Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: viberunner on June 25, 2008, 06:32:55 pm
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Hey
I'm a long-time gamer, including Elite on my C64 (back when it was released).
Have checked out some FS2 mods at my friends, particually the Battlestar Galactica mod which he plays all the time.
My PC is out of action at the moment, but as it gets rebuilt FS2 is going on the list & I'm going to put some time into it. I really miss playing a decent space sim, looking foward to it. With some many mods I'll think I'll be playing the missions, then going through campaigns and mods in here.
Anyway, quick question: does anybody use a joystick to play, and what recommendations are there? Can I use the thrust levers, or sperate thrust controllers? Can I use pedals? Is Force Feedback supported?
These questions are probably daft-level questions to you guys, but on the PC I haven't had never had an interface peripheral.
Amazing work guys in keeping a franchise alive...
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Microsoft SideWinder Precision 2 or Pro.
Doubt any more are being sold, check ebay.
And yes, since Freespace was pretty much the last decent space or flight simulator, it supports everything any joystick ever had, because when the game died, so did the peripherals.
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I use a Saitek x52, the regular, blue lighted one, not the red Pro version. I swear by it. Magnetic position sensing, zero-drift centering, and a full throttle, not a dinky little slide switch. It's got enough buttons and mode switches that I can map all my commands to the joystick. I rarely need to tough the keyboard.
There are a couple of hitches though. First, it's expensive. It's +$100 for the unit. Second, M$ released a "patch" for the Saitek drivers. All it does is kill the profiling function on the joystick, which means you lose all your programmed functions. Saitek realized what happened though and released a patch of their own that undid the damage. It was a big enough problem that they added it as item #5 on their tech support FAQ. The simple solution is to not download M$'s patch.
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The simple solution is my suggestion. There's more reasons than you mentioned for it, and technically, the one I suggested won the goddamn European league, so it's tried and true.
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i swear by ch gear. i fell out of favor with saitek when mu x52 broke with bearly a years worth of use. it still works, but its got a monster dead zone in the middle of it which i just cannot stand. i never really abuse my sticks, i never had one physically break on me, mostly the pots become innacurate and i get a new one (going back to the mid 90s). since the x52 has no pots (hall sensors) in the xy axes, it made no sense for the deadzone to apear. i also perfer dual spring systems rather than the single spring system. lets you feel your springiness proportional to the individual axis. also the ch profiling software is an order of magnitude superior to the saitek software. downside is that ch is really really really expensive. i can vouch for the fact that ch multi stick configs work with the fs2 engine. there are cases where multi unit saitek setups x52+pedals dont really work with fs2 without using ppjoy. but its possible. freespace is still a 4 axis game, though i wish they would add 3 more (lateral thrust, vertical thrust, and reverse thrust).