Control sensitivity way to sensitive, same for trim wheel

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So I’m doing all my inputs with 1/8 of the travel of my stick, the planes reacts hyper sensitive on the small inputs. My stick and the in game stick are synced, so full forward is full forward in-game too but the sim seams less responsive on the end and super in the beginning.

The same problem with the Cessna 172 Skyhawk trim wheel, it’s super sensitive and even the slightest adjustment will have a huge change on the aircraft behavior. I’m using the same stick and calibration as in X-Plane 11 where the controls and trim wheel are way smoother/scaled correctly.

/ / Below are updates about the issue and were not included in the original post above but edited in on a later date

- - - - Update about the issue by Reddit user Kalnaren (repost with permission here) - - - -

So we all know the default controls, at least for GA planes in MSFS2020, are waay to sensitive out the gate and the recommendations have been to dial back the sensitivity in the options menu.

However, I encountered something that makes me think this isn’t a control sensitivity issue, but rather an issue with the simulator vastly overstating the amount of control authority of the control surfaces.

I did some experimenting with short-field T/O techniques in a DA-20 to test the theory.

About 2/3 of the way through the vid I kicked the sim over to the ‘Legacy’ flight model and repeated the test and got far more expected behaviour on T/O (though flight dynamics were much worse).

This would also help explain why trimming seems so hyper-sensitive and also why you can steer the DV-20 on the ground with rudder at 2 knots (the DV-20 has a free castering nose wheel), along with rudder steering on the ground being far too responsive across the board.

I think this is important because in general we’ve been assuming its simply a matter of the controls being too sensitive… in this case, it won’t matter how much you dial back the control sensitivity because the ratio of control deflection vs. control authority is seriously messed up. This actually points to an issue with the flight physics rather than just a control sensitivity issue. In theory this could be mitigated with exponential curves on the control axis, but that’s a band-aid solution (and can’t be done in the game).

- - - - A ugly fix to improve the controls (explained by DizzyBasket7278 in this thread) - - - -

The trick is to edit all files named FlightModel.cfg and look for Elevator_Effectiveness, Rudder_Effectiveness etc and change it from 1 to 0.2.

Many planes use the generic file in … Official\OneStore\asobo-aircraft-generic-piston-singleengine\SimObjects\Airplanes\Asobo_Generic_Piston_SingleEngine

Others have their own copy in their aircraft folder.

This is fiddly, but it works as a workaround at the present time.

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Have you tried reducing the sensitivity settings in MSFS? The button is in the top left in the CONTROLS menu.

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Yes you can adjust the curves but you can end up with too much travel near the latter part of the controls by going to far.

I think they have got something slightly wrong with the sensitivity of the controls, I know most of use are using controls with a lot less movement than the real ones and with XP I have to reduce the sensitivity a little but the trim operations shows that something is not quite right as moving the elevator trim a small amount results in too much pitch movement.

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Yes, like I said it’s not the controls itself, they are synced correctly, it’s how the game handles the input. Everyone I’ve asked is saying the same thing, it’s way to sensitive from a game perspective, like not a control input perspective.

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I think we all need to make sure that we’re filing bug reports on this issue so we can have proper control inputs soon :slight_smile:

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I’m struggling with this issue to. I have a Thrustmaster 1600M and have mapped trim to the little slider at the back of the stick. Its almost like if its not moved it resets to some random position on start up and then the first time you make the very smallest of movements it picks you the current position and immediately moves the trim wheel from where it thought it was to there (potentially a huge movement) - once its settled in position, it seems to then work ok. I’m doing the training flights so the trim wheel may get initialised to some position by the instructor.

I previously had this same slider mapped to the throttle and that had similar behaviour (and almost as though reverse axis didn’t work as well), but came to the conclusion that trim was more important.

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Same here. Saitek 52 already configured sensitivity curves…but still. Minimum stick input for elevator and aircraft is looking up to the sky. One thing to note is it seems to be worse when flying low speeds.

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Its not just that a joystick doesnt have the same travel as in the real-world, its the force required to move the controls that is lacking with mainstream joystick/yokes. In a real aircraft with conventional controls, the yoke/joystick becomes very tight in feeling during flight. A real aircraft when well trimmed is flown only by applying slight pressure on the controls instead of any significant deflection…and even applying this “pressure” is probably as much force as doing full deflection or more on a PC joystick. What is missing is force feedback strong enough to simulate proper control loading in mainstream hardware.

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Right but most of us aren’t using FFB as you’re saying. I think there should at least be the ability to see linear response in the airbus and other aircraft which might use an electronic system. But that out of the way, watch this: https://youtu.be/HvqP79s47Mg?t=165

727 pilot moving the yoke quickly to make precise changes in the aircraft’s direction… with the current control input curve implementation this kind of precision is impossible in the sim. The roll and pitch cannot be manouvered this quickly at all in the sim, and even in the video, while I’m sure the pilot can feel the feedback obviously, it also doesn’t look like the aircraft needs to be wrestled to control either…

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The trick is to edit all files named FlightModel.cfg and look for Elevator_Effectiveness, Rudder_Effectiveness etc and change it from 1 to 0.2.

Many planes use the generic file in … Official\OneStore\asobo-aircraft-generic-piston-singleengine\SimObjects\Airplanes\Asobo_Generic_Piston_SingleEngine

Others have their own copy in their aircraft folder.

This is fiddly, but it works as a workaround at the present time.

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Yeah MS should find a way to give a better feel in the case of non-FFB hardware with lower travel/resolution, it is hard though without giving a non-linear response in aircraft with conventional controls. Fly-by-wire aircraft of course filter the control inputs and should be possible for MS to simulate that but even an Airbus side-stick must have much more resolution then what we can find for a PC which is also important to achieve fine control.

Nice video. I think every airplane has a different feel…I fly a Q400 IRL and in comparison it needs very little control deflection to achieve a good response, and the controls are very heavy, probably more so then the Boeing 727 if I do the same amount of deflection as that video but again it is not needed to deflect that much on the Q400. It is however a guess as I have never flown a Boeing. See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSIvIik1EyM

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By the looks of the video, it does seem that the controls are a lot heavier in the q400. However, every landing video I’ve seen of a boeing in windy conditions shows the pilots moving the yoke quickly with big movements to get the right attitude or whatnot. You simply can’t get that with the controls MS has setup, even with the 787 or 747. So I see what you mean too, but every boeing and airbus clip I’ve seen, the pilots seem to be able to have much more input than we’re able to achieve in the sim.

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No, that just makes the effectiveness lower, but has no impact on the built in curve unfortunately. It does make some aircraft more usable, but the roll of the airbus and 787 still are horrible.

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When you say horrible do you mean too sensitive? too sluggish? What I am seeing with the 787 is a heavier more sluggish feeling on the controls and this requires a larger deflection to get the same response.

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I made a video showing exactly this https://youtu.be/NhI-Ck0D-ds

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I use “Nose Up” and “Nose Down” for my trim wheel. It is very un-sensitive, you have to crank on it a lot but you can dial your trim in perfect. At least on my yoke.

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The reason that is there is for joysticks that have lower travel/resolution/forces then the real ones. That being said it is weird that you cannot change it to a linear curve if you want to. Definitely something we should have the option of doing.

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Edit. After reviewing you video I came to conclusion that the joystick travel is just too short

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Mmmm, shouldn’t be. Flew plenty of airliners in xplane 11 and never had a problem with the joystick travel being too short because it actually allowed me to adjust the response as I wanted.

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Yeah, I tried adjusting the sensitivity myself and unfortunately it does not seem to have anything to do with the response curve but somehow the amount of deflection required for it to react. We should ask MS to fix this or add another option for the response curve itself. Maybe there is a way to adjust this in the .cfg but I am not quite sure.

EDIT: Actually, I just tried 60% for both pitch & roll, it seems to help a bit on my end, maybe just a bit of fine tuning and you can get something close to linear.

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