Xbox 360 controller throttle mapping

[Camacha]

After fooling around with kOS for throttle control, it came to me that I could also use the Xbox 360 controller for fine control. However, when I set the right trigger as throttle, throttle opens up to 50% at the first touch. Between 50 and 100% I have perfect control back and forth, but it is as if half throttle is the minimum it will do. Pressing X or control on the keyboard resets throttle to zero as usual.

The strange thing is that the left trigger is set as incremental throttle, and that works fine across the whole range. It is just that I can not use that, as it is not sensitive enough.

I have fiddled around with the deadzone and sensitivity, but that does not seem to change much. What do I need to change to get the (non-incremental) throttle to work from 0 to 100%?

[Camacha]

I have fiddled some more with it, no answer yet. I can not imagine this should be hard to do. Anyone?

[Sirrobert]

Seeing as this game is not designed for a controller, I'm pritty sure it doesn't recognize a difference between holding the trigger full or only a little. As such, it wouldn't do any better than the shift key, even if you did get it to work

[Camacha]

Seeing as this game is not designed for a controller, I'm pritty sure it doesn't recognize a difference between holding the trigger full or only a little. As such, it wouldn't do any better than the shift key, even if you did get it to work

On the contrary, controllers work quite nicely. KSP supports analog sticks, so you can control your craft in a very delicate manner. Instead of inputs being on or off (like WASD with a keyboard) you have a full range of control, from minimal input to full rudder. The triggers also do what they are supposed to do; the left one works as it should, and the right one works perfectly past 50%. You can even maintain a hover with only half that trigger range by artificially limiting your TWR to 0,5 or less, but it goes without saying that this is less than ideal.

No, it is not a matter of support, that works pretty well actually. I don't fly craft with the keyboard anymore. It is just that this throttle trigger thing makes manual hover harder than it should be.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Camacha

[Togusa]

You might want to try mapping the throttle to one of the joysticks and see if it gives you better control. The best candidate for this assignment on the Xbox 360 controller IMO would be the right stick, since it's closer to X (which you've mapped for zero throttle). If you do this, you may wish to consider setting up/down for the throttle and left/right for roll, so that any errant sideways sideways motion won't pitch or yaw a rocket off course.

[Camacha]

Heh, mapping throttle to the joystick sort of works, but is fairly odd since neutral position is also 50%.

It does leave me with the impression that the triggers are viewed as analog sticks with only one direction (up or down like an analog stick, instead of a trigger). This seems to be confirmed by the observation that checking the invert option gives you control over 0 to 50%, which is pretty much what you would expect in that scenario. Sadly that probably means it is probably something that has to be fixed on the Squad side of thing, unless there are configuration options I do not know about.

Edit: I found this thread, which confirms my suspicions.

[GoatRider]

Hmm, wonder if I can use my R/C flight sim controller. Then my model helicopter reflexes would kick in.

[GoatRider]

Oh well, would you look at that, it works pretty good! For my heli reflexes to work I had to switch roll and yaw for my lander to work as expected, but I was able to fly around like it was a bad fixed pitch heli. And I found out quite quickly that there's a heli pad on top of the VAB.

Only problem is I couldn't quite get full throttle authority. Even after calibrating it and maxing out the sensitivity, I can't quite close or max out the throttle.

[Camacha]

I tried to intentionally miscalibrate my controller so that the trigger axis would be -1 to +1. In the input window provided by the Xbox setup software that actually worked seemed to work out (right trigger is -1 to +1, or 0 to 100%), but KSP is still not having it.

The intention is to indeed use the controller as a remote control for a vehicle. I can land with some accuracy now, but it could be a lot better with the full trigger to play with.

Funnily enough I already put in a request to easily switch presets, so switching between aircraft mode and hover mode is a bit easier