Is Your Joystick Stiff or Loose?

[jedra 11]

Ok, sorry for the Sid James type thread title, but I do have a serious question to joystick flyers out there.

I have been flying this game since day one and now my flying, take-offs and landings are pretty good (relatively speaking). The thing is that I can't hover for toffee (I play in expert mode) and collecting and dropping off cargo I find absolutely impossible. The problem is that I just can't seem to keep my stick steady enough, I start over-compensating and before you know it I am in the pendulum dance!

I play with a Logitech G940 stick/pedal/throttle and all my sensitivities are mid (straight line) and my deadzones are off. I play with very little 'stiffness' and I wondered if this is where my problems lie - the G940 is quite top heavy. Does everyone else play with their joytick tightly sprung or not?

It's the one area that literally hours of practice has not paid off at all.

[Guess Who 10]

Ok, sorry for the Sid James type thread title

Caught my attention at least :)

I fly the same stick. But I use it without any centering spring, totally loose. That way you can do smaller corrections a lot faster and over time you'll learn to "feel" the helo. Anyway make sure you have the latest driver, the latest firmware, and set the hysteresis adjustment to minimum. That's for the stick; the bad news is, there is no way to tone down the hysteresis enough for the collective, which leads to problems with fine adjustments durig landing and hover. That is just bad design by Logitech (the infamous reversing bug) and the reason I wouldn't advice anyone to buy the G940 for Take On.

[jedra 11]

Interesting - I just flew for an hour or so with my stick almost completely rigid (oh god, I am really sorry - it's impossible to talk about this subject without people sniggering at the back) - and I found that I didn't overcorrect so much. Problem is that it is hard work. I haven't tried the cargo pickup missions yet though, so I will give them a go later on.

With regard to hysteresis, I found that with it set to 20 or less on the collective, I was getting massive jumps from 0 to -8 and 0 to +8. I have currently got it set to 90 and it seems to be a lot smoother. So, is the reversing bug apparent when you reverse from maximum or minimum, or when you move across the '0' point, or something else entirely. I have done a bit of searching on the subject and can't find a definitive description of why the hysteresis settings are there and what effect the sliders actually have!

[Guess Who 10]

[...]With regard to hysteresis, I found that with it set to 20 or less on the collective, I was getting massive jumps from 0 to -8 and 0 to +8. I have currently got it set to 90 and it seems to be a lot smoother. So, is the reversing bug apparent when you reverse from maximum or minimum, or when you move across the '0' point, or something else entirely. I have done a bit of searching on the subject and can't find a definitive description of why the hysteresis settings are there and what effect the sliders actually have!

Have you read about the reversing bug on the Logitaech forums or at SimHQ? It#s quite prominent in TKOH when you have the virtual hud enabled. You can test it on the ground: When you pull collective and then reverse the motion at any point the gauge won't follow for a moment and then jump quite a distance to catch up with the actual position of the collective. That's why you can't do fine adjustments around a specific point; the collective will not react at all or will jump for quite an amount which leads to over correction. The hysteresis adjustment is supposed to lessen the effect, meaning the amount of pot travel (input value) the firmware needs to give out new values (output value) to the software.

The source of evil is the firmware. It was a design decision to suppress spiking of the pots, which leads to the conclusion that Logitech uses sub par hardware on this set ... with the latest firmware they reduced the hysteresis for the stick to marginal (not zero!), which makes sense, because there are no pots on the stick; it's hall sensors. What were they thinking?

They stated somewhere on their forums, that there will not be anymore attempts to fix this "bug" which for me and many others equals denial of support. Apart from the infamous reversing bug their are many others. My collective for instance needs a complete rewiring because the thumb pots spike when you move the collective, the mode switch looses it completely or changes it's value when you move the collective and so on. And that's from day 3. But I don't wanna bore you with my problems with this set. Just wanted to state that it's seriously overprized and not very usefull for helo sims because of construction details and questionable handy work.

BTW: SimHQ has a large discussion about this. There are also some examples of collective rewiring and other attempts to make things better.

[jedra 11]

Interesting, I will check out SimHQ - not a lot I can do about it though as I am useless with a soldering iron! I have seen various mods with regard to rewiring the G940 with 3rd Party controllers, but it's too much for me.

I had noticed that while hovering, you get serious sudden height drops/gains, but I had put that down to the FM, or just assuming that this is what happens in a helo in real life.

Out of interest are you using a different stick now?

[Guess Who 10]

I feel your pain ... :)

I had noticed that while hovering, you get serious sudden height drops/gains, but I had put that down to the FM, or just assuming that this is what happens in a helo in real life.

No, that's actually the stick/collective messing up your fine adjustment. Not that TKOH flight model was easy to fly or hover ...

Those "mods" with custom controllers are far beyond my enthusiasm as well. What this stick needs is a coder that ripps that damn' firmware apart and get's rid of that BS of hysteresis. The rest is would be an easy fix.

I don't fly at all at the moment. While I'm some sort of sim head since Falcon 3.0 (was that in the eighties or the nineties?) I gave up on the most flight sims, the last one beeing Falcon BMS just recently. Too much hassle to less fun; maybe I'm getting old ... But I will repair the wiring in the throttle and start again with Take On. Apart from being a kind of preparation for ArmA III I do like Take On a lot. It's lots of fun just flying around and practising stuff. Prior to the G940 I used an MS Sidewinger FF 2 for things like ArmA or space sims for more than a decade. But it was getting old and for a helo sim you would want a good collective an pedals. That's why I bought the G940. But the Sidewinder still feels better in Take On ...