Configuring Controllers in Microsoft Flight Simulator

okay so today we're going to take a look at configuring controllers in microsoft flight simulator when you launch into the game you come into this screen with the world map and the current spotlight event and a couple of other bits and pieces like the marketplace on the front page if you look at the top of the screen there are three options welcome profile and options so you want to go to options and then the far right option here is the control options so this is where you will configure controllers for flight simulator this page is the same page you see when you press escape while you're flying so the escape key on the keyboard pops this page open and obviously you get a resume button at the bottom left if you're flying if you're in the menu you just get to go back option so if we go into control options the first thing to note when you go into control options is every device that is plugged in that the simulator can see or that windows can see i should say will be listed across the top so in this case we've got the keyboard the mouse the joystick which is a an a320 pilot joystick and a throttle quadrant so to see what is configured on a particular device you can click on that device and then you can open out any of the the sections within it and bear in mind there's a filter here that says assigned so if we open this out it's only showing us things that are assigned for example so there's the camera views there's radio there's miscellaneous there's all kinds of things that's in here we're going to leave all of the keyboard mappings alone because i think they're you know they're pretty straightforward out of the box and we don't want to go and change how the simulator behaves we just want to make our new controllers that we've plugged in work so we will click at the top of the screen on the joystick for example when you look in the sensitivity button that will show you the various axes of your joystick and when you move them around you can see the dots moving yeah so what's going on here is across the bottom of each graph you've got the amount you are deflecting the joystick and up and down the graph you're getting the output of having done that yeah so if you it's a it's a bit of um a bit difficult to imagine but when you are moving right and left for example on the x-axis you are sending between zero to minus one which is banking left and from zero to plus one which is banking right so it's a bit of a a head struggle to figure out exactly what's going on here but you the way to think about it is across the bottom is the amount of throw in your hand and up the side is the amount of output to the simulator yeah so you've got the x-axis the y-axis if you've got twist grip you'll have a z-axis as well and if you've got a slider on your joystick you'll also have that so notice that the sensitivity controls are nothing to do with mapping anything yet it's just to say how is this particular joystick mapping when we throw it around to what comes out to the simulator so notice we can move the sensitivity bars around so we can turn this into a curve so if we say minus 50 percent on the sensitivity then it turns into a curve we'll leave it at 49. it really doesn't matter how sick can we get it to 50. it's sometimes really finicky to get it to the exactly right numbers so if we say 50 we get a curve yeah and obviously the the higher the percentage the more that becomes curved and it flattens out the middle you can set a dead zone as well so you can say how much around the middle do i want the joystick to or do i want the game to not pay any attention to before it starts reacting yeah so we can leave that on a very low number usually so we'll say our dead zone will be say two percent and we'll say two percent for the pitch as well yeah so a tiny amounts of joystick movement therefore won't cause aileron or elevator movement the more difficult one to understand is neutral so what we're saying here is bear in mind this this one is your left and right amount so you're offsetting where the center is so you end up with uh the zero point is now this makes more sense for a throttle and for a stick we can set we'll do this in terms of the throttle so you get some idea what's going on with this so i've got a throttle here it doesn't help that it is reversed but we'll just bear with me for a moment so when i push it to one end or the other it's in a dead straight line at the moment if i'm move neutral you can see i'm saying when i'm at a quarter of the throw i'm almost that's almost all of my movement is allowed along the rest of the throw so the first quarter only outputs that much and then the rest of it so the ideal reason for doing this and you will see this on a default controller configuration that's configured for the airbus it will have massive curves and massive neutral settings to offset where the reverse thrust kicks in on the stick but on the study level planes you tend to be able to configure the stick any or configure the throttle anyway so you can set where it is if you have got configuration through something like the a320 you can set this to zero and set everything else to zero and just have a straight line and then you configure it in the airplane but if the airplane isn't configurable you can mess around with the neutral setting to figure out where you want the throttle to be before just before it gets into reverse thrust and how much of the of the throttle throw you want left to control the rest of the the movement through the throttle so you've got um dead zones at the extremities which is that's what it says on the tin you can cut off the amount at the far end so dead zone in the middle is here and then dead zone in the extremities you're cutting off the far end of the throw so you're not using the whole throw of your stick for example just go back to zero and can i get it back to zero is the question there we go reactivity doesn't show up directly on the graph this is done by the simulator itself and all it means is will the simulator react as fast as we press the controller so if we suddenly snap to one side the ailerons will do that for example instantly so that's hitting the aileron straight away if you turn the reactivity down we might push the joystick suddenly to one side but the actual elevator on the plane will smoothly flow over there yeah so it's how quickly does the game react to you hitting the controls so you can see in my case i let the game react as fast as i can go so if i want to go and fling the controls around the ailerons or elevators or rudder or whatever are going to react the moment i do it so that's sensitivity so to find out what is mapped on the various buttons on your joystick there are some nice tricks because the first thing you're going to want to do probably when you plug a new stick in and you come in here and you select it is you're going to find want to find out what is mapped on the buttons yeah now i'm just out of interest i'm going to configure this particular joystick right now because i've reset my profile we'll get to profiles in a moment so i want to find out what have i got mapped so at the moment it's saying assigned so if i click on any of these headings i can see what has been assigned at the moment and you can see there's a couple of different things in here if we if we break out the menus the axes have already been assigned and i'm quite happy with those so we've got the elevators the ailerons and the rudder yeah if i wanted to change one of those i can go and change it but we're going to just do buttons for the moment so we the game usually gets the axes right if you don't like what it's chosen you can go and choose your own i'll just do it with this so this was right axis zed so if i click in here you can see what has already been assigned and we can say well we want to put something else in so if i twist this it's picked up i've pressed right axis zed but i may not want it to react to what i did so rather than clicking start scanning i could actually select so i can go down here and find r axis zed and there it is so you have both and you can validate you have to validate every choice you make so you can either do things by demonstrating it by pressing the button or choosing it from the drop down menu so autopilot i don't want button well i'm not sure what button four is yeah okay i think the sim has just paused on me which is wonderful yeah it has so we'll just hang on for a moment if i just stir the stick we'll see the the bar starting this just proves the problem with the sim pausing happens in the menu and the simulator there we go it's just come back to life autopilot so if i click in here at the moment the autopilot toggle is set to joystick button number four so if i click in here i can say what button i really want and it is number four so then i can validate that i will i don't want the throttle on this controller so i can go in there and i can i can type anything to be honest because i'm going to go and get rid of it so i've click clear the current input and validate yeah and that's got rid of my mapping on this joystick for anything to do with the throttle so now i've got a ton of buttons that i've not used on the joystick because all i've set up is the axis and the autopilot button that was already mapped to something else so what i can do is search by a name of a control so say i want to do the flaps i can type flaps into this box and it shows me automatically all of the settings that are available for flaps that i can map to things so i could say i want to increase and decrease flaps on two buttons on my joystick so if i say i want to to increase flaps i'll go and click in here and i can start scanning and then press the button i want so it happens to be joystick button number eight which is this one here and then i can validate that and that's done it if i want to decrease flaps i might want to press the button in front of that so down flaps up flaps so that was increased we want to decrease flaps which is over here so we scan for the buttons and press it and we validate okay and you can go on like that through all of the controls you might want to map so we might want to say we want the propeller and we've got what are we going here propeller axes we've got increased propeller pitch so if we want to increase the propeller pitch we might want to press button number 13 on this side and validate it and then if we wanted to decrease the propeller pitch we can scan and press the button we want to do that and validate it so where this gets interesting you can see propeller pictures an example has four different propeller pitches the game out of the box supports air aircraft with up to four engines so you get to set four lots of propeller pitch four different axes if you really want for the throttles four different fuel mixtures so anything where it makes sense to do it you can set four individual ones where you only want one you can just go or where you only have one controller you can just set the the individual setting instead of each of those hopefully that makes sense okay so now we've done that so we've done the pitch we've done the flaps we might want to do spoilers so if we come back in here and put spoilers and we'll say extend and retract spoilers so extend spoilers we're going to put on a button and validate it and retract spoilers we're going to put on a button and validate it so you can keep going with this all day really um the final one we'll do is fuel mixture fuel so have we got a fuel mixture or engine condition it's sometimes known as isn't it so we want rich so if we type rich and see what happens rich set mixture rich so we can click in there and we can say rich is going to be um this button here validate actually now let's go for a slightly different button so we can clear that one and say that one validate and then we would have to look for lean for the opposite wouldn't we set mixture lean start scanning press our button and validate so you can carry on like this all day long really setting the various buttons on your controller the final one i'm going to do is the hat switch i don't use the hat switch on the joystick which is this one at the top for views i use it for the trim so if i search for trim you can see i can set the trim up elevator trim nose up so i will make it when the mouse appears where's the mask on elevator trim nose up and i will start scanning and i will pull back on the on the point of view hat and validate elevator trim nose down and i will push forwards on the the hat aileron trim left and i will push left on the hat aileron trim right and i will push right on the hat so that's done so that's all of my changes i wanted to make and i can save them and that's done and now we can go flying and the controller is going to behave exactly as we've told it to now the difference comes in what if we've got different airplanes that have got different sets of controls needed so we want to have different controller configurations that's why there is a link at the bottom of the screen saying preset manager so the classic example of this is the throttle quadrant so on some planes i might have two engines and i want to use one one stick per engine for the throttle on another plane it might have a a throttle at one engine and a throttle and pitch would make more sense or so yeah throttle and propeller pitch so i could maybe have one stick for the throttle and the other stick configured to use a propeller pitch so obviously you want it to be different for different planes so you can have what are called profiles in the control options if we go look in preset manager it relates to this underneath each device name there is a profile name so this one obviously doesn't have a profile so it's just got this ta20 ta320 pro pilot profile which is like the default this one you will notice i've got lots of different profiles for different airplanes within the game and say i wanted to get rid of the f22 one for example i can go to the preset manager and then you get your buttons to do what you want with profiles so i could duplicate this one so you can start with a base profile and duplicate it to make different ones and it'll prompt for a name and so on and so forth so the idea being you can make new profiles you can get rid of old ones so f22 i'm not using at the moment yes i want to get rid of it so it goes back to default for example and then we've got one for the twin otter there's one again one that i've saved just with the same name instead of using the word default i've got a dc6 i've got an a320 so you can see you can configure them all differently so for each one you would just go and choose the one on the profile that you want and then the rest of the screen here is going to reflect that profile so it's the controller you have configured and the profile you have chosen that you are setting up here so hopefully that makes sense so you can see the savage cub the kodiak so you can see on the kodiaq i've set up rudder trim on some of the buttons okay so there you go that is basically how you can configure the controls in flight simulator so you can search for aspects of the aircraft that you can configure by name you can search by the input so if you're not sure what a particular button is doing on a joystick for example you can search by input and press the button and it will tell you if there's anything mapped to it you can also select an input so all of the inputs available on that joystick you can go and choose so for example we could say let's go and choose joystick button number one it's got arm auto throttle so that's the one on the left side of the left throttle stick in this example so yeah and again you can filter them so you can filter the choices being shown so if we take that filter away we can see all of them or just the essential ones or the ones that we've actually mapped yeah so it's pretty straightforward once you're happy with what you've done or that you've changed profile maybe to choose a different profile to play with you say apply and save and you just go back and then your controller is as you have just set it so i guess the big takeaway is that you can have multiple controllers and you can configure them multiple ways and then when you go into an aircraft you can choose the controller configuration you want to use and the other i guess the other nice takeaway is that sensitivity section where you can configure the axes on the controller and how they how the axes are tuned and again that is stored in the profile so that's per profile okay so i'm going to leave it there hopefully that's been helpful and taken away some of the the um the mysteries of what's going on in the controller configuration so remember you don't really need to touch the keyboard or the mouse the only ones you'll need to change are your controllers so when you plug a controller in a new section will appear at the top okay that's it i'll stop recording there

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 43,695

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Id: Ug2116DVYEc

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022