Can I play ksp with a flight joystick?

[Pars]

Can I play ksp with a flight joystick?

[NewtSoup]

That's an interesting question right now.  Maybe not.  Usually yes.  There is a bug at the moment which stops KSP recognising my Thrustmaster HOTAS  Joystick which is annoying.  And if I try to configure the game to use my steam controller it simply crashes.  The game SHOULD respond to any Direct Input controller on Windows or SDL compliant Joystick ( Direct X equivalent I believe ) in Linux.  Does KSP use SDL? I'm not sure but probably.

Edited March 27, 2018 by NewtSoup

[bewing]

With the new version of KSP, the Unity library changed. And Unity uses SDL on linux. KSP has been supporting DX9 on Win for compatibility reasons, but it's getting harder to fight with the Unity library to make that work. Especially since Unity changed the supported SDL library and got even more tied up with DX11 in the new library version. Unfortunately, all this library mucking about is resulting in some nastiness for joysticks, currently. The devs are looking into it.

 

[Dafni]

Joystick support has always been a bit poor in KSP ever since the early days I started playing. We had different quirks along the way. I hope one day they fix it for good. Proper joystick support is mandatory for a space flight sim IMHO:

[Pars]

Despite all my efforts, I did not get a positive result, but I would like to thank you for your informative comments.

[XtraChrisP]

Not directly answering your questions, but I use my XBox One controller for KSP.   I don't get quite the fine fidelity I could out of a flight stick, but it's still better than binary (on-off) controls for the keyboard.  When I need fine control (with my twitchy space planes, for instance) I press CAPS LOCK and the limited control authority is good enough for my purposes.