What would be the best functions to map to your HOTAS
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With my current setup I have mapped already:
- Guns, Pickle. TMS and DMS functions - Mapped to Joystick
- Left and Right MFD buttons - mapped to TM MFDs
- Speed-brake, Counter-measures, - mapped to Throttle
- FCR cursor movement - mapped to Throttle mini-stick
- Gear up/down - I use the keyboard
- CP buttons - I use the mouse…
In the process of adding in the voice command to take care of Tower, AWAC communications
Since I still have button left over,what buttons/function would you also consider essential to map to the Hotas.
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Really depends on what stick you have/how many buttons switches it has.
Ideally you’d want the all same buttons/switches/wheels as the real jet. Adding a recenter or pause button for headtracking is a nice additional well.
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What Zeus_ said – 100%
If you can match what an F-16 pilot actually has at their fingertips, you can really accelerate your muscle-memory learning on par with IRL operations, and it feels pretty good, too.
In addition to these, it can be helpful to bind wheel brakes if possible (I use a shifted state on my 2-stage trigger). If you’re not familiar, a shifted state is where you push down one button (the Shift button) and ever other button DX# assignment is incremented by a set number (255) allowing alternate bindings to be set, and increasing the maximum number of bindings you can have on your HOTAS.
Here’s an example of what I found helpful to bind for my Saitek X52 Pro falcon profile:
For info on how to create a key bindings file for your HOTAS using DirectX, check out this guide:
http://www.blu3wolf.com/falconbms/Kolbe/Falcon%20BMS%20Keyfile%20Manual.pdf -
+1 to Zeus and Semler
I’ve had a variety of crappy joysticks, and I constantly tweak the layouts, so I had to make a priority-list to remind myself whats most important…
As a general tenet I try not to bother mapping cockpit switches that a real pilot would have to take a hand off stick or throttle, to interact with (eg. AP settings, jammer, landing gear, etc)
Here is my list, in rough order of descending priority but also grouping some related items together:
fcr/tgp slew (4-way)
antenna-elevation (up/down)
man-range (in/out)trigger (1 and 2… but really only trigger2 is critical)
pickle
missle-step
pinky-zoom / dx-shiftuncage*
cursor-enable*slap-switch
tms (4-way)
dms (4-way)
cms (up and left)
comms (4-way)
trim (4-way)speedbrakes (in/out)
wheelbrakesautopilot-paddle
cursor-zero (not a real hotas button but I’m told double-tap-TMS-down may do this in a future update, so it’s fair play)Simulator Stuff
- look-closer, reset fov
- recenter track-ir
- toggle mouselook
- toggle pilot-body
- etc
*Special Combos =>
- dogfight with ACM radar => hold tms-up; look at target; release
- dogfight with HOB missiles => hold cursor-enable; look at target; hit uncage; release
That last one is pretty powerful … but something to keep in mind before, say, using the dx-shift layer to map ‘uncage’ or ‘cursor-enable’