to HOTAS bind or not ?

[Dirty Rotten Flieger]

 I usually try to only bind the controls actually on the real stick and throttle and use the mouse in my left hand to flip switches in the cockpit. Lefty mousing was awkward at first but I'm used to it now. The F1 has almost no HOTAS and some of the controls needed for dog fighting are hidden from view on the left side .I imagine the pilot would use these by feel with training .  

Obviously this can be a disadvantage online if my opponent has bound everything in his F1 like an F-16 HOTAS but I like to think this captures the some of the  character of the older planes I like flying. If that means dying head down in the cockpit looking for switches then so be it.

Do you guys do this? Or is this just going too far? 

 

 

[Lieuie]

Generally I try to be as realistic as possible but if it is a switch that is necessary I will map it on the controls.

Great example being trim on WWII aircraft. There is no way I am trimming with the mouse and I don't really have the option to create realistic controls for it so I will just put it on the train hat.

Another example is the ACM radar modes on the F-14. The switch is in the wall in front of the throttle. That was already mapped for me on the stick by Heatblur. I think it's more realistic that way than getting your eyes off the target to search for the switch so you can click it with your mouse since the real pilot would have memorized it's location and won't have to search for it. 

In regards to the F1 I still haven't figured out what I am going to map on it since I didn't have much time to fly it yet.

Edited August 7, 2022 by Lieuie

[Lace]

There are arguments for and against.  On the one hand - an experienced (or even trained but inexperienced) pilot will have far more cockpit time than your average DCS'er, running various drills and scans so that most operations will be second nature and switches will quickly fall to hand when required. 

On the other side of the argument, they will also be dealing with additional stress and more importantly, manoeuvring G-forces, something notably absent in even the most realistic PC sims.  This means either reducing loading, or making slower, more deliberate movements, not unlike moving a mouse to the correct switch in terms of the time taken to interact with a control.

[Krez]

I try to keep similar functions on the same HOTAS button across all aircraft.

[ARM505]

If the controls were designed to be immediately accessible, and fall readily to hand (like the examples quoted above), and didn't require multiple movements to actuate, then there is absolutely no reason not to bind them to your HOTAS from a realism point of view, as the same speed of response and functionality is then reached. Having a real cockpit around you is a MASSIVE advantage, even with non-HOTAS cockpits. People forget how small fighter cockpits are, almost every single control is nearly immediately reachable, often only by feel, or at worst with the briefest glance. I've sat in a Mirage F1, it's a small space. Every button is almost immediately to hand. Sure, you may have to glance down, but it's a millisecond. And the controls around the throttle are basically a few cm from your fingers. Compare that to glancing down (with no peripheral vision, unlike reality), waggling your mouse around to find the cursor, getting onto the hotspot while holding your TrackIR still.....there is IMHO zero realism lost when binding controls to your HOTAS that weren't there in reality (even things like gear or flaps). This is a similar conversation to the Mosquito gear lever retraction (applies to the MiG21 as well for example) - in reality, moving the safety gate out the way is very easy with one hand, and one action, in the sim it's much more difficult.

You could argue that some controls wouldn't be reachable under high G load, etc etc, but in the vast majority of situations the real cockpit, even in non-HOTAS setups are still easier to use. IMHO. Having sat in quite a few cockpits, wishing I was flying them! FW190, Spitfire, Mustang, Yak 3, Me262, Mirage F1, MB339, Me109 (tiny!) AT6 (Harvard to us) and countless civilian aircraft.....the same with airliners in sims (which I've spent thousands of hours in in reality). I know it's totally unrealistic to have MCP controls on your HOTAS in MSFS, but in reality reaching up and twiddling the heading bug is incredibly easy compared to mousing over it in a sim.

There are known combat situations where pilots end up heads down when they shouldn't have to be - for example, quoting from the interview with the wingman of the South African Mirage F1 pilot, on the merge with MiG21s, they were so close that they could see the opposing pilots had their heads down for some reason, quite odd given that they were at the merge - apparently, the MiG pilots were finding their external tank release control to drop their tanks. All the Mirage pilots saw were objects separating from the MiGs, and that their heads were down. After the war, it became apparent exactly what they were doing (they conversed via intermediaries), and why their heads were down (they had to hunt for the jettison controls in the MiG). So, perhaps leave out more complicated controls like emergency jettison, sure, absolutely. It would be realistic to have to hunt for *those* type of multi-function, rarely used controls.

 

tl;dr - IMHO, you are hampering yourself unrealistically by not binding almost anything you need to your HOTAS.

Edited August 6, 2022 by ARM505
Spelling and grammar!

[statrekmike]

To piggyback a bit on the excellent post above. It is also important to have some perspective in that unlike a real combat pilot, we are not going to typically be focused on a single aircraft. DCS has a lot of different airplanes with some wildly different control schemes. If you are the type of player that uses a lot of modules, it starts to get VERY impractical to try and have a bunch of different binding methods across all the different aircraft. It makes learning and using the aircraft harder than it really should be. Again. Real combat pilots don't need to bounce between various, entirely different aircraft like we in the DCS community tend to do. 

 It makes good sense to have a general method of assigning controls across a range of aircraft. Obviously there are going to be special considerations here and there but a lot of stuff can just go in the same place every time.

[Dragon1-1]

I generally try to stick with a realistic binding scheme, but I have a Winwing base so I have a lot of base buttons to work with. This means that if a switch is readily accessible in the real jet, I can usually find a place for it on the base. I try to stick to a single aircraft when possible, so I can afford to bind things to work like on the real thing, this occasionally causes muscle memory problems but they tend to go quickly once I adjust.

[Harlikwin]

On 7/22/2022 at 11:29 PM, Dirty Rotten Flieger said:

 I usually try to only bind the controls actually on the real stick and throttle and use the mouse in my left hand to flip switches in the cockpit. Lefty mousing was awkward at first but I'm used to it now. The F1 has almost no HOTAS and some of the controls needed for dog fighting are hidden from view on the left side .I imagine the pilot would use these by feel with training .  

Obviously this can be a disadvantage online if my opponent has bound everything in his F1 like an F-16 HOTAS but I like to think this captures the some of the  character of the older planes I like flying. If that means dying head down in the cockpit looking for switches then so be it.

Do you guys do this? Or is this just going too far? 

 

 

I bound some of the "panel" controls by the throttle, as well as some of the radar stick controls, since I don't have an actual radar stick. But in general I agree with you philosophically at least. 

 

Edited August 7, 2022 by Harlikwin

[sedenion]

On 7/23/2022 at 7:29 AM, Dirty Rotten Flieger said:

If that means dying head down in the cockpit looking for switches then so be it.

Do you guys do this? Or is this just going too far?

This is going too far, far beyond the common sens to me. Transposes with car driving and imagine a driving simulator where you have to grab up your mouse then move your "head" with the HAT to point the turn signal stick behind the steering wheel and click over with left or right mouse button. Do you realize how disabled you are with your mouse and your HAT-moved head ?

Clickable cockpit is simply a pitty substitution to make the user able to interact with all things, because all cannot be properly bound to keyboard shortcut, and this would even be almost impossible to memorize all thoses shortcuts. But, in fact, the closest substitution available for panel/button/switch interaction, except the HOTAS, is the keyboard.

So, if you don't want to bind such vital switch to your HOTAS because of some realism considerations, you however should at least map it on an easy to catch keybord combo. Because using your mouse pointer to pick up the switch on a virtual cockpit is even less realistic than using HOTAS button.

I had hard discussion about this some years ago while clickable cockpit bacame the super "must-to-have" feature. Speaking of realism about moving a mouse pointer in a vritual cockpit to click up a switch is in many aspect a nonsense. One better should create well studied and ergonomic keyboard mappings.

Edited August 8, 2022 by sedenion

[Harlikwin]

4 hours ago, sedenion said:

This is going too far, far beyond the common sens to me. Transposes with car driving and imagine a driving simulator where you have to grab up your mouse then move your "head" with the HAT to point the turn signal stick behind the steering wheel and click over with left or right mouse button. Do you realize how disabled you are with your mouse and your HAT-moved head ?

Clickable cockpit is simply a pitty substitution to make the user able to interact with all things, because all cannot be properly bound to keyboard shortcut, and this would even be almost impossible to memorize all thoses shortcuts. But, in fact, the closest substitution available for panel/button/switch interaction, except the HOTAS, is the keyboard.

So, if you don't want to bind such vital switch to your HOTAS because of some realism considerations, you however should at least map it on an easy to catch keybord combo. Because using your mouse pointer to pick up the switch on a virtual cockpit is even less realistic than using HOTAS button.

I had hard discussion about this some years ago while clickable cockpit bacame the super "must-to-have" feature. Speaking of realism about moving a mouse pointer in a vritual cockpit to click up a switch is in many aspect a nonsense. One better should create well studied and ergonomic keyboard mappings.

 

Well I run VR, and finger trackers so clicking in the pit is pretty natural actually. Where it falls apart in some cases is that you have no "haptic feedback" and the tracking isn't quite 1:1. So stuff like that lil switch by the throttle (also obscured by the throttle in some cases) becomes basically impossible to use when IRL its finger flick away. So that's the kind of stuff I tend to "map" beyond just the throttle/stick binds. 

I actually use the Clickable FC3 mod, and while its not the most realistic thing its also FAR better than having nothing to click in the pit and relying on Kbd commands for FC3.

[sedenion]

1 hour ago, Harlikwin said:

I actually use the Clickable FC3 mod, and while its not the most realistic thing its also FAR better than having nothing to click in the pit and relying on Kbd commands for FC3.

Clickable cockpit is a welcome feature and improve immersion in some case, its ok. I am a little hard with clickable cockpit because module developers tends to concentrate all their efforts on it and to forgot to design good default keyboard mapping with suitables commands such as toggles, cycles and increase/decrease (and sometimes the opposite, you have a toggle while you wanted two separated commands to bind on HOTAS...).

Edited August 8, 2022 by sedenion