Eskimo John

Sounds like a good plan. I will look at it in the week and report back. Many thanks.

Ok. Not the TrackIR. Completely disconnected and it still happens. Something USB is causing it I think, but it is strange that it isn't causing issues in other things like in X-Plane for example. I am going to have to disconnect everything USB and see if I can find out which device is causing the issue. Assuming it is a device and not a USB card ot the motherboard. However its to late for that tonight. A job for tomorrow if I get time.

I am testing now, and It might be a blind ally. I have unplugged the hub and am flying the P51 without the whole device connected. And it has just happened again. I suspect at action of switching out a device may have caused the issue to occur rather than be the issue itself. I will connect the hub back up and fly with the trackIR disconnected to see if that is the cause. lets see....

Something strange is going on with my USB set up. The devices connected to the hub were mouse and keyboard and not the trackIR. However the track IR was disconnecting when I switched out the keyboard. I changed over the hub and now the trackIR switches out when I switch out the keyboard or the mouse. Very odd indeed. The replacement usb hub is even less reliable as the TrackIR now switches in and out at random without me switching out devices. But each time it happens the screen zooms in. Its a hardware issue for sure, I just dont see why the trackIR is switching in and out unless something USB related is failing inside my PC.

I think I may have found the issue. Having rebooted my PC I can open the .diff.lua files ok. there must have been a file lock on them, and now the changes has stuck. so progress there and all good. I have a switchable USB hub that has a usb device and the the mouse plugged into it. I can switch the mouse off and on with no effect but when I switch the other device off and on the view zooms in! Perhaps a dodgy hub. I think the other device is my trackIR. I will rewire it next week to remove it and see what happens. I will post here when it is done but it will be a few days. A spiky device was possibly correct! Thanks.

No message, they just dont open. Notepad++ just attempts to open them and goes nowhere. Notepad ++ just freezes.

Ok I now have some files in place as described above. I still need to check if they do what they should. The files are .diff.lua files, but have weird names with joystick and a strange bunch of letters and numbers in them but with the afore mentioned double file ending. I thought having the .lua ending they might be readable text files as per a standard lua script file so I tried to open one with notepad++. They wouldn't open. Is this correct, or is my system locking the files? If they are locked it might explain the settings not being loaded on a re-start.

Thanks for the above that is very clear. I don't have an OptionsPresets or an Inputs folder in my Config folder. That explains why changes are not saving. I have work getting in the way at the moment but I will make some changes to see what happens as soon as I can. I will try making some changes and seeing if the directories and files appear and if not I will go through the process you have just done and see what happens. It wont be for a couple of hours at least though. Thanks.

@Lange_666 Thanks for the above. MY SaveGames folder has a DCS subfolder in it as described above and in that folder there is a Config folder, exactly as you describe above. However that is where it ends. I have three files in the Config directory imgui.ini, network.vault and options.lua. There are no directories in the Config directory. Perhaps the changes are not being saved as there is no structure to save them in?

The DCS install is a completely new install of v 2.5. No mods at all, just as it comes. The only thing that is not default is that the user files are on the usual 'C' drive and the install is on a different SDD - the 'D' drive. Otherwise its completely vanilla. I am just trying it out at the moment as my usual X-Plane doesn't give me the combat experience DCS should. If it matters X-Plane is installed on a completely separate drive as well.

To be clear. Any changes made to the controls should be saved in \Saved Games\DCS\Config\Input. So I should expect to see a directory call Input at the above path and a .diff file in that directory? There is such a 'Config' directory, but no 'Input' sub-directory and no .diff files in the Config directory. EDIT: There appear to be .diff.lua files in the individual aircraft files in the main DCS directory structure. Would the missing user profiles files explain why things have reverted to what they were before the changes?

Finally got around to testing the changes made above. Seconds into a flight the zoom thing happened again. So I checked the controls settings and this is what I found: No red marked conflicts. The changes made wit respect to these have saved and look fine. Axis control assignments were not ok. The changes made to remove the assignment of JOY_X etc had reverted to what they were before, that is to say they were assigned to all three controllers again. So I think my first priority is to get to the bottom of point 2 above as I need to find out if this is the cause of the zoom problem, although I have no Idea how to do this. Are these assignments stored in a file somewhere that I can view or at least check on the date/time the file was last changed? Any help would be great.

Some progress... I have found some conflicts and wrong assignments and resolved them: The default settings for some axis commands seems to have been to set all devices to the same axis. So the toe brakes moving the control issue was because the JOY_X and JOY_Y settings were assigned to the Roll and Pitch control for all three of my devices, joystick, throttle and rudder. There were some conflicts in the settings, a couple of them were because the same command exists in both the General and UI settings, BDA Show/Hide being on of them. I deleted the General version and kept the UI version. I hope this was the correct one to delete. Others were specific commands for aircraft that conflicted with non aircraft specific commands. With these I deleted the ones I thought is would want to use less. Once the rudder brakes were sorted I noted that the animations seemed to indicate that the controls were the wrong way around so I inverted them. No time yet to test, but hopefully later today. One question. Are the changed settings automatically saved? I couldn't see a save button.

Thanks for this @draconus. I have to work now but I will return to this later today if I can or if not tomorrow and go through all you have posted above. When it s done I will post again.

It happened again On approach in the P51 - not a good time as a lot is going on. I did note the following: I was able to recover from it using the newly mapped zoom controls. It wasn't so pronounced. However this might be because I was zoomed out further than before when it happened. It went from fully zoomed out to about the normal position. A small menu appeared in the top right corner of the screen appeared when it happened. I am not sure what this is as yesterday was my first day with DCS, but it was in white letters and listed several of things that were numbered. It may have been there when it happened before but I am not sure. I do have some sort of conflict with my controls, but it might be unrelated. I have Saitek rudder peddles which work by default in terms of rudder control, but the toe brake switches don't seem to function correctly. There behaviour is strange: They don't show up in the control mapping screen if I try to map them. if I use them the stick in the cockpit moves to extremes. The right hand toe brake moved the stick to the far right and the left hand toe brake moved the stick back toward the pilot as far as it can go. There are a few control settings with a red disk with a ! cut from it by some of the P51 control settings. An accidental touch of brakes can have an interesting effect in flight. The instinct to use them on landing results in very bad things. As they dont seemed to be mapped to controls I cant see a way to stop them behaving like this.

@draconus It happened without Track IR and also with it functioning. Resetting it had no effect other than to re-centre my forehead on the instrument panel. However. Following on form @Lange_666 's post I set a JS control to the zoom in slowly and zoom out slowly functions and did a quick test flight in the P51 to see if this control setting could help me control the event when it happened. The result was interesting. I completed two flight with out it happening al all. It is as if the control settings prevented it from happening. Later today I will do a longer flight to test it more thoroughly and report back here.

@Lange_666 Thanks for the reply. I have no axis bonded to the zoom function, all controls are set to the way they are on install. no modifications at all. Essentially every control is set to default.

I am also new to DCS and have the same problem as ATC31501. At random intervals the display zooms in as far as it can go so that I have my nose on the instruments and I cant seem to get it back unless I press right alt C and use the mouse wheel to zoom out, although sometimes this dosn't work either. I am using a track IR as well, but I have tried running DCS without the TrackIR software running and it still happens. I have noted that the zoom happens without a key, joystick or mouse click coinciding with it so it isn't an obvious control issue that I can see. It happens with both the Frogfoot and the P51 so it seems not to be an aircraft related issue. I have a complete new DCS 2.5 install with Thrustmaster Hotas Warthog JS and throttle and Saitek rudder peddles attached aside from a keyboard and trackball controls. @ATC31501 - did you get this fixed? I an hoping for some advice as without it DCS is a non-starter for me.