No HOTAS/Flight stick support?

[dayreach]

Making a hovercar racing game that actually uses a pitch axis,but then not include support for flight stick and throttle controls is pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid game design.

[Taste]

Making a whiny thread that actually has a point, but then not include a polite attempt to reach out to the devs and ASK, maybe GATHER SOME PEOPLE who share your view to indicate to the devs it's worth their time is pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid post design.

[Spyrelle]

You really don't need a flight-stick, just a controller.

[Kronark]

So just take your flight stick / hotas and rebind the directinput commands as xinput commands with a 3rd party tool. You're not on a console, it's an open platform.

As for why the devs didn't do it automatically... It's because every damn direct input device binds it's inputs differently. x +/- on one joystick is z +/- on another. This is why xinput has limitations, to impose standards on hardware manufacturers and developers. I personally do not miss the days of PC gaming when it took 20+ minutes of configuration and testing before you had all your bindings mapped and could actually start to just play the game.

[Dark Lord Orobus]

Plenty of people agree I would buy this game if it had Hotas support especially as I want to play in VR. But flying a spaceship with an X box controller or a keyboard? It just ruins the immersion!

[BurningTofu]

Originally posted by Kronark:

So just take your flight stick / hotas and rebind the directinput commands as xinput commands with a 3rd party tool. You're not on a console, it's an open platform.

As for why the devs didn't do it automatically... It's because every damn direct input device binds it's inputs differently. x +/- on one joystick is z +/- on another. This is why xinput has limitations, to impose standards on hardware manufacturers and developers. I personally do not miss the days of PC gaming when it took 20+ minutes of configuration and testing before you had all your bindings mapped and could actually start to just play the game.

Indeed, I think people got lazy with "Plug and Play" feature. It's time to treat PC like a PC. You can setup it up yourself with HOTAS if you wish.

[Exigeous]

Another "if you add HOTAS/Stick control I'll buy". As has been said I realize it isn't a flight sim but once you get used to flying/space games that do support HOTAS and VR you just can't go back to a gamepad. Every minute I'd play it without my Warthog I know I'd be constantly thinking "damn I want to use my HOTAS". At this point a game has to support VR, Wheel/Pedals or HOTAS for me to be interested and if it's a flight game HOTAS is a must.

[Algester]

unless HOTAS actually have pedals I can't say getting a good setup is viable I still say a twin stick again similar to Virtua on would acutally play good on this game... if it has pedals...
essential to the game are these basic motions
acceleration
yaw
steer
break
pitch
power up use
if your HOTAS comes with pedals use the pedals for yaw, pitch would be easy just direct the input to up or down on the joystick
digital throttle for your accel (as its not pressure/analogue sensitive its only off or on so having an analogue input like a throttler seems stupid)
use power up on trigger
have a sub button for break as you can accelerate while breaking
I Don't suggest you use the joystick for yaw as it may lessen your joystick's life span due to constant having to fanagle with it during turns and trust me in tracks like Vertigo or Revolving these constant drive of inputs with reaction time matters
if you can remap Steel battalion twin stick controller your good to go

[Exigeous]

All true and good advice - I do in fact have pedals with my HOTAS, I have the Thrustmaster Warthog which doesn't have twist for yaw so they are basically a must with the Warthog. I would have gotten pedals anyway regardless of having twist like say an X52. I've played a lot of flight sims in my time and my father was a pilot, as such not having pedals is a deal breaker for me. The only mistake I made there is I have the VKBSim Mark IV pedals and while they're great, *very* well made, all metal, light so easy to disconnect and move I wish I'd have gone with the MFG Crosswinds. The VKBSim don't have toe brakes, when I ordered it I didn't think I really cared and while I get by just fine without them having the toe control would have added yet another input type I could use. When I ordered the Mark IV's I wasn't aware of the Crosswinds as while doing my search when I came across the Mark IV's I fell in love with them.

My cockpit is built for both flight and racing so I like that I can disconnect the Mark IV's with one simple cable (RJ45 / Cat5 connector) so I can easily get them out of the way and slide my Fanatec racing pedals into place. If I slide my seat all the way forward on the rails I can reach the racing pedals just fine so when I play something like Elite Dangerous when I deploy the SRV I slide forward, hands on the wheel and move my feet over the Mark IV's and use the racing pedals to drive. Total blast to actually drive the SRV with a proper wheel/pedal set. When sim racing I just move the Mark IV's as I don't need them at all and don't want them in my way.

[Algester]

after that have a software that can rebind your joystick inputs into a keyboard/gamepad input then you are pretty much all set it shouldnt be that hard
of course I also find out that not all kinds of gamepad fits the game perfectly as I did use an 8bitdo FC30Pro not the best experience due to the 360-esque button layout and I was kind of lazy to remap the controls even if I could via external software

[Exigeous]

Yup, you're right that it's easy enough to use a translator for this. I use JoyToKey, vJoy and vXbox extensively with a few other games and while it works it's never as good as if the developer built in support.

JoyToKey = Convert any joystick input to keyboard/mouse output
vJoy = Take keyboard input and output a generic gamepad device
vXbox = uses vJoy input to create what the system thinks is a "real" Xbox 360 controller

The main thing that's funky and hard to get right are analog sticks. Sure I have have all that press the A key then setup vJoy/vBox to turn that into say left stick but it's then binary. Full left stick or no left stick, no 30% or 70% etc.

I'll likely give this a go thanks to Steam's fantastic return policy. Really great for a game like this where you won't know if it works the way you want without trying it for yourself.

[Algester]

Originally posted by Exigeous:

Yup, you're right that it's easy enough to use a translator for this. I use JoyToKey, vJoy and vXbox extensively with a few other games and while it works it's never as good as if the developer built in support.

JoyToKey = Convert any joystick input to keyboard/mouse output
vJoy = Take keyboard input and output a generic gamepad device
vXbox = uses vJoy input to create what the system thinks is a "real" Xbox 360 controller

The main thing that's funky and hard to get right are analog sticks. Sure I have have all that press the A key then setup vJoy/vBox to turn that into say left stick but it's then binary. Full left stick or no left stick, no 30% or 70% etc.

I'll likely give this a go thanks to Steam's fantastic return policy. Really great for a game like this where you won't know if it works the way you want without trying it for yourself.

ohh the game doesnt support analog input if that makes rebinding it easier ok my mistake the game has analog steering but not for yaw
if there's a hacky way to do this is to say have a rebing application that turns 2 joysticks into 2 Xbox analog sticks (joy stick 1 = left analog stick, joystick 2 = right analog stick)
vJoy+Xboxce seems to work with Hawken+Steel Battalion controller so it could be a proof of concept to get HOTAS pseudo support

[Headless]

Originally posted by BurningTofu:

Indeed, I think people got lazy with "Plug and Play" feature. It's time to treat PC like a PC. You can setup it up yourself with HOTAS if you wish.

This! It's a PC! You can use freely available software to map your HOTAS for this game. Don't blame the devs for not supporting flight sticks in a racing game.

[Exigeous]

Originally posted by Headless:

Originally posted by BurningTofu:

Indeed, I think people got lazy with "Plug and Play" feature. It's time to treat PC like a PC. You can setup it up yourself with HOTAS if you wish.

This! It's a PC! You can use freely available software to map your HOTAS for this game. Don't blame the devs for not supporting flight sticks in a racing game.

I think this is both true and false. While it's true that a PC gives the owner far more flexiblity to game the way they want over a console that doesn't mean that the developer should leave things in the hands of PC gamers to do what they should have in the first place. Now I say that having not played Redout - so in this case if the developers never envisioned or intended players to use a HOTAS, wheel/pedals, lightgun, etc. then PC players shouldn't be crying. In that case I'm deciding that I want to play differently than the designers intended then it should be up to me to make that work and to not ♥♥♥♥♥ about it. As has been said I can ask nicely, see if others agree and hope to show the developer that it's in their best interest to add support for X - where X could be HOTAS, wheel, VR, etc. etc.

From what I understand of Redout it does seem that HOTAS would be a good control method so it's a bummer it's not there but again that doesn't give anyone the right to yell at the devs, etc. It's their game, not ours, they can build it any way they want. We don't have any rights to play how we want, if we don't like their input devices then we just buy something else, case closed. Whining about it helps no-one.

I have played many games where HOTAS or Wheel support "should" be a no brainer, meaning they are obvious flight or driving games and the developer just left it out. Be it for lack of time/skill to add that support or they've never used a HOTAS/wheel again it doesn't matter, it's their game.

We PC Master Race guys are lucky that with time, reading and experimenting we do have the tools available to use to be able to make just about any control scheme we want. Hell I've seen a guy build a controller out of a bunch of potatoes. Or a microwave. It's nuts.

[Algester]

however if in the long run if the developers consider the path of consoles as well it would be easier to ditch HOTAS support unless PS4 or XBONE do support HOTAS just to streamline the development process rather than build various forks for each hardware support and I'm pretty sure Redout will probably have the possibility of popping out in the XBONE market and PSN

[Exigeous]

Yeah, I get your point - fortunately there is a big enough market for games to support advanced controllers like HOTAS and wheel/pedals and as I understand it (from friends who are game developers) it's really not that hard to add support for those devices. Those of us that have/use HOTAS & wheel/pedals are generally more technical and are perfectly comfortable with doing full custom bindings of controls. So the developer need not provide built in templates for all the various devices, just give us the ability to bind whatever input we want where we want it. If they do this they also need to be sure to read from ALL joystick devices and not be lazy and fall into the "first only" type. For example Battlefield 1 will let you bind a joystick to control the planes - but only the *first* joystick device in the system list. As there's no way for a user to control the order your only choice is to unplug ALL joystick devices to make sure the one you want is first. Further if you want to use HOTAS and pedals that's 3 devices so with BF1 there's no way to do it correctly.

It's funny that many of the smaller games from very small dev teams seem to get this right where the big publishers do silly stuff like with BF1. All we (usually) ask for is the ability to setup what we want how we want it.