how do controller

[Marble]

Ive been playing kerbal on console for a while and I finally am able to play on pc (and i was getting annoyed that console will never be updated) and i got really used to the xbox controller and was wondering if i could possibly use it on pc. 

[bewing]

Welcome to the forums.

46 minutes ago, Marble said:

i got really used to the xbox controller and was wondering if i could possibly use it on pc. 

Yes, you can sort-of. It's not exactly the same button mapping as on the console. And you need to use a USB cord on the controller I think -- I don't think there's an easy way to make the controller's bluetooth work on PC.

One caveat though -- for some nutty reason, many older versions of Windows (Win7) do not have any drivers available that will recognize and run a new xbox controller.

When you have an xbox controller plugged into a usb port and you load the game through steam, there is something called the Steam Controller driver that gets loaded. The Steam Controller can use an xbox controller or a PS4 controller as a substitute. It's a little tricky to activate, though. There's a little icon on the Steam Client that looks like a controller. Click that and you get into the controller setup. You have to activate it there, and it should show you all the game controllers that are hooked to your PC for you to select one.

Once you've done all that, there should be a couple button mapping presets available. One should act a lot like the Cursor Preset on the console. The other one should have pretty much every single function in the PC version mapped to somewhere on the controller. The mappings can't be exact, because there is only one "modifier" button available (instead of 2 on the xbox) and no radial menus.

One nice thing is that using the Steam Controller setup, you can completely customize your button mappings to suit yourself, and save it as a new configuration. Each button that you press gets converted into a keyboard keystroke -- so it's not possible to use the controller to do anything you can't do with the keyboard.

 

Edited December 29, 2018 by bewing

[helaeon]

I play this way exclusively with an xbox one controller and have been since version  .24 or something like that. Bluetooth works but if  it disconnects you can't get it  to connect again without re-starting the game, so USB cable is the way.
You'll need to figure out your own key mappings, and using a button as a mod/shift key doesn't work very well.

I don't do any of the steam controller driver stuff, just map the axes  and buttons directly through KSP.

For VAB and most of the UI I'm using keyboard/mouse (mostly mouse). Flight is all controller and action groups (up on the keyboard)