Magic Trackpad vs Slimblade Pro

[Pyrocumulous]

Just thought I'd jot down a few notes for anyone else that that is considering an alternative to a mouse for DCS World in VR. I use a tray that sits between my throttle and HOTAS, and while one could put a mouse on it, a stationary pointing device makes more sense given the limited space and limitations of VR. I've been flying with the Apple Magic Trackpad 2 for several years, and then just started testing a Kensington Slimblade Pro this week. I'll just place a list here of what each does well and what the limitations are.

Both devices can be used wirelessly via bluetooth, but I use both via USB. The Magic Trackpad utilizes the Mac-Precision-Touchpad driver, which allows it to be used as a Windows Precision Touchpad. This gives the ability to use a lot of gestures, but not a lot of customization options here. The Kensington Slimblade Pro utilizes Kensington Works.

A regular mouse with a scrollwheel is really the gold standard to judge against, so if that fits with your sim setup, just go with that. There are two primary functions that utilize the mouse in DCS World: the map screen / mission editor and clickable cockpits / comm menu / rearm menu.

Apple Magic Trackpad

• Great for no-eyes ambidextrous use. It's a large touchpad, and wherever your finger makes contact on the trackpad, that's where it is.
• If you've used a laptop, you already have the muscle memory built.
• No moving parts, and no crevices to gather any grime.
• Scrolling is intuitive, two fingers swiped up or down and the knob spins.
• Zooming in and out of maps and external views is accomplished with the pinch gesture. It can be a lot of pinching (and whatever the inverse of pinching is) when moving around on a map.
• Scrolling lots / fast is easy, precision scrolling is very difficult. For example, trying to set the altimeter or just barely turn on the lights.
• It's a large touchpad, so you can drag a long way before you run out of space, but if you have to raise your fingers the click-drag is terminated.
• Left clicking and right clicking works quite well, just tap with one finger for left or two fingers for right
• Holding the left mouse button is done with a quick tap-tap of a single finger. This works pretty well for most applications, although sometimes you get a click-click instead of a click-hold due to the speed of your taps. Precision dragging a slider such as changing the curve on a axis is also a challenge.
• Holding the right mouse button down is impossible. There are clickable cockpit switches that you need to hold with right click, measuring in the map, are among the challenges here.
• Precision is improved by turning down the pointer speed, and given the size of the touchpad you can turn it way down and not run out of space.
• Precision Touchpad settings in Windows initially looks pretty exhaustive, but there is not much customization that can be done that is applicable to flight simming. The most useful is probably the three and four finger tap, for which you can create a custom keyboard shortcut.
• Polling rate appears to only be 92 hz, which makes for a less smooth operation on the desktop, but realistically, I can't tell the difference in the VR cockpit.
• Photo plus screen capture from Windows touchpad settings in spoiler:

Spoiler

Kensington Slimblade Pro

• Your fingers have one home base: they need to be on that ball. Fortunately the ball is easy to find in the blind.
• What isn't always as easy to find is the clickable buttons, they are huge buttons, but only the 1/3 closest to the ball is actually clickable. Not a huge problem, but not as good as the Trackpad in this regard. It might make sense to add some masking tape or similar tactile indicator.
• There are four physical clickable buttons, of which you will probably want to make the bottom right and left the left/right clickers, and then you have two more to be creative with. The Kensington Works software allows you to select anything for those four buttons: launch programs, keyboard shortcuts, etc. One limitation is that the only modifiers keys for keyboard shortcuts is ALT, CTRL, SHIFT, and Windows: there isn't a Left Control option, for example. You could even customize shortcuts for two buttons clicked simultaneously.
• You can hold those clickable buttons down easily while dragging with the ball. It's really pretty easy and intuitive. Right, left, middle, it's glorious in the F10 map compared to the Trackpad.
• Scrolling is handled by twisting the ball horizontally. You can customize the rate of scrolling in Kensington Works, and I found that the Intertia Scroll setting is excellent for allowing precision adjustments (e.g. setting altimeter) but also being able to spin a dial all the way. The mouse pointer is held stationary (in software) while spinning the ball; this works surprisingly well but still can be challenging to keep the pointer on the knob while you are spinning it. This also accomplishes zooming the map and external views. There is an audible and tactile clicking sound when twisting the ball which comes from a speaker in the device; I kind of like it, but it's odd that there is no way to disable this affect.
• The trackball plus physical clickers means that you have unlimited dragging.
• You can set the CPI (Counts per Inch, essentially resolution) with a button on the right side of the device, which combined with adjusting the pointer speed is pretty effective at maximizing precision while still maintaining range of motion. CPI can be set to 400, 800, 1200, and 1600. 1600 will move your pointer across the cockpit by only nudging the ball 30 degrees or so, 1200 seems to be about ideal for my setup.
• Polling rate appears to only be 128 hz, which makes for a less smooth operation on the desktop compared to a good mouse (1000 hz), but realistically, I can't tell the difference in the VR cockpit. Previous firmware versions (<4.49) had a wired polling rate of 500 hz, but this caused problems, so as of v4.49 both bluetooth and wired modes are capped at about 128 hz.
• Photo plus screen capture from Kensington Works in spoiler:

Spoiler

 

Edited December 15, 2024 by Pyrocumulous
correct typographical error

[Nightdare]

Been using a Logitech trackball since 2000-ish

The only downside to trackballs is the average resolution (around 10% of modern mice), but this is not an issue in DCS

[Ssnake51]

I would recommend the Kensington Expert Trackball over thte Simblade Pro.  You can click anywhere on one of the large four buttons.  Also, the scroll wheel works great.  It uses the same software for programming.

The Simblade Pro does look a lot prettier though.