New plugin works with Thrustmaster joysticks to swap between airplane and rocket modes

[Jason Melancon]

I've been using a script I wrote in 2019 to swap the x and z axes of my Thrustmaster joystick on demand. This makes piloting rockets much nicer. However, there normally isn't any on-screen indication of which mode the joystick is in. This fixes that.

[Link redacted by a moderator]

The TARGET script does the swapping, and the plugin displays the current mode any time you perform the swap, and any time you resume control of a vessel.

In airplane mode, the axes are what you'd expect in any ordinary flight simulator. In rocket mode, joystick x axis controls yaw instead of roll, and joystick z controls roll instead of yaw. I find this much more intuitive, for reasons I've detailed in the link above. And now that the plugin tells me which mode I'm in, I won't crash nearly as much because I forgot to switch the mode!

I use the T.16000M because I have two of them and I use one left-handed for translation while docking. If you have a Thrustmaster joystick that isn't a T.16000M, you'll need to tweak the script to permit it to work with your particular joystick model. But this shouldn't be difficult.

This makes use of the TARGET fix I've posted about before at

 

Many, many thanks to Ivan Wellesz on https://forum.dcs.world, and to users Vebyast and Gotmachine!

Edited September 12, 2022 by James Kerman
Redacted by a moderator