Rudder Left & Right Initial Movement Jump

TLDR; Rudder controls push the rudder further when centred, than the corresponding opposite rudder control to bring it back to centre. Is this intentional?

When I use the Rudder Left(Yaw Left) and Rudder Right(Yaw Right) controls the initial movement is quite large. By contrast, trying to move back to the centre rudder position takes four times as many key presses. This isn’t a big issue when in the air, but I’ve found this to make controlling the plane during take-off and landing very challenging at higher speeds…I usually just end up swerving off the runway because the initial kick of the rudder was so large it created a huge amount of momentum that I can no longer keep the plane on the runway.

Example. I press the RT button(Xbox controller Right Trigger, but keyboard behaves the same) and if the rudder was centred it pushes it 4 “increments” away from centre. When I then try to manually use LT to get the rudder back to centre, I have to press LT four times just to get back to the centre rudder position.

Now, I have bound the Centre Rudder control so I can quickly get back to centre without having to make four distinct movements which has helped quite a bit at low speeds, but, I’ve found that even with that, I still tend to swerve off the runway at high speeds.

My question is this, is this abnormal behaviour for the rudder or am I just really bad at controlling high speed planes on the ground? It just seems odd that the Rudder Left/Right controls behave inconsistently, depending on the rudder’s current position; centred vs not centred.

When I use an XBOX One controller I have Rudder Axis LEFT and Rudder Axis RIGHT assigned to LT and RT respectively. Much easier for rudder control as it’s analog (progressive) and centers when you leave go of trigger.

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You do need to bear in mind that airplanes IRL aren’t flown with an x-box controller and a keyboard.
There will always be some limitations when doing so in the sim.

Having said that, there are a few steps to you need to do and rule out as the issue, before you troubleshoot further.

These are the first steps to take.

With the sim running, if you are on the start up screen, from the top heading, select “Options”, or if you are already in the sim, press “ESC” on the keyboard.

  • Under “General”
    Set “Flight Model” to “Modern”, not “Legacy”.
  • Under “Assists”
    Set all “Piloting” assists to “Off”
  • When you are in the sim, from the “winged” sim icon, Open AI Control (icon to the right of the yoke icon), and ensure that “Control Aircraft” is “Off” (button placed to the left).

Next, and quite important, is to add deadzones to each axis for all your controllers. Approximately 5% should be enough, but there have been instances where significantly more was needed.

Do not assume, even if you know how you had these already set, ensure these are this way now.
The last few updates did change some user settings.

When you get all this done, and if you’ve still got the problem, get back to us here!

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Thanks for the reply. I tried out these binds, Axis Left and Right, and this is how the Rudders were behaving for me prior to one of the recent updates.

While these binds do get around the issue of controlling the planes on the ground, these also make using the rudders in the air almost pointless as there’s no middle ground, you either hold down the trigger and the rudder goes to one extreme, or you tap the trigger and the plane just wiggles around for a couple seconds because the rudder was momentarily off-centre.

Thanks for the thorough reply. These properties are all set to the values you indicated.

Regarding the deadzones, I did see new Deadzones for the controller triggers, which I do not recall seeing before, however, setting the sensitivity/deadzone/reactivity on a controller trigger doesn’t really mean anything because you’ve either pressed the trigger or you haven’t, they’re not like the thumbsticks.

I’ve added a diagram of the behaviour to the original post.

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The next thing that may help, is adjusting the reactivity setting for the rudder.
I have heard of settings between 20 and 65%.

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Hmm, for me rudder control when using LT/RT as the Left/Right axis is progressive - on ground or in flight. The more I press the trigger the more the rudder is applied. I can make very slight to full rudder movements. Rudder is applied ONLY while you hold the LT/RT trigger in a position, of course it’s not rudder “trim”. If you are expecting “trim” then this isn’t the setup.

As for the sensitivity adjustments they don’t seem to be programmed - you can attempt to change but they just revert upon leaving the config screen. Also, the LT/RT triggers act like digital on/off buttons in the sensitivity config screen but thankfully they behave like analog in the game - progressive.

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Well now that I’m aware that the triggers are in fact analog, I’ll play around with the sensitivity values. Hopefully they stick. Thanks for the help.

Well apparently my whole life has been a lie. The triggers are analog. I’m not sure how I never noticed this. I guess every game I’ve ever played only had a binary control bound to them, so when I came to FS2020 I was just going HAM on them.

Thanks for the help.

Unfortunately the the sensitivity of the LT/RT triggers can’t be adjusted in MFS2020, at this time at least. But, I personally don’t find them a problem once I got use to the default sensitivity.

I was mostly a racing simulation gamer and many times used an XBOX One controller if not using my wheel/pedal setup. The triggers in racing games are always LT for braking and RT for throttle and being analog allowed for progressive control.

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