A doubt about landing gear

[Sakivano]

I mainly fly the Spitfires, both MkV and Mk IX. I see that in real life, in order to lower the landing gear there is a lever on the right of the pilot and you have to lower it, and vice versa to lift the landing gear. The question is, I've got an old throttle and I've tried to use it as the landing gear lever, to no avail. I mean, I can lower the landing gear, but it doesn't work to lift it. Seeing the control section, I see I can't use the throttle for this purpose the same as I can use it to manage the engine power. Is there any other way to set up a throttle for such a task?

[DrKarrot]

I'm not positive if axis control of landing gear is possible in the current key bind system, but an easy way is to use an external profiler to map that axis to some keys.

 

In my case, I use Keysticks (which is now free, IIRC) to map the axes on my Xbox 360 controller to numpad keys that I can then map to engine controls. Should be able to do something similar with your throttle axis. Map 0% to whatever you have as your "Lower Gear" hotkey, 100% to  "Raise Gear."

[RedKestrel]

8 minutes ago, DrKarrot said:

I'm not positive if axis control of landing gear is possible in the current key bind system, but an easy way is to use an external profiler to map that axis to some keys.

 

In my case, I use Keysticks (which is now free, IIRC) to map the axes on my Xbox 360 controller to numpad keys that I can then map to engine controls. Should be able to do something similar with your throttle axis. Map 0% to whatever you have as your "Lower Gear" hotkey, 100% to  "Raise Gear."

Current keybinding is button only. I'm not familiar with Keysticks but your solution looks like it might work. 

However, with an old throttle, if you have 'jumpy' pots, assigning the axis to a button might result in a little bit of jitter randomly triggering the button.

Also I thought that the raise/lower gear button was the same?

[DrKarrot]

Just now, RedKestrel said:

Current keybinding is button only. I'm not familiar with Keysticks but your solution looks like it might work. 

However, with an old throttle, if you have 'jumpy' pots, assigning the axis to a button might result in a little bit of jitter randomly triggering the button.

Also I thought that the raise/lower gear button was the same?

 

Keysticks has a nice option for "Type" key where it only sends the key once when it detects an input, so it doesn't keep spamming the hotkey for a slider/axis that is "held" at a value. Think XPadder had a similar option but haven't used that software in years. Lots of literature about this kind of thing related to the sim-pit home-building folks.

 

In game there look to be separate binds for each:

[RedKestrel]

Just now, DrKarrot said:

 

Keysticks has a nice option for "Type" key where it only sends the key once when it detects an input, so it doesn't keep spamming the hotkey for a slider/axis that is "held" at a value. Think XPadder had a similar option but haven't used that software in years. Lots of literature about this kind of thing related to the sim-pit home-building folks.

 

In game there look to be separate binds for each:

Huh, I just never bothered with a separate key. useful for something like this.

So the 'Type' key only sends once when it detects an input. Is there a movement sensitivity setting? Because some throttles jitter by a couple percentage points. on their own, that could be interpreted as separate inputs.

I guess the best thign to do would be to try it and see, it would just suck for the throttle to accidentally drop the gear when you are in a high speed dive or a dogfight.

[DrKarrot]

Got this working on my old Extreme 3D pro, as a test.

 

Doubled up the slider axis, one inverted (so it "keys" at physical 0%) and one regular (so it "keys" at 100%) both with .9 (90%) dead zone. So being at the lower 10% pushes LCtrl-G once, upper 10% LAlt-G once. Should be fine jitter-wise as long as it isn't more than a 10% jitter, and even if it does, it would have to jitter all the way to the other end of the slider to hit the other hotkey and ruin your flight, since hitting "Lower Gear" again with the gear already down or vice versa is not an issue.

[Sakivano]

Oh, thanks. I'll try keysticks.