Joystick mappings
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Installed falcon 4, and updated it. Everything working including the axis, but i cant get the 8 way top hat to map. Joystick is a MS sidewinder 2. Any help appreciated.
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Are you using the Alternative Launcher? My Sidewinder works using this.
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https://github.com/chihirobelmo/FalconBMS-Alternative-Launcher/releases
+1… to remap any joystick buttons or hats, you either have to edit the .key file manually (hard) or use AL (easy)
AL does have some limitations to be aware of … viz. if you have multiple devices with hats plugged in, I think it can only address one of them?
(This could be the case if you have a gamepad or an older joystick plugged in … or vJoy or something similar installed.)
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Is the sidewinder the first device or not? Falcon’s handling of POV on devices expect the first is somewhat complicated. I would assume Alternate Launcher has something to deal with it in a user-friendly way. I don’t know since I don’t use it. For what’s going on behind the scenes look in Docs\BMS Technical Manual section 10.8.3.
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I still have not figured out how to make an 8-position hatch through a .key file using the DX buttons of the joystick, it is much easier and more functional to program buttons through a program that emulates pressing the keyboard through a joystick like UCR, through the keyboard the hatch is always eight-position and more modifier buttons are available
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I still have not figured out how to make an 8-position hatch through a .key file using the DX buttons of the joystick, it is much easier and more functional to program buttons through a program that emulates pressing the keyboard through a joystick like UCR, through the keyboard the hatch is always eight-position and more modifier buttons are available
How does this work – you use UCR (or similar) to map the 8 hat positions to 8 (unshifted) keybd scancodes … so, then you can use all shift/ctrl/alt combinations with the hat?
I’ve sometimes wondered if anyone has tried something like that. Would allow you to control TMS, DMS, CMS, comms and FCR/TGP cursor etc, all from a cheapo joystick with single hat. (Probably extends to trigger, pickle and whatever other handful of buttons the stick has…)
I haven’t yet tried this myself … the idea of clearing away a block of 8 (or more) keybd scancodes to accommodate this, has seemed too daunting.
But I have a 5-button mouse, so mapping those extra buttons to act as [shift] and [ctrl] keys, makes this tempting.
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The strange thing is, I map the views in AL, and if i press a view button on the joystick, whilst in the falcon 4 settings page, the correct keybind flashes up, but no change in the game……thanks for your kind reply
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yes, i use only a mouse, and joystick
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could anyone using a sidewinder post a copy of their keyfile……i have something not right, here hehe…thanks for all your kind replies.
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Some quick things to sanity-check.
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Open your DeviceSorting.txt file (in Notepad) and ensure your Sidewinder is the device on the first line … the file should probably only contain that one line, in your case.
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Open your ‘falcon bms.cfg’ file, in Notepad, and search for any of the following settings … and try deleting those lines, if you find any.
g_nNumOfPOVs
g_nPOV1DeviceID
g_nPOV2DeviceID
g_nPOV1ID
g_nPOV2ID -
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thanks airtex, checked those, no different. Its as if the sim isnt reading the keyfile.
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I give up! Though I will say, I’ve had issues in the past, with slightly nonstandard spacing or punctuation, or line-endings or unicode chars or something, that has caused BMS to stop reading a keyfile at some point halfway down. I never really debugged it or reduced it to repro… I just diffed/merged vs an older copy I had, and suddenly the problem went away.
Alt Launcher is a great tool, but I do not know or expect that it would perfectly enforce every idiosyncrasy of the BMS key-file parsing code.
Not sure what to recommend. Depends on how heavily customized your key-file is, I suppose. If it’s not too much, maybe just start over from a fresh backup copy BMS-Full.key (or whichever)… see if you can get your hat to work, to your liking, then use something like https://www.diffchecker.com/ to highlight the differences.
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How does this work – you use UCR (or similar) to map the 8 hat positions to 8 (unshifted) keybd scancodes … so, then you can use all shift/ctrl/alt combinations with the hat?
I just set 4 directions of my joystick hatch in the UCR (or any other program that emulates button presses from the joystick to the keyboard), then I assign keyboard commands in the UI, in the simulator all cursors set in this way move in 8 directions, that is, the game recognizes keyboard commands in this way Thus, I do not use the DX buttons at all. In my opinion, you can assign any buttons in this way, just put shift, ctrl or alt in the UCR on the hut and when pressed, they will be determined like this