Non IRL pilot, been into flight simming just since December 2020.
I have a Honeycomb yoke, their throttle quadrant and Thrustmaster TPR pedals.
I also have a much cheaper racing setup with a G920 wheel and pedals.
I’ve always wondered why racing wheels have force feedback so you can feel the resistance but flight sim controls don’t.
Is that because the resistance is harder to simulate? Do you not feel resistance on a yoke? I’d have throught they would be more, for example if you’re plane isnt trimmed correctly it would be a lot harder to hold into position.
It’s always got me wondering why they don’t simulate this, and if any of you think the experience would be improved if they did?
There WAS a company with the patents to force feedback tech but those supposedly expired a few years ago.
My guess is we haven’t seen anything new because the tech leads to expensive devices and is difficult to do right and up until the last couple of years fight sims were a pretty dead niche, so no-one thought it was worth the effort.
That’s probably changed now so it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s at least one company working on consumer-grade FFB kit but if there is I expect it’ll take some time.
Well that’s good news, to the OP question, it’s not a MSFS limitation, it’s a lack of product that features it, due to the patent issues which may be resolved now.
There are FF solutions. You can buy a Brunner Yoke for much less than the cost of a secondhand aircraft. Or you can buy a secondhand Microsoft Force Feedback joystick. They’re decades old but were well built, so still good.
The trouble is that although MSFS must calculate the forces on the control surfaces, these are not made available to peripherals, so you need add-on software to do those calculations in parallel. But nevertheless, it does work.
I’m hoping that one day the forces will be visible in some sort of API, which would open the door to mass market FF joysticks and yokes
Just a yoke for much less than the cost of a secondhand aircraft lol. Maybe I can get the rudder pedals as well for less than the price of a two bedroom house.
Still got my trusty Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback 2 from about 15 years ago and its great. I did buy a Thrustmaster X52 Pro some time ago, but using springs in a stick when you’ve had a FF stick just feels like playing a ZX Spectrum with a Kempston in the '80s… aka rubbish.
Because of that there is currently a small user base and not much motivation to do the software side in-sim.
Because it never has in-sim support, less vendors are likely to develop hardware that would drive up competition and drive prices down, along with the benefits of economics of scale.
Force feedback joysticks are a rarity due to the patent holder being a ■■■■■. The Brunner yoke costs $800 and the joystick they sell is over $1300 American. The most the average flight simmer might spend on a yoke/joystick is around $500 on the high end.
They (Immersion Corp who owns the patent) charge obscene amount of money to developers for the licenses necessary to create force feedback enabled apps and hardware. The costs of these licenses get passed down to the user in the form of higher prices for the product.
Since there are so few modern ffb joysticks that are within the price range of the average gamer, game developers have little incentive to implement something that costs additional money just to develop for an extremely small set of users with compatible hardware.
You might hear some people say “But that patent expired, They should be able to just do it!” Which is true, but none of us are patent lawyers (i’m assuming) and it’s certainly more nuanced than that.
That rings a bell. I seem to recall back in the day, the drivers (which you had to install to get it to work at all) had a name that was “Immersion something”
What a shower. It would be much more in their interest to charge very little, but get millions of sales.
You mix up Thrustmaster with Saitek/Logitech
X52 pro…
That has been my weapon of choice for 15 years or so but the stick died.
Also flew a few times with a MS FF 2 and it felt great, especialy while pulling or pushing the G’s out of my brains
