Rudder Pedal Sensitivity

[RJC68 823]

3 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

I am with you, I never even thought about the extremity  dead zone settings because frankly I had no idea what it did. I just tried this on the elevator setting on the JF Arrow and it handles much better. 

 

Now the bad news. When you set extremity dead zone, and start a new flight after restarting MSFS 2020, the setting disappears and it resets back to zero.. Bummer. 

 

I just read on the MSFS forum that this issue had been fixed in the latest Beta. 

I just loaded up the Sim again and checked the extremity dead zone and it had reset, Thanks for pointing this out.

I just flew the A32NX the entire SID up to FL160 with my Airbus side stick and she handled like an absolute dream, extremely precise. I will try the return leg of this trip with my Honeycomb Alpha and see what that is like. I even found the tiller control is way better applying this method to the rotary axis on the Airbus side stick as opposed to using a curve.

I am going to take the S-Curve out of my Virpil software and give this a go for my pedals when I get a chance although my take of roll was way better than in the past with the curve in place in the Sim.

Happy Days !

Many thanks @Stearmandriver for sharing this little piece of awesomeness !

 

[fppilot 4,389]

17 hours ago, Stearmandriver said:

Try this: in the in-sim control sensitivity settings, do NOT add any sort of curves.  No kind of curve can feel natural.  Instead, the magic setting you want to adjust is "extremity dead zone".  Add a positive extremity dead zone of around 30% and see how that feels. 

Does this apply to rudder pedals?  I cannot find the extremity dead zone setting.  I am using Crosswind pedals.

Edited April 10, 2022 by fppilot

[Stearmandriver 2,318]

56 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Does this apply to rudder pedals?  I cannot find the extremity dead zone setting.  I am using Crosswind pedals.

Yup it will apply to any axis.  Be sure that you've selected the correct tab across the top of the controls screen, before clicking "Sensitivities".  There should be different tabs for keyboard, joystick, throttle etc, depending on the devices you're using. You have to click to highlight the tab for your rudder device, and then Sensitivities will show you all the axes for that device. You can kick your pedals back and forth and find the one that's moving. 

[Stearmandriver 2,318]

And yes, Bob is right that there's a bug with the sensitivity settings right now, where two specific settings are reset when the sim is shut down and restarted: extremity dead zone and reactivity.  This is supposed to be fixed with SU9; I think it's already fixed in the current beta. 

Also, you've all obviously got it right but just to clarify for anyone else reading: there are two different settings that use the term dead zone.  There's "dead zone", and then there's "EXTREMITY dead zone".  We want the "extremity dead zone" setting, if the goal is toning down sensitivity.  The regular "dead zone" setting will actually make it worse haha. 

If you watch the graph of the control axis as you adjust extremity dead zone, you can see what it's doing: it's limiting the maximum, full-deflection effectiveness of that axis, and thus spreading the remaining range of effectiveness across the full travel of your control axis.  I use this a lot on the pitch axis of various sim aircraft too, as I often find pitch authority to be excessive. 

The downside (everything is a compromise, right?) is that you ARE losing some control authority on whatever axis you're adjusting. So for the rudder axis, this means that at full rudder pedal deflection, you now have less rudder authority than you used to.  The question is whether this is a problem, and that's personal preference. Usually if you're adjusting this, it's because the axis in question is just too darn effective on that sim aircraft, and you WANT less authority... but you can see how it could be taken too far. 

For me personally, if I'm adjusting rudder extremity dead zone and I can still land in a moderate x wind, perform an aggressive forward slip, and get the airplane to spin (assuming it's supposed to do those things), then I figure I still have plenty of rudder.  For the pitch axis, I make sure I still have enough authority in the flare, maybe to do a soft-field takeoff, and to perform an accelerated stall. 

One more thing to note: adding a POSITIVE extremity dead zone is what's needed to reduce sensitivity / effectiveness.  But if you ever encounter a sim airplane that needs MORE control sensitivity (I have yet to meet this airplane), you have the ability to do that too.  You can give any control axis MORE authority with a NEGATIVE extremity dead zone. 

You can see it's a really powerful control setting they've given us.  As for how I figured it out: absolute dumb luck.  It could probably be documented better 😉

[Pivot 154]

I have a question, how would one do this extremity dead zone with FSUIPC?

[Ixoye 1,828]

2 hours ago, fppilot said:

Does this apply to rudder pedals?  I cannot find the extremity dead zone setting.  I am using Crosswind pedals.

I also have Crosswind pedals and I feel no need to use extremity dead zone on these, but I was using it with my old pedals.

Edited April 11, 2022 by Ixoye

[Stearmandriver 2,318]

1 hour ago, Pivot said:

I have a question, how would one do this extremity dead zone with FSUIPC?

That I don't know, but I'd assume there's probably a setting that does the same thing, though I don't know what it would be called. I remember FSUIPC being extremely flexible when I used it for FSX though so I'll bet there's a way. Can you maybe adjust the graph of the axis directly, so grab the top and bottom points and move them both towards the middle, so instead of the line making a 45 degree slope, it's more like 30-35 degrees? 

 

5 minutes ago, Ixoye said:

I also have Crosswind pedals and they work great with default settings for me.

Oh yeah, they're great pedals. We're not talking about fixing an issue with the pedals, but with the flight models of certain sim aircraft that are much too sensitive in one or more axes.

[Adrian123 1,015]

34 minutes ago, Stearmandriver said:

That I don't know, but I'd assume there's probably a setting that does the same thing, though I don't know what it would be called. I remember FSUIPC being extremely flexible when I used it for FSX though so I'll bet there's a way. Can you maybe adjust the graph of the axis directly, so grab the top and bottom points and move them both towards the middle, so instead of the line making a 45 degree slope, it's more like 30-35 degrees?

Ive tried that and all I can think of with FSUIPC with no results.

[Bobsk8 12,814]

2 hours ago, Pivot said:

I have a question, how would one do this extremity dead zone with FSUIPC?

I doubt if you can, I have never seen anything like that in FSUIPC. 

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,799]

The issue with extremity dead zone is you lose some of your rudder authority in crosswinds.

[Stearmandriver 2,318]

25 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

The issue with extremity dead zone is you lose some of your rudder authority in crosswinds.

Yup, I talked about that a few posts up. The thing is, if you're in a plane that will benefit from it, it's because the plane is modeled with too much rudder authority to begin with... so dialing it back to a reasonable range is the intended goal.

It's worth testing, after applying the extremity dead zone, to make sure you still have enough control authority on the adjusted axis.  So for instance on the rudder, test and make sure you've still got enough authority for crosswind landings, aggressive slips etc. 

Chances are you will, because if you're seeing an improvement with an extremity dead zone, the control was simply too effective to begin with. 

[Gerwil 177]

FWIW, every plane I am going to fly in MSFS, even before I start up the sim I go into the Flight_Model.cfg and devide the center wheel steering (example value in bold below) in half or even less. This center wheel steering causes the twitchy-ness on the runway, not so much the rudder. I found that with this value in half or less I still could turn the plane on a dime while taxiïng and have a lot less problems with keeping the centerline during landing or TO.

Example:

It's the 8th value in the point.0 line:

[Contact Points]

point.0 = 1, 2.507979, 0, -5.619, 820, 0, 0.52, 25, 0.165, 1.7, 0.9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1.1

Edited April 11, 2022 by Gerwil

[Bobsk8 12,814]

8 hours ago, Gerwil said:

FWIW, every plane I am going to fly in MSFS, even before I start up the sim I go into the Flight_Model.cfg and devide the center wheel steering (example value in bold below) in half or even less. This center wheel steering causes the twitchy-ness on the runway, not so much the rudder. I found that with this value in half or less I still could turn the plane on a dime while taxiïng and have a lot less problems with keeping the centerline during landing or TO.

Example:

It's the 8th value in the point.0 line:

[Contact Points]

point.0 = 1, 2.507979, 0, -5.619, 820, 0, 0.52, 25, 0.165, 1.7, 0.9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1.1

Adjusting extremity dead zone is much easier than messing with with contact points on every aircraft. 

[Ixoye 1,828]

31 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

Adjusting extremity dead zone is much easier than messing with with contact points on every aircraft. 

But adjusting the contact point only needs to be done once, seems like a better option to me as it is a hassle to switch to different setups all the time.

Edited April 11, 2022 by Ixoye

[Bobsk8 12,814]

12 minutes ago, Ixoye said:

But adjusting the contact point only needs to be done once, seems like a better option to me as it is a hassle to switch to different setups all the time.

The only time you have to switch setups is if you need a different controller for different aircraft, which you might have to do anyway.  I have different setups for the DC6, the Kodiak, etc.  Also, how to you adjust contact points of aircraft where the files are encrypted?