"Hi,
so I play with xbox controller and I believe anyone with HOTAS or any kind of joystick will confirm this, basically in gamepad mode.
For example on my controller I have up arrow to lock target and down arrow to target closest enemy, in any combination using this buttons when I fly around tossing and turning, bobbing and weaving, rolling etc... I always and its literary 90% of the time I lose that target lock, very very annoying, need to retarget again bc autoaim is not working, it happens when you lock on a surface element, almost any target you want to lock on keeps getting untargeted."
Hi, I have been kind of looking into this issue myself of late but from a different perspective, I suppose, but because of it, I have the answer for you I hope. I think I should explain why am so late in this conversation as have been playing X4 on and off for a few years now and also played a lot of the X3 games, which had more targeting options like next and previous friends and enemies as well as simply next target. I don't remember if it had sub targets?
Anyway I used to play this with a joystick by Mad Cats I think called a Cyborg evo force and it was great compared to keyboard and mouse but because it only had 12 buttons I had assigned 2x shift buttons, it was quite complex in a way but I could play the game mostly without requiring much use of the keyboard or mouse, I still have this, the software and the key bindings etc.
I missed out on rebirth but when X4 came out, I became interested again and have played it on/off for a couple of years now, so I also set up the evo force for this, again with 2x shift buttons so again not requiring much use of the keyboard. The joystick still works but after 12 years of abuse one or two of the buttons have become a bit fragile, IPA and WD40 is your friend for this but after another year or so it began getting a bit dodgy again. A big difference between X3 and X4 seemed to be that missiles needs to take up a guns slot in X4 whereas in X3 you could just launch missiles from the ship and keep all gun slots for guns. The result of this is that I never really used missiles in my X4 player ship.
Lately I decided to give Star Citizen a go. Star citizen (SC) has many different controls (many more too) and a FPS element to it that X4 doesn't have, so with this I decided to buy new joysticks to replace the old aging Cyborg as I knew I would have to in the end with the couple of failing buttons and really didn't want to go through the binding process more than once, this is a totally cantankerous job in my opinion :/
I went for the VKB Space Combat Edition. These are fantastic joysticks, it's a sort of cross between a HOTAS and a HOSAS so the left one is bent over and gives proper control over strafe (I used to use the POV hat on the Cyborg for this as well as shifted for looking around) On the left one I also removed the Y axis springs so it behaves as a proper throttle. Each of them has up to 35 buttons! Obviously Star Citizen is new to me and so I set about setting up X4 with them 1st, also to give me an idea on how to set up SC.
Because of the huge increase in buttons there was no need for 2x shifts but I did assign one, sort of, more as a weapons safety lock so fire became enter and launch missiles escape so I don't accidently have friendly fire incidents. I also used this on the Cyborg
. PS I can even control the mouse pointer using the VKB's and they are also very precise with no need for the 11% dead zone I used with the Cyborg.
I assigned buttons for everything in the game, including "Toggle Target Lock" (its default is shift T on the keyboard) I didn't really know what it did. I decided that perhaps it was to unlock a target locked with a missile so I armed my Split Dragon with missile launchers went out and targeted ships with missiles to see if I could unlock the missile "Lock" with it... to no avail.
Now I was confused!
After much experimentation and googling I now have it sussed and along with that an answer for your question. It is not a bug!
In the past I left gamepad mode at its default which is for controllers only, not joysticks so I have always had it off. So I tried it ON for joysticks and discovered that what gamepad mode does is it changes the targeting behaviour, with it off you need to target whatever is under the reticule by pressing T or whatever button you assign to the joystick/controller. With it on you will target whatever is under reticule automatically. If you don't know this then you may well think that something is wrong with targeting. This is your answer and it is deliberate I guess it will save you assigning one button on the controller for locking a target.
So what I wanted to know, what “Toggle Target Lock” does. So in game, it toggles the targeting behaviour from/to automatically targeting under the reticule back to requiring the Target button to be pressed (T) or the button assigned for this purpose on the joystick/controller i.e. it toggles gamepad mode on/off. It only does anything if Gamepad Mode is set to ON in the game settings!
I don’t know if gamepad mode has any other effects apart from this.
If you want to stop your targets bouncing around try pressing shift T on your keyboard. If it doesn't work go into the game controls and assign “Toggle Target Lock” to something then back to the game and press it and hopefully your problem will be resolved.
Cheers
