 32 button limit? A can't say I have heard of that limit before....Let's drive in as I have an hour before bedtime
Thanks
Steve

The limit is apparently in the engine ED uses. tbh, never hit myself. I just use a button as a shift-key and it pretty much doubles what you can do.

 

[Maolagin]

Hi, thank you for all the replies, it seems whatever way I go it will be a headache, but not so different to mapping in a driving sim I have altogether 37 buttons and toggles on the front of my dashboard and 12 buttons around my steering wheel and can all be mapped separately but never used all of them in any one game. @Ashnak ...Are you saying, that I can only map 32-buttons and Windows 10 stops at 32 button limit? A can't say I have heard of that limit before....Let's drive in as I have an hour before bedtime
Thanks
Steve

It's a limitation of the older controller API that ED uses. Fortunately it's rarely a serious problem. The limit is 32 buttons per device, so you might already be okay, depending on how many devices all that kit shows up as. If not, the usual solution is to use remapping software to set some of the buttons to generate keyboard presses.

The fundamental problem with using your setup is, ED is a 6DoF flight sim, and the available analog axes available to you don't line up in any immediately obvious way to the control axes you'd want for flight. Bare minimum, you want two analog axes - KB+M players get away with this, typically using the x/y mouse position to control pitch and yaw. If you have additional analog axes, the next most important things to control would be the throttle, the vertical thrusters, and roll.

So looking at what you have, clearly the wheel is your primary analog control. Your best bet might be to use that for yaw, and enable the "yaw into roll" control option so you can command both yaw and roll from the wheel. I want to suggest putting throttle control on your gas pedal if that's analog, since that's how you're used to using it. But maybe you could get away with using the gearshift for throttle and the pedals for pitch? No matter what, you'll still have quite the bindings project getting just the remaining essentials mapped. But if it works out, I hope you come back and tell us how you did it!