Ported from BT411, which needed the same thing for its glass cockpit.
PadRIO reads XInput, which covers Xbox-class pads and nothing else. A
flight stick, a HOTAS throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals or a wheel
arrive through DirectInput instead, and until now the game could not see
any of them - the only generic-joystick path left was the 1995 single-
device DIJoystick behind L4CONTROLS=DIJOYSTICK, which is untouched here.
L4JOY is the reader: up to four devices as normalized state blocks, hot-
plug re-enumeration on the same ~3 s cadence PadRIO uses to look for a
pad, and a device lost mid-race zeroed rather than left holding whatever
was pressed when it went. XInput-class devices are excluded by VID/PID
against the RawInput paths carrying the "IG_" marker - without that an
Xbox pad arrives through both APIs and every button counts twice.
bindings.txt gains four rows in the grammar it already had, using its own
vocabulary (deadzone/rate) rather than BT411's:
joydev <slot> [product-name substring]
joyaxis <src> axis <axis> [invert] [deadzone <d>] [rate <n>]
joybutton <n> button <addr> [toggle]
joyhat <n> <up|down|left|right> button <addr>
Slots resolve to a live device every poll, by name substring or ordinal,
so unplugging and replugging does not rewrite anyone's file.
Two things the pod's shape forced that BT411 solved differently:
Pedals - a signed composite axis that decomposes into the pod's two
pedals, positive right and negative left. The pod has a pedal each
side; a twist grip or rudder bar is one signed control, and pressing
one or the other but never both is exactly what it wants to say. It
is a channel name like any other, so a pad stick can drive the turn
too.
A joyaxis on Throttle with no rate is a real lever and OWNS the
channel - full travel maps onto the 0..1 the pod runs on, instead of
nudging the accumulator that a spring-centred pad stick has to use.
RP412JOYCONFIG=1 (joyconfig.bat) runs the capture wizard before the
console screen: it asks the player to move each control, and derives the
sign convention from the DIRECTION of the move. That is the point of it -
a stick that reads positive pushed right and one that reads negative are
equally common, and no amount of documentation gets a player to work out
which they own. It writes only its own section, between marker lines, so
hand-edited keyboard and pad rows survive re-running it.
The wizard also prints every axis at rest before it starts. A driver that
refuses the +-32767 range we ask for reports its own, and an axis then
sits hard over instead of near zero; seeing "X +1.00" on an untouched
stick is the difference between a five-minute fix and a bug report that
says it configured itself. Each capture reports the move it saw for the
same reason.
Verified on the Logitech Extreme 3D on this machine. Enumeration finds
it and excludes the Xbox pad, which still arrives separately through
XInput. Every row shape parses - 7 axes, 2 buttons, 4 hat directions -
and three deliberately malformed rows (a bad axis name, button 99, a
"sideways" hat) are each rejected by line number rather than silently
dropped. The wizard lists the device with its axes at rest reading
X +0.00 Y -0.01 RZ -0.04 SL0 +1.00, waits on the first prompt without
self-triggering, and with a hand on the stick captures X to steering,
Y to pitch, RZ to the pedals and SL0 to the throttle, inverting the ones
that read backwards.
Running the captures through to a written file needs a hand on the
stick, so that part is the machine's to confirm, not this build's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
They were mapped to the config buttons (0x37/0x36), which the 9 and 0
keys already reach from the Upper Right MFD bank. Freeing them gives
players two pad buttons to assign; bindings.txt carries the mapping as
commented example lines so the way to re-enable it is in the file.
Docs and the dist README follow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Per the user: the game never reads the pilot keypad, so the numpad
becomes the flight cluster - 8/2/4/6 stick, 7/9 pedals, 0 trigger -
with Shift/Ctrl as throttle up/down and Alt as reverse thrust. That
frees the entire letter board: W/A/S/D/Q/E return to their printed
MFD bank positions and B goes back to being the gap key, so the
default profile now carries the complete unmodified vRIO bank layout.
The keypad addresses stay bindable (arcade key events) but ship
unbound.
Alt as a held flight control meant every release popped the window
menu and stole focus - WndProc now eats SC_KEYMENU. Shift/Ctrl/Alt
key-name aliases added to the parser alongside the .NET names.
Profile parses clean (59 key buttons, 8 key axes); single-player
cycle and key-bomb tests green (Alt+Q abort unaffected).
Machines with an existing bindings.txt keep their old map - delete
the file to take the new defaults.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PadRIO now loads bindings.txt (vRIO profile grammar: key/pad/padaxis
lines with toggle, deflect/rate, invert/deadzone options) written
self-documenting with the full default layout on first run. The
default is vRIO board-complete map - number and letter rows are the
MFD banks as printed on the panel, F-keys the secondary/screen
columns, numpad the pilot keypad (0x50-0x5F delivered as arcade RIO
KeyEvents, a new PadRIO capability), Space/arrows the joystick
column - with the desktop driving keys carved out: WASD stick, Q/E
pedals, PgUp/PgDn throttle, B reverse (vRIO gap key; R returns to
its bank). Pad bindings unchanged in spirit, plus Panic on LB and
config on Start/Back; axis signs are encoded in the profile now, so
L4PADFLIP flips on top of it.
Default profile parses with zero rejected lines (68 key buttons, 8
key axes, 12 pad buttons, 5 pad axes); single-player cycle and the
key-bomb tests stay green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5