homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Rise of Flight - The First Great Air War Input Device Sensitivity

I recently installed ROF and am going through the training missions. I have all Saitek equipment - Cyborg EVO Force joystick, ProFlight rudder pedals, ProFlight throttle quadrant. I am not a newcomer to the flight sim community. I fly FE, IL2, CFS3, FSX, OFF, and even RB3D. My OS is Windows XP Pro 32. As far as my experience shows, ROF is way too sensitivity to Joystick and Rudder Pedal inputs from my Saitek equipment. Is anyone else seeing this? Where a slight touch or movement of the controls causes a huge swing of the aircraft in all degress of freedom - pitch, row and yaw. Is this normal? I have learned, while flying in the training senarios, to be very, very careful and deliberate not to over control or I will cause the a/c to oscillate wildly. I recently read that several beta testers have suggested to Neoqb that this is not realistic reaction compared to flying actual replicate aircraft. I remember that WomenFly2, who is also a beta tester, made a similar comment about just this very same observation. I have read other threads on this forum that CH products have software bundled with their FlightStick and Rudder Pedals that give you control of the sensitivity. Has anyone discovered how to adjust the input sensitivities on Saitek equipment, so the game is more fun to fly?

Maybe this is hair-trigger control is realistic - NOT. Maybe Neoqb's goal is to completely simulate an exhausted pilot - I know that I am - at the end of a flight.

OlPaint01

The discussion is over here: http://riseofflight.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=2564&start=0

I have the same Saitek joystick with CH pedals. At first the sensitivity drove me crazy, but believe it or not, I am getting used to controlling the aircraft in ROF quite decently now. I have learned how to use the stick in a very sensitive and delicate manner. ROF is certainly far more sensitive in the flight controls than any other sim I have flown, and yes, the community has apparently been hollering to have some form of in-game adjustment. I am also relatively new to this sim and I know how you feel...I could hardly fly at first and it was frustrating!

One thing that you might find helps is adding a tiny bit of "null zone" to your Saitek joystick controls in the Windows set-up for game periperals, at least for a while if not permanently. This will help you to avoid rapid over-corrections a bit by buffering your joystick movement (when you move through the middle range, such as from up to down elevator) which in such a sensitive control scenario causes those wild fluctations in control movement. I started that way but now I have removed the null zone for pitch and roll. The rudder has not been a problem for me with the CH pedals as there seems to be quite a bit of travel in them for the equivelent amount of rudder movement.

Hope that helps...a bit!

I also use a Saitek HOTAS (X45) and to dampen the stick action so it is not so loose, I have added a 3/16 inch shim atop the spring and under the bottom of the stick. I also have a 1/16 inch shim that I added to the 3/16 shim to stiffen it up even more, but have settled with just the one 3/16 for now. Try it, you might find some improvement.............I have. I use this shim for all the different sims that I fly.
BadBud
www.simflite.com

The other great aid is a (get ready)...good armrest. Seriously, it really aids in keeping that forward pressure on the stick during level flight and helps tracking in a small circle when you are trying to throw lead at something. I like the setup now, even in the Se5 and D.VII.

I think it is actually. The problem is in OUR limited flight control setup, not neoqb's. If you look at the in-cockpit stick, it is moving in a realistic manner and providing what seems to me to be a proper displacement to provide a believable airplane reaction. But that "real" stick has a huge amount of available movement and it has airloads which aid in feel. I want the sim to simulate reality. Control curves, and the low-end force feedback we have today, will only take you further from that.

I guess the neutral position and sensitivity issue very much depends on your input hardware. Both my joystick (CH Fighterstick) and my rudders (Simped Vario Pro) have very light spring forces. I have no issues whatsoever with RoF's handling. In fact I feel it's very direct. I do not consciously apply "constant forward pressure" on the stick. If I do, I don't recognize it. And I see the sensitivity of the airplanes as being realistic. I would expect them to behave the way they do (I am no rL pilot though).

Let's clarify this. The "skittish" over sensitivity and the strong nose-up pitching of some in-game aircraft are very unrealistic. It results because Neoqb have made a series of fundamental mistakes in how they have set up the control responses.

There are a number of related problems here. The first is that the player's perception is that the sensitivity is simply too high to match the experience of the real pilot. This is confirmed by people who have actually flown WWI replicas (Womenfly2), by people who fly modern small high-powered biplanes (EcoDragon and others) and by people who fly other sorts of modern aircraft (including me). This arises because Neoqb have used a 1-for-1 model of stick/control-surface deflection. Pretty much every flight sim in the last 10 years has recognised that this will be a disaster and has gone for a model where PC stick deflection is scaled to pilot stick force, not control-surface deflection (IL-2 does this very well indeed). Neoqb's decision to ignore this experience is baffling and results in players having to fight skittish aircraft that in real life are far more precise. Their attitude seems to be "sure, we know it's far too sensitive but what do you expect when you insist on using a PC joystick rather than a full-size joystick with force feedback?". If only one could buy a full-size joystick with force feedback.

The second problem is that they have scaled fully-forward/fully-back PC stick movement to fully-forward/fully-back aircraft stick movement. This sound superficially attractive, and can work well if the real aircraft has symmetrical up/down elevator travel because then the neutral position of the PC stick puts the elevators in "neutral" and the aircraft feels reasonably well trimmed. This appears to be the case for the SPAD and it does indeed feel well balanced in pitch in the game. It goes nose-up under power and nose down with power off. Unfortunately, most aircraft actually have rather more up-elevator travel than down-elevator travel. The result is that the PC stick at neutral corresponds to significant up elevator. In the case of the SE5a this is very apparent. A force-feedback stick gets round this by moving the neutral position forward (and, low-and-behold, with an FFB stick the SE5a is quite manageable). However, I doubt if even 5% of players have an FFB stick and so most are left wrestling with aircraft that feel trimmed very, very nose up. No real aircraft would be configured to such a dangerous hands-off state - and WWI biplanes weren't.

On top of this, there is no in-game ability to set control deadzones and response curves. Some PC peripheral controllers let you do this (e.g., CH). Others don't (e.g., Microsoft's Sidewinders). I use an MS FFB2 stick with an X45 throttle and CH pedals. Adding some resonse curve to the rudder has made my aiming much better. The nose no longer oscillates wildly back and forth in response to the slightest movement of the pedals. I would like to do the same for the elevator, but can't because the Sidewinder can't do it and the game hasn't had it coded in yet.

All of this is a shame, because in other respects the flight models appear to be very good. It's just that the control model is preventing us from experiencing this fully.

Neoqb's An. Petrovich has promised to consider changing the stick/control-deflection model, probably when they add trim to the SE5a. Until then we are stuck with flight models that are in total actually rather unrealistic unless we use an FFB stick and can set response curves. Beyond this, there are also some questions about trim speeds that seem rather low, but that is a minor issue compared to the "up elevator" and sensitivity problem.

My suggestion is to keep up a firm but polite pressure on Neoqb's forum to get this fixed. In my opinion it's the single biggest failing of the game.

Cheers,

RD.

Getting my Saitek X45 stick and throttle off of the top of my PC desk was the best thing that I have done to improve my sim flying. If you go to my club site www.simflite.com under topic Member's Systems (BadBud), you will see a picture of my "cockpit" which is a hard install at near my chair level with the stick in about a 15 degree forward postion to lesson wrist fatigue. After a cockpit check in a F-16; and at the time flying Falcon4, I decided my cockpit should resemble somewhat the same HOTAS positioning as the F-16. I have been sim flying with this permandent HOTAS install for many years/hours a day and have never had a problem with it. When I go to other flight simmers who all have desktop positioing of the controllers...........it is a bear to fly for me and I ofter wonder why anyone would want to fly with their controllers in such an awkward location that is not tied down. Hope that this helps.
BadBud
www.simflite.com

Should curves be included? Sure. But with the knowledge that it is a crutch in response, not to a failing of the sim, bu to OUR control setups. We need 30 inch mohagany sticks attached to bell cranks, pullies, control wires, and surfaces flying in the wind. Even the $10m sims I have to fly annualy get it wrong. The best option is to accept the sensitivity and deal with it with a light touch.

Using my MSFF2 I found the controls sensitive to begin with although not too bad, DCS Black Shark is more sensitive to stick input imo.

After a couple of weeks I'm used to it now, in game response curves are the way to go though.

Absolutely agreed! The sim flight controls should be modeled to accomodate the typical pc periperals that are commonly used in the flight sim world, otherwise we may all need separate full size cockpit joysticks just to fly RoF in what many real life pilots consider to be a normal and realistic manner. Many of the 'solutions' that we offer here are simply 'work-arounds'.

Well written, RocketDog; makes sense to me.

+1. This feature is key, IMHO.