Greetings!
I have seen numbers of postings that talk about how frustrated people are with various features or aspects of Microsoft’s flight simulator - and that has its place - so long as the criticism is constructive and not general “XXX” bashing.
Here I want to bring visibility to features, aspects, or whatever in MSFS that impress you or help make your simulator experience better.
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All features help, but for me, the most recent feature that has helped me the most, (aside from the forums themselves), is the ability to specifically tailor the response curve of a control with a degree of precision in ways that other simulators, (most notably X-Plane), cannot do.
Example:
My Saitek X52 HOTAS joystick’s “Z” (rotation of the stick) axis had become unuseably noisy. Based on multiple sources, I tried to fix it by changing the internal potentiometer - only to discover that the calibration and centering of the Z axis had gone into the dumper.
- The physical center of the control was no longer the electrical center, with a non-trivial offset.
- The response curves of the left and right-hand twist was not symmetrical.
- Sensitivity around the center was excessive.
Once I learned what the various adjustment sliders did when setting a custom curve, I was able to:
- Set the simulation’s electrical center to the physical center so that the range of motion each side was the same.
- Create a left-hand twist curve that counteracted the observed non-linearity of the actual control twisting to the left.
- Adjust both the right and left hand curves so that the limited travel of the control covered the entire range of possible control values - and make them match in rotational value to the greatest degree possible. This makes the left and right-hand action more symmetrical.
- Adjust the “touchiness” of the controls, (as opposed to “sensitivity” - touchiness is the sensitivity of small changes of value throughout the control’s range - i.e. reducing the dv/dt over the entire range of possible values)
What feature/aspect of MSFS has been most helpful to you?