MSFS | Sensitivity Settings for Controllers | How To Guide | Get the control you need

[Music] so [Music] hello warm welcome to the sim hanger my name's mark the sim hanger for things flight sim related and welcome also to part 7 in my how to guide series a collection of videos designed to help you get the very best out of microsoft flight simulator i'll leave a link to the playlist in the notes below we all spend money on flight sim be that on pc hardware software or our controllers such as yokes throttle quadrants joysticks rudder pedals and so on and we do this to enhance and make our flight sim experience more realistic there's a configuration option for our controllers in microsoft flight simulator and it's one that is perhaps least understood and least used that can enhance our controllers and make our flight sim experience far more realistic sensitivity so today we're going to be having a look at sensitivity settings what do they mean what impact do they have on our controllers and offline some experience overall and what to do about it so with that said let's get started the first step is check your control is calibrated in windows from the search bar type in control panel when it comes up click on it and open the control panel i consider this an essential step and in the control panel what we're looking for is devices and printers click on that along the top we'll be shown all the different peripherals attached to the computer in this example i have the alpha flight controls from honeycomb and flight rudder pedals attached right click on your chosen peripheral and from the sub menu select game controller settings and another window will open up from this menu select your chosen peripheral in this case i'm going to choose the alpha flight controls there are two tabs at the bottom we're going to choose properties and this will open a window that will allow you to test your peripheral both axes and buttons it's also a great way to check that everything's working i'd estimate 75 percent of peripheral problems that i've helped subscribers out with are due to calibration issues if you want to recalibrate choose the settings tab and then the calibrate and go through the process and follow the instructions [Music] we're done with windows now in sim and choose world map we need to set up a flight so we can test our controller and in this instance as an example i'm choosing the cessna skyhawk select an airport i recommend on the runway with the engines running and then click fly i'm on the runway in pilot plus oxford now hit escape to bring up our menu options and we're going to choose controls once in the control sub-menu make sure you select by highlighting the peripheral that you want to configure for today's tutorial i've chosen the satex stroke logitech pro flight cessna yoke now on the left click on sensitivities the reason i've chosen the proflight as opposed to the alpha flight control yoke is that the alpha flight control is much finer in terms of its resolution and calibration so the pro flight joke is going to be much easier and simpler for me to demonstrate the impact of various sensitivity settings on controllers [Music] the sensitivity settings are currently set to default and we'll only really be looking at the first two axes the x-axis which is the roll when i turn the yoke left and right and the pitch axis which is the y-axis which is pushing the yoke forward or pulling it back up and down we can see the ball move on the sensitivity graphs you'll note that the default settings are linear if we look at the top graph section you'll note along the horizontal there are five squares or cubes and along the vertical there are five as well so we could say each block or square is twenty percent we can say it's linear because for every 20 of the physical movement of the controller which is along the horizontal line we're getting an equal amount of movement in sim the vertical line anyway hopefully this will make more sense as we adjust settings as you can see there's a fairly comprehensive range of different settings let's jump in the cessna and give it a quick go with everything set at default we're now just starting our takeoff i'm waiting for 60 knots and then i'm going to pull up gradually and i'm going to try and maintain a climb ratio of 500 feet per minute shortly after takeoff i'll also be turning 90 degrees to the west and again maintaining my climb that's 60 knots now pulling up keeping an eye on my climb indicator and adjusting accordingly with small movements of the yoke and as you may have noticed there's a little bit of bobbing up and down off the nose as i try and maintain the 500 feet and now to commence my turn to the west the takeoff itself was okay the aircraft did seem to jump up a little bit but nothing too serious need to bring my nose down a little bit i'm leaving my throttle set i'm not adjusting that so not a bad take off and turn but a little bit of bobbing up and down due to the sensitivity of the movement of the yoke let's head back to the settings and see if we can improve this by using the sensitivity settings so we hit escape to bring up the menus then controls make sure we're still on the pro flight cessna yoke which we are and back to sensitivity before jumping into the detail let's just understand how the graphs work if i move the sensitivity into the minus section we're turning it down the sensitivity is reduced so if we say we're turning sensitivity down we're moving it into the minus area if we move it into plus we are making that controller more sensitive and so on so the first thing we're going to do is adjust the sensitivity for the pitch or the y-axis and to demonstrate this i'm going to turn them both down to 40 percent and you'll notice the line changes it's no longer linear what has happened is now i require 40 percent of movement of the yoke physically to get 10 movement in sim i'm moving horizontally two squares but only one square vertically as opposed to default which is one to one whilst the total movement of the yoke over its whole axis will have the same impact closer to the center or neutral position i should have finer control i'm also going to make the changes to the roll axis i'm going to change them down to 40 percent as well this will affect the roll both left and right and see if this will assist me in maintaining my 500 feet per minute climb during the turn let's give it a try we're coming up on 60 knots and now pulling back gently and up we go i think that was a little bit of a smoother takeoff we're not jumping up so much and with the finer control i'm finding it a little easier to maintain the 500 feet per minute climb a little bit of bobbing still but not as much as before let's now try the turn need to bring the nose down maintain that 500 feet there we go and again this is easier to control now you may be thinking and i would agree that i've desensitized the controls too much by using 40 but i've done this simply to highlight the impact that changing these settings can have on the flying experience [Music] so back to our sensitivity settings again and this time we're gonna be having a look at dead zones i'm quite fortunate with my pro flight joke that i don't have a lot of noise or chatter and what noise or chatter is is where the ball continues to move even though the yoke or peripheral is not being moved here's a good example of a fair amount of chatter on my saitek throttle quadrant a combination of dirt age and quality of potentiometer will affect the ability of the peripheral to maintain a constant position if you do have movement away from the center position then your sim will be getting left right up or down feedback as you fly even though your controller is static making it very difficult to maintain level flight if you do have chatter you can overcome that by setting a dead zone as indicated the size required will depend on the amount of movement that you have it's always a good idea to set up some dead zone on newish controllers two or three percents more than adequate on older controllers probably something between five and six percent effectively what a dead zone does is kill any feedback into the sim for small amounts of movement near the center for my pro flight joke i think i'm gonna set them both to four percent that should be more than adequate for what i need [Music] moving on to the neutral setting now normally this is set at zero it is used to set the center bias for the controller so if you had a bespoke control or a broken controller and center for the controller was way off center you could change that neutral or central position but before doing this always check calibration first here's a quick demonstration we're flying with our neutral position set at zero whilst flying i'm going back to my settings and changing the neutral bias for my roll and i've changed it to plus 20 percent let's see what impact that has you can see that the aircraft continually wants to roll to the right because the center has been offset it has a continual bank but if you had a controller whose center was offset to this degree well this could be a solution again to demonstrate it let's change it from a positive to a negative neutral position let's choose 29 and we should get a constant bank to the left this time and there it is under normal conditions you would never use neutral leave it at zero you would only ever use it if it was a bespoke control designed to have an offset center but more commonly it will relate to if you've got a defective controller and for whatever reason this center's been offset by five or ten percent the result is you're constantly banking left and right always calibrate first of course changing the neutral position would help you correct any small errors any big errors will get a new controller let's move on now to extremity dead zone when you change the sensitivity settings you're changing the curve so you're changing the speed at which you reach a hundred percent but you always reach a hundred the extremity dead zone is similar but it reduces down from a hundred percent here for example it's at fifty percent so full motion on the controller will only give you fifty percent of the input into the sim and why would you need this well for helicopter pilots for one it's a godsend and also extremely useful if you have an oversensitive control an extremity dead zone of a hundred percent means no input here's an example where the extremity dead zone change has been very helpful we're in the aerosoft crj and controlling the flaps via the axis it's just too sensitive a slight movement and it's full flaps down we can either use the traditional flap lever or use the axis and change the extremity dead zone i'm going to change it from zero to 25 the new hundred percent is now 75 therefore our physical move of the axis is in smaller increments and therefore we should have better control let's jump into the sim and see if it's worked always remember to apply and save after making any changes you can see now i have better control over the axis and it more or less represents what's happening in sim so by way of explanation the extremity dead zone can help reduce the sensitivity on a particular axis or control it could for example be very useful if you've got a joystick that has very little movement in terms of pitch and roll control by reducing the sensitivity effectively in the sim giving you slightly more control with your joystick [Music] let's now move on to the least understood of all the settings reactivity and i've changed to my rudder pedals to demonstrate this reactivity is at 100 and i'm moving the z-axis which is my nose wheel steering no matter how fast i move it it will follow the curve change it to zero percent and see what happens the motion ball no longer follows the line exactly this is because the reactivity setting acts as a dampener it's the shock absorber for your controller it is designed to mimic the impact of air pressure and weight on your aircraft and how your controller reacts to the various inputs the faster you move the controller the more evident the dampening effect is if you're flying an airliner for example and suddenly you did full roll to the right it would take a little bit of time to react to that as the ailerons move into position and push against the air pressure as well as any mechanical dappness built into the system within the hydraulics the best way to demonstrate this is by using something like the a320 let's take a quick look at the settings before we have a look at the yoke let's take a quick look at the bravo throttle quadrant all my throttles are set to linear and this is my recommendation regardless of the aircraft that you're flying leave your throttles linear it's more representative of the real world and i do the exactly the same for mixture and for prop the only change that i have made is to the flap access and here you'll see that i've got the extremity dead zone at 20 percent i found this gives me more accuracy when setting the flaps to a particular notch but this does vary aircraft to aircraft for example i've switched my controller to the alpha flight controls from honeycomb and these are the settings that i'm currently using the only change from default is the sensitivity settings on the y-axis which is my pitch up and pitch down i've left the dead zones and the neutral exactly as default and no extreme dead zones have been implemented reactivity is at a hundred percent so let's give it a try and see how it flies so we're just going to test the role in the bank and then we'll test the pitch the up and down and afterwards we'll change the reactivity setting so we can see if there's any major difference i do get some feeling of the size of the aircraft and the weight even though reactivity is at zero percent it's obviously built into the model of the aircraft let me now try nose up yep she climbs fairly quickly and nose down i've never flown an aircraft of this size not even close so to some degree i'm just guessing to what it should feel like back to the settings and sensitivity and let's change the reactivity and i'm going to move them down to 50 percent on both axes the roll and also the pitch now let's go back and see what sort of difference we get let's start off with the pitch and initially i'm just going to push the nose down a bit and now level up and then pull the nose up definitely slower definitely feels heavier than now the roll i can feel a definite difference in the speed and how she changes it's too much though she feels almost sloppy so let's go back and change it again and this time i'm going to change the reactivity again on both axis to 75 percent and after some considerable experimentation i found that this worked very well and were the final settings that i stayed on let's try that out she's certainly more responsive than she was last time that feels about right to me it's no it doesn't feel sloppy i still feel as if i've got good control so for me at least i think something around the 75 works really well so [Music] no two aircraft are the same so arguably you'd have different settings for every single aircraft for most of us that's too big an undertaking and for jets i use those settings as shown in the last section and i'll show you my ga settings we're at the handcrafted mcgee airport following the france and benilux update let's take a quick look at the settings and we'll start off by having a look not at my alpha flight controls but at my flight rudder pedals and the sensitivity settings i'm using there you can see that the break axis which is x and y are left linear but the sensitivity on my rudder pedals are turned down fairly considerably this is to give me finer control when i want to make small movements of the rudder to stop me snaking down the runway you'll also note that the dead zone set at eight percent i've had these rudder pedals for many years and they're beginning to show their age the reason for eight percent is they don't always return exactly to zero or neutral but eight percent well it works just fine for me let's now have a quick look at the bravo throttle quadrant there's not much to see here as although various axes are used for throttles so they're all set at default and linear so i keep my throttle quadrant at default and now on to my alpha flight control yoke let's take a quick look at this settings there and a reminder this is for ga aircraft i found a sensitivity setting for both roll and pitch it's fine at 20 everything else is at default except reactivity is at 75. to compare my sym yoke to the physical yoke and its movements i still get a hundred percent but because of my sensitivity setting i'm getting a little bit more movement closer to neutral and faster movement closer to a hundred but as we've seen this gives me slightly better control if you want one-to-one movement well the answer would be sensitivity set to zero or perhaps into the plus margin and in the pipe arrow and i'm using my rudder to make small adjustments now slightly larger ones and now to be more aggressive maybe a bit too aggressive let's get off yep there we go i find those settings gave me excellent control on the rudder i'm not suggesting that you use my settings each individual will have their own preference the way they like their aircraft to handle and how they like to fly and the method in which they fly to some degree although i enjoy the airliners i spend more of my time on the ga site and vfr just a final note that the reactivity settings within the sim can be a little bit buggy at times so you need to be careful they don't always reset well i hope today there's enough information to let you start experimenting with the sensitivity settings for your controllers and of course for different aircraft you're going to need different settings i hope you found this useful and informative thank you very much for joining me i'll see you again soon make sure you take care bye for now [Music] you

Channel: SimHanger Flight Simulation

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Id: fOZfymIJR5U

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021