What are secondary axis channels for?

[badpandabear]

I was playing around with mapping joy stick controls and noticed that there are secondary bindings for various axes. I tried to use these, and all I got was one joystick axis controlling both yaw and roll, which wasn't very useful to me.

So I'm curious, what are these secondary settings supposed to be used for?

[semanticman]

See this DevNote from 2/10/2015:

Since version 0.18 and the addition of docking, we’ve had this docking control mode which very few players ever got around to using. I didn’t remove that, but I did come up with a more elegant way to implement the control binding switching, so we could do away with all those duplicate input mappings on the settings screen. Now, there is only one input mapping for pitch, yaw, roll and linear translations, and the docking mode mapping is done using the secondary key bindings and a new state toggling system which is simpler and more flexible than the old way. So much more flexible, in fact, that you can now use docking mode as an alternate control scheme in any way you want. Rather use it to swap about yaw and roll inputs for controlling rockets and spaceplanes with a joystick? Now you can. Also, Axis bindings now also have secondary mappings of their own, so you can have a second axis bound to each action, either as a redundancy or with a different set of UI mode toggles.

I'm actually not sure what this means for how we should configure our settings in practice, but it might be the "Switch Translation/Rotation" control, which is located in the Flight tab of the Input tab of the Settings.

However, I don't think that's the whole story. I'm going to tested this out, I'll post back here after I explore how it works.

Edited May 7, 2015 by semanticman
make clear I'm not sure how the controls work yet

[Harry Rhodan]

You can for example bind roll to the left trigger of a gamepad and the inverted axis to the right trigger. That way you can emulate a shared axis.

[semanticman]

You can for example bind roll to the left trigger of a gamepad and the inverted axis to the right trigger. That way you can emulate a shared axis.

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by "shared axis"? Googled "shared axis" and "shared axis controller joystick" but no joy.

My only motivation is to be able to swap yaw and roll axes when flying rockets and planes, but I'm curious how you and others would use the feature.

I haven't had time to do finish the exploration that I've been planning to (my initial attempts wound up mapping both roll and yaw to both axes, like the OP), I hope to have the time to tonight.