BT411/docs/CONTROLS.md

BattleTech 4.11 — controls reference

Two ways to fly: the keyboard/pad (the ~25 core actions) and the cockpit panel, where every one of the pod's 72 illuminated buttons is mouse-clickable exactly where it sat in the cabinet. Left-click presses; right-click latches a button held.

Rebind keys in content\bindings.txt (delete it to regenerate the defaults). Upgrading from a pre-board build migrates your file automatically: rows you authored and the joystick wizard's section are kept and beat the new defaults; the old stock layout is replaced; the previous file is saved as bindings.old.txt. Cockpit layout and display sizes live in content\environ.ini (likewise self-documenting).

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Keyboard — the keyboard IS the button board

The letter and number rows are the MFD button banks, laid out where they sit on the panel. Flight lives on the number pad so the board stays free.

Flight — the number pad

Key	Action		Key	Action
NumPad 8 / 2	torso aim up / down		NumPad 7 / 9	left / right pedal
NumPad 4 / 6	torso twist left / right		NumPad 5	all stop
NumPad 0, Space	main trigger		NumPad 1 / 3 / .	pinky / middle / upper
Shift / Ctrl	throttle up / down (the lever sticks)		Alt	reverse thrust
← ↓ →	look left / behind / right		↑	torso centre
`	cockpit / chase camera		PgUp / PgDn	volume up / down (saved)

You spawn in BASIC control mode. In BASIC the stick steers and the pedals do nothing. Press F7 once for MID, where the pedals steer and the stick twists the torso — the full pod experience. If "turning doesn't work", this is why.

The panel — letter and number rows

  UPPER DISPLAYS   Heat / coolant      Engineering        Comm / hotbox
   top row       1   2   3   4  |  5   6   7   8  |  9   0   -   =
   bottom row    Q   W   E   R  |  T   Y   U   I  |  O   P   [   ]
                  0x2F..0x2C        0x27..0x24        0x37..0x34
                  0x2B..0x28        0x23..0x20        0x33..0x30

  LOWER DISPLAYS  Left Weapons                        Right Weapons
   top row       A   S   D   F      (G unbound)     H   J   K   L
   bottom row    Z   X   C   V      (B unbound)     N   M   ,   .
                  0x0F..0x0C                          0x07..0x04
                  0x0B..0x08                          0x03..0x00

  COLUMNS beside the map
   left    F1 zoom+  F2 zoom-  F3 thermal  F4 CROUCH  F5 lamp  F6 display
   right   F7 control mode  F8 -  F9..F12 Generators A-D

G and B are deliberately unbound: they are the physical gap between the lower clusters.

1 2 3 Q W E are the coolant valves and the detents run 1 - 5 - 50 (max) - 0 (CLOSED) - back to 1. One press past max shuts that loop off and everything on it overheats; boosting one loop starves the others, since the supply is shared. 4 is the flush (hold it) and R re-balances every valve.

The weapon and engineering displays are page-gated: on the Quad page the outer buttons jump to a populated Eng page; on an Eng page they drive generator select A-D, bus mode, coolant toggle, trigger configure, and eject (tap to clear a jam, hold ~3 s to jettison a burning ammo bay before it detonates).

What a bound key gives up

Binding a key removes it from the authentic 1995 typed-hotkey channel so it cannot double-dispatch. This board binds nearly everything, so those hotkeys are given up by design: 5 = MFD1 Quad page, z = MFD3 Eng1, t/y/u/i/o = pilot select, +/- = target zoom. Unbind a key in bindings.txt to get its 1995 meaning back. (The old -/= VOLUME keys moved to PgUp/PgDn -- they no longer share a key with anything, in any layout.) Same rule for the built-ins: ` is the view toggle (V is a board button now), and J/K/L cycle the MFD preset pages only while unbound.

Addresses with no function at all — the pod never wired them — are 0x16 0x17 0x19 0x1E 0x1F and 0x38-0x3E.

Controllers

An Xbox controller works out of the box.

Flight sticks, HOTAS and pedals: run joyconfig.bat once. A wizard asks you to move each control in turn — stick, twist, throttle, fire buttons — writes the bindings, and drops you into the solo menu to try them. It only rewrites its own section of bindings.txt, so hand edits elsewhere in the file survive.

Mouse buttons are bindable like any key — MOUSE4, MOUSE5 (the side buttons), MOUSEMIDDLE, and MOUSELEFT/MOUSERIGHT. The side and middle buttons are the free ones; left and right are how you press cockpit buttons, so binding those fires on every panel click too. Mouse movement is not bindable — see docs/MOUSELOOK_PLAN.md.

key MOUSE4 button 0x40        # side button = main trigger
key MOUSE5 button 0x46        # side button = middle thumb

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Cockpit layout

Set these in content\environ.ini:

• BT_MFD_SCALE (and _UL/_UC/_UR/_LL/_LR) — size of the five MFDs, as a percentage of their pod size. Turn them up if you want to actually read them while you fly.
• BT_RADAR_SCALE, BT_RADAR_POS — size the map, and move it out of the middle of the road: CENTER, LEFT, RIGHT, MIDLEFT, MIDRIGHT.
• BT_GLASS_PANELS=1 — break every display out into its own desktop window instead of the composited cockpit. Good for reading one display at full size.

Run with -fit for a borderless window over the whole monitor. The cockpit scales to any window shape at one uniform scale, so nothing ever stretches — a window that isn't the cockpit's shape just gets black bars.