The Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 was out half a lifetime ago (for me). It was an amazing piece of hardware. They just don’t make them like that anymore.
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Yes sir… This was only an innocent joke between 2 veterans.
Back to business…
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I’m using my old Microsoft FFB II from when I was a child and it is still kickin and bumpin perfectly!
Flying in DCS world you REALLY get an appreciation for force feedback and it leaves a HUGE hole in MSFS2020. I use XPForce but it doesn’t really do too much.
I’m hopeful one day MSFS will natively host FFB so people can experience the joy of wind buffeting and stalls and ground bumps, etc
It looks like XPForce has an MSFS version, though I couldn’t see much info on that specifically.
Actually, back in the 90s, there WERE a few FFB flight controls. But it didn’t prove popular due to 1) expense, 2) few games supporting FFB, and 3) the difficulty of getting the things to work at all (this was back before plug-and-play was really much of a thing–EVERY change of peripherals was a pain). So basically, the market for FFB was only a tiny sliver of the already rather niche flightsim market, and it was very expensive to implement both in terms of an extra system in the games and building the hardware.
So supply and demand pretty much killed it off. And when everybody stopped developing FFB sticks, a speculator bought up all the patents in hopes of a revival, but this was AFTER FFB sticks had already died out. And really, I don’t see there ever being a revival because nearly all the same issues that killed it back in the day still apply.
For an excellent and very long analysis of the whole thing, see this great reddit post by Kalsin8: https://www.reddit.com/r/hotas/comments/er0582/comment/ff259jj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
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Given that the tech is now used in PS5 controllers, I can’t see the expense being a reasonable excuse any more. Microsoft should release a new entry level FF controller, and that would re-ignite the market.
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It would be great to actually feel the pressure on the yoke increase and decrease as you trim the plane. I think it would be transformative.
Not sure if they could convey the feeling of correctly applying rudder and keeping the plane stable during turns, if so those two things would make flying feel far much immersive.
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I use XPForce.
It works and you do get force feedback as opposed to none at all with default MSFS.
Ground roll and normal flight are quite acceptable. Aerobatics, less so. Turbulence is almost non-existent unless it is extreme in game (not an XPForce issue, the sim gives external apps no info about turbulence). They have a simulated realistic trim that works OK but, because the sim FFB interface is non existence, there are issues with the real yoke getting out of sync with the on screen virtual cockpit yoke.
TLDR XPForce is far better than no FFB at all and worth having, but there are a lot of issues and almost all of them can be traced to the sim itself not supporting FFB properly.
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Depended where you were flying. In the original IL2 Sturmovich the MS FFB2 and a trackIR were seen as optimal for good results in the online “full real” multiplayer servers that turned off targeting forcing you to ID and track the target manually and stay on their tail. TrackIR gave you the SA you needed and FFB gave you instant feedback that you were approaching stall in steep turns and let you fly right on the edge of the envelope. I think in civilian sims it was less common.
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There was back in the day but peripheral companies stopped making them.
Even if you had controllers that support FFB, I don’t believe this game does.
Quite so. I never flew IL-2, being an Aces High guy originally derived from DOS Air Warrior via Warbirds. But I never saw the need for FFB in those games to avoid accelerated stalls and whatnot. There were plenty of visual and audible cues for when you were getting close to the edge of the envelope and besides, if you flew the things enough, you just KNEW the limits and didn’t QUITE exceed them, nor consciously register the visual and audible cues. You were in the zone, using the Force (or more likely the Dark Side, driven by Hate). If you could do that, you had only the other gods to worry about. If you couldn’t do that, you were cannonfodder. Making the mental jump from one to the other was the whole trick. Knowing your Shaw chapter and verse wasn’t enough, you had to “let go of your feelings” (except Hate, of course). And if you could do that, then you didn’t need FFB.
FFB in a flightsim is a different thing from FFB in a racing sim. With a racing sim, you have a known track with known bumps, so these spots can be flagged to trigger appropriate FFB wheel responses. In a flightsim, you have nothing of the sort except on the ground and there you’re mostly using the rudder pedals anyway. In flight, there is no known map to trigger set FFB reactions, just the ever-changing swirl of the air through which the plane is moving.
Most combat sims have no wind or weather to begin with, allowing the few with FFB support to concentrate solely on own aircraft speed, AOA, etc., to generate fairly generic FFB outputs like increased control forces with higher speed and vice versa, maybe some stick shake, too. But if you have wind and weather going on, as in MSFS, then you have to add inputs from that on top of the own-aircraft situation, and there’s no map for this, it has to come in realtime from the weather engine and be handled dynamically by the FFB system in the controller. And AFAIK, none of the old FFB sticks were capable of doing that, being designed for own-aircraft variables only to suit still-air combat sims. So adding FFB to a stick for MSFS would, IMHO, be an order of magnitude harder than doing it for a typical combat sim, for both the game to provide inputs and for the stick to process them.
And then you get into the issue where things like servo tabs, hydraulics, and fly-by-wire disconnect the stick/yoke in the pilot’s hands from the actual forces transmitted from the control surfaces to the stick/yoke and/or required to move the control surfaces with the stick/yoke. In the case of such disconnects, what’s the point of having FFB anyway? And how would the FFB controller know when you were flying an Airbus instead of an XCub, and thus know how to give you appropriate FFB?
Consumer level racing sims generally do all their own FFB calculations using parameters you control in game, they only output a number to the wheel to tell it how much FFB to provide. The wheel doesn’t know about bumps etc.
If a new generation of FFB flight controls was to arrive I’m sure it would be the same. MSFS already knows all of the forces on the plane, trim, AP modes etc so it “just” needs to do some calculations to combine the various inputs into a vector to send to a stick or yoke. This is a lot simpler solution to the one you describe and would help keep the accessory cost down.
But I don’t expect MSFS to put this work in on the sim side unless a major hardware partner comes along with a strong business plan to sell FFB hardware mass market.
And as noted above it’s really GA and gliders that would benefit from this. Airliners it doesn’t provide significant benefit.
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Of course. But the racing track is a finite entity known carnally in all respects by the game system providing inputs to the FFB wheel. The track has a general level of roughness that goes on always by default, it has some particularly bad places of known location and intensity. Some racing games can then add extras on top of this, like for rain, snow, how many cars have gone ahead of you on this rally stage to make the ruts worse, etc… The main thing which differentiates racing sims from flightsims, however, is that there’s a fixed, underlying map which the FFB system of the game can easily use to provide inputs to the FFB wheel, which the player then perceives as meeting expectations developed through a lifetime of driving real cars and from the visual and audible clues the game also provides. I’m just saying that flightsims utterly lack this known, fixed foundation for FFB effects, and that sim pilots can’t see bumps and ruts coming in the invisible air, so the efficacy of visual clues is zero, and all FFB and associated audible clues come AFTER you’ve flown into a bad pocket of air.
So, think about MSFS, where supposedly the wind is 1) taken from live data which changes moment-to-moment, and 2) is affected by nearby terrain on a realtime basis per the atmospheric model. BUT, the weather data is streamed and thus subject to internet lag, which varies by user circumstances and the whim of the Internet Gods. So, how would the game provide realtime FFB inputs based on realtime wind conditions? If you’re lagged in the weather part of ALL the streaming MSFS does (graphics seem to take priority over weather), then if FFB was tied to weather, you’d most likely get harsh inputs long after you’d passed the proper place, and have no visual nor audible clues to help make sense of them, especially as you didn’t get those inputs when you were where they should have happened.
I don’t see this happening. The thing that sets MSFS apart from previous civvy sims is all the streaming, and that’s the future of the genre. No need for folks to buy orthos and whatnot because just flying along brings the real world to you as needed. Based on available data, of course, but that’s improving. But this is inherently against the methodology used by previous and existing FFB controllers.
As an old glider pilot myself, I disagree. The stick forces on gliders are never more than minuscule unless you’re doing aerobatics and even then ain’t much. Sure, in real life, glider pilots react to sensed forces. This is how you find and then stay in thermals. A wing bumps up, you turn into it, then skid and slide uncomfortably in a tight, wings-level, deliberately uncoordinated spiral in the turbulence until you’re high enough to glide over to the next thermal. But all the force feedback you experience doing this is through the seat of your pants, affecting the whole airframe. The stick stays as floppy and limp as always compared to a powered plane. So, you can simulate this no problem with visual feedback, no need for an FFB stick, and IMHO an FFB stick would be unrealistic.
My point is that in order to stimulate the market, you need something in the few hundred pounds / dollars price point that the average consumer can buy. There will always be those with deep pockets who have thousands to spend on kit, but they are neigh.
The issue (if we believe what we read) seems to be licensing. The company that own the licensing of the tech have licensed it to Sony for the PS5 controller (which is a commodity type item).
If someone makes an entry level stick that is within the reach of mass market at Christmas, lots of people will get one. Then some of them will want more and thus a market develops for better hardware and demand for better software support. If someone makes it, people will by it and demand grows, licensing costs come down etc etc
I think anyone who has used an FF stick beside a sprung one (even where theres no FF support in game) would always fly with the ff stick as the movement is much more natural and it doesn’t feel like the joystick you had in the 80’s on a Commodore 64.
Lets not forget, its been done before. the Sidewinder was that expensive, even allowing for 15 years of inflation.
I agree with what you say but the problem is the chicken and egg issue. There is no technical difficulty with a FFB joystick for flight, but it needs coordination between hardware and software (MS) to make it commercially viable. MS did it before but I don’t see that being their direction this time. It’s purely a business problem to solve.
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For any RL bigger framed jetliner pilots here, what are you actually feeling through the yoke and rudder control surfaces during takeoff, landing and cruise or is everything numbed due to hydraulic/electronic tech?
The expired patent story has been around for at least 5 years which leads me to believe that while some may have expired there may be others still in play
But it also begs the question why if some companies can make FFB devices, then why can’t others? Or is it just a cost issue, and some don’t want to, or can’t afford to pay the licensing fee? It’s not like there has been a blanket ban on the things.