Joystick / HOTAS Support!

[Pyxaron]

Just because there's interesting stuff to add on that point, and it'd be better to do it without reviving an old topic.

First: Please vote on this feedback on Keen's support site, it might help finally get full support.

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/add-true-joystick-support

Second, partial support has been added in a moderately recent update, but still lacks an UI.

So if anyone wants to mess with it, the config file for joystick controls is in in ControllerSchemes.sbc in the \Steam\steamapps\common\SpaceEngineers\Content\Data folder.

Klime has made a sample config with instructions on how to use it, posted here.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V41S1jfnet9yETGkvXP9Xd0QaPbtsXPW

Essentially, the support only goes as far as supporting buttons and axis that would normally exist on the xbox controller, but that still gives enough for 8 analog axis and a large number of buttons. The config file allows remapping of any analog axis to any of the thrust or turn axis, so it's possible to get 6DOF analog controls.

And it works nicely enough that it's possible to dock smoothly a ship that'll do 0-100m/s in a second or two.

3rd party software might still be needed to merge multiple joysticks or other devices into one virtual device tho, since it only supports one controller. Thrustmaster's sofware does the job really well, there's apparently some others but i haven't tried them since, well, it works good enough. Being able to tweak the response curve is very convenient, since SE does it a bit odd by default.

But now, if Keen could just add an UI to remap axis to functions in-game, it could be considered fully supported. The default mappings are horrible.