Small update:
Got my MFDs mounted and working as in-game MFCDs in DCS A-10C. It was quite a hassle trying to figure out how to get it working and getting the displays positioned right since the entire time that I was working on it the official forums where all the nifty how-to's are posted were down! But after a lot of trial and error and pulling my hair out I got it all working right!
You'll notice in the second pic my $20 Logitech Webcam C210. I got it set up and working with FaceTrackNoIR and DCS Warthog, and frankly, I'm quite pleased and surprised at the speed and quality of the head tracking with only $20 invested! The one problem I've run into so far is that when I move the angle of my head downward, as if to look at my lap, the camera moves vertically downward slightly, but not angularly downward. This means that I have a really hard time trying to see the controls in the cockpit. I'm not too worried about it, as once my simpit gets it's enclosure I'm going to switch to TrackIR due to the lack of light in the enclosure. But if anyone has an idea or solution for the time being, that would be swell!
Also, as detailed in my other post
here , I purchased a Logitech G940 from Amazon, used it for a few hours, was thoroughly unimpressed, and sent it back. My biggest issue with it was that it showed up as three different controllers in Windows. For most modern sims and games, that's not a problem. But with my favorite genre being space flight sims and the fact that there are really no modern ones this means that the G940 is mostly useless for me. Very few of the games that I want to play allow multiple controllers.
In that thread Sokol1 pointed out that any HOTAS except for CH Products' would also encounter this problem once pedals were introduced. This stopped me in my tracks. I sat there with my reply window open for about an hour, just thinking about this issue. I came up with a solution based off of the solution I made for the joystick users of the game Black Prophecy. For those not in the know, Black Prophecy is a combat space sim MMO that was designed for either joystick and throttle or mouse and keyboard. One of the things you can spend talent points on when gaining levels is automatic advanced flight maneuvers called Tactics. Examples are quick and tight rolls, flips, stops, and boosts. In order to activate the tactics, a series of directional inputs needs to be used, such as Strafe Left, Strafe Right, Strafe Right to activate a right barrel roll, or Forward, Forward to activate a boost. With the keyboard, this was easy enough, since the flight controls are setup with WASD like a FPS game. But even when using profiling software to create a macro that should activate the tactics, it would never, ever work for joystick users and no one in the community could figure out why.
I eventually discovered that the problem was that in order to activate the tactics, the game was expecting a small period of no input between directional commands. If you're trying to use boost as a macro of "W, W" while your throttle is at full, the game never sees the accelerate command drop to zero and the tactic won't activate. I just knew that there had to be a way around this. So by using the combination of the programs PPJoy and GlovePIE, I assigned the physical throttle axis to a virtual axis, bound the virtual axis to the accelerate command, and created a script so that when a button on the throttle was pressed, the virtual axis was set to neutral, the "W" key was activated twice rapidly, and the axis was set back to full. It was a long and convoluted workaround, but by gum, it worked!
Sorry for the long tangent, now back to something that people might actually care about, lol!
By using a similar method to the one detailed above, multiple controllers can be assigned as a single controller in older games, thus getting around the limitation in older games and sims.
Copypasta from my other thread:
Basically, it goes like this:
Create a script in GlovePIE that redirects each axis of the joystick, throttle, and rudder pedals to the virtual PPJoy controller. This way all physical controllers can be seen as one controller in Windows. The problem you run into then (aside from the maximum of 8 axes) is assigning controls in the game. When assigning and you move the physical axis, the game would probably see both the real and virtual axes moving at the same time. Which one will be detected first and registered? Who knows. It would probably be a crapshoot. But to overcome this, and this is the clever bit, you need to create a second script in GlovePIE with the sole purpose of using it once to bind all the commands in-game. In this second script, you would assign each virtual PPJoy axis to something that is not an axis, like a key on your keyboard. Then you go in-game, assign the proper axes, save the bindings, stop the second script, and run the first. Voila. Now your game sees multiple axes from multiple controllers as one virtual controller because it's only expecting input from the virtual controller, whose virtual input is being provided by physical controllers. This is what I did to solve the Tactics issue with Black Prophecy. Actually, if I remember correctly, you might be able to assign the physical axes to the virtual ones in PPJoy itself. This would save you the trouble of needing to create the first script. Not certain though, since I haven't used PPJoy in some time now, since I stopped playing Black Prophecy because the developers have stopped supporting the joystick using part of the community.
I now realize that this could have solved my biggest issue with the G940, and probably would have kept me from sending it back. No biggie though, I wasn't that impressed with it anyway.
tl;dr: I'm working on a method to make multiple controllers show up as one in older games and sims.
Previous Topic
Index