Radial menu control using 8-way hat on joysticks

[azaghal]

Has anyone been able to utilise the 8-way hat on a joystick for controlling the radial menu selection (I'm using T.16000M HOTAS under GNU/Linux)? From what I can tell, the only way to pick one of the options is by using two axis-style controls on the joystick, which is kinda disappointing - the 8-way hat feels to me like a way more natural way pick an option in this particular case.

On another note - is it by design that the last selected option in radial menu remains selected upon the next invocation? Feels kinda useful for running repetitive actions (for deployables, for example) without having to assign a dedicated button for everything, I hope it was intentional and won't get marked as a bug, though...

Best regards,
Branko

P.S.
For a moment I thought that mouse cannot be used to select the radial menu entries either - but apparently it's just that the buttons do not get highlighted when hovering over with a mouse...

[stooper88]

I've been struggling with this as well and have not found any working solution. There was one post on reddit where a user reported success with a VKB flight stick but couldn't verify if it was due to the VKB software. But in all my other searches, nobody else has come up with a working process or method.

My impression is that the control settings for X4 radial menus only support analog axis controls. These are the settings under Menu Navigation > Radial Menu. For example, I have an X52 Pro HOTAS. X4 readily allows me to bind the X and Y joystick axes, the Z throttle axis, the ZR twist rotation axis, the Precision Slider axis, and both of its X and Y rotary knob axes to either of the radial menu settings. Although these bindings are supported, they are all clearly impractical for game play. Ideally, the X4 control settings would also recognize the POV1 Hat as a dual-axis analog input as well.



However, for many HOTAS flight sticks, X4 treats the POV1 hat as a digital D-Pad. In the screenshot below, the POV1 hat on my X52 Pro is only recognized as an 8-way D-Pad. Note that this type of Direct Input configuration is not the same as a dual-axis input control. As such, it doesn't work with the Radial Menu control settings. Unlike with the other analog axis controls on my X52 HOTAS, I cannot bind the POV1 hat to the radial menu settings.



Strangely enough, other games don't have this same problem. As an example, the screenshot below shows the configuration screen from Everspace 2 illustrating its recognition of the POV1 hat as dual-analog axes.



In addition to navigating the in-game menus, the above settings allow me to use the POV1 hat to quickly and accurately make selections from pop-up radial menus during game play:



Alternatively, other games combine mouse support for radial menus with enumerated options and support for numeric keys. In the example below from DarkStar One, I can select any choice from the radial menu by clicking with a mouse or pressing the corresponding number key. For flight sticks which provide programmable key binding support, this option would allow a means of using the POV hats for radial menus (by mapping the 8-way directions to number keys 1-8).



Then again, we don't even need the above example from DarkStar One, as X4 itself already demonstrates existing support for this type of user interface. In the example below, communication choices are selectable by mouse clicking or by pressing the corresponding number key.



It's important to note that, in order to work reliably and intuitively, enumerated radial menu options should have numbering placed statically so that corresponding POV hat bindings don't "break" for dynamic context-based menus like the example above. I.e. the directional placement of menu options and ordering of numbers should be consistent so that a given option doesn't correspond to NW sometimes but SE other times, etc.

Moreover, why bother with numeric key mappings when the very same dialog menu can be navigated using any other directional POV hat bound using digital D-pad bindings or button mappings. By default, X4 treats the other two hats on the X52 Pro as additional buttons. In turn, any of these can be bound to the dialog menu navigation controls for up, right, down, and left (illustrated in green in the first image). So I'm already able to easily navigate all other menus and dialogs using my other joystick hat (POV2) without any restriction. But as it stands, only radial menus don't work -- for any of the HOTAS hats whether analog or digital. In other words, instead of separate Radial Menu settings, perhaps X4 should just apply the dialog menu navigation settings to the radial menu as well.

All of the above nuances would be moot if native POV hat support, whether analog or digital, could simply be bound directly to the Radial Menu settings (as with other games). Also, to be clear, I'm not using X52 programmable bindings to configure my HOTAS POV1 hat any differently in X4 than in Everspace 2 or other games. So it stands to reason that, if other games can natively accept X and Y analog input from the POV1 hat, then there should be a way for X4 to do it too. Likewise, if the X4 radial menu settings could be revamped to accept digital controls, then that should be considered too -- similar to how the Dialog Menu settings allow for digital directional bindings (Up, Right, Down, Left) as well as analog axes bindings (Horizontal axis and Vertical axis).

Hopefully someone at Egosoft will be able to investigate and help with this. Please... it would be a HUGE boon!

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(Edited to apply resized images per forum guidelines and make small clarifications. Thanks mod -- I've been on a decade+ hiatus and lost acquaintance with the forum etiquette/rules.)

[azaghal]

I like the thoroughness of your reply to this one, there is a couple of points up there I found quite interesting.

Just to be on the clear side - the POV1 you are referring to on your HOTAS, is that a fully analog input on the device? In case of the T.16000M joystick, the hat at top is actually fully digital (I am instead using the analog stick on the TWCS for radial menus at the moment).

The menu button navigation idea is actually kinda interesting, although I wonder if it could cause issues for someone else's control schema. In case of controls I have set-up for myself so far, I am also using the joystick hat for looking around, as well as for menu selections.

Best regards,
Branko

P.S.
Truth be told, I am really starting to consider that having a virtual joystick device mapper with some advanced functionality (hold-to-activate, modifiers etc) would really be an awesome thing to have for X4 - I know there is something under Windows (Xpadder), but nothing under GNU/Linux, unfortunately.

[stooper88]

Just to be on the clear side - the POV1 you are referring to on your HOTAS, is that a fully analog input on the device?

Thanks for the good question and sorry for being unclear. I'm fairly confident that all 3 hats on the X52 Pro are fully digital. In other words, there is no sensitivity gradient, dead zone, or other such analog functionality. Despite that, as shown with Everspace 2 and other games I've played, the POV1 hat specifically mimics a 2-axis analog input. This allows it to be bound to horizontal and vertical axis controls when needed. In contrast, the other two hats behave strictly as digital controls, at least in my experience. To be honest, I'm not sure why or how this is the case. But to generalize further, I have other flight sticks which behave similarly with their primary hat sticks (e.g. Logitech 3D extreme pro and others). To be extra clear, this is all under Windows 11. So it's possible there will be different behavior with other drivers/platforms.

The menu button navigation idea is actually kinda interesting, although I wonder if it could cause issues for someone else's control schema. In case of controls I have set-up for myself so far, I am also using the joystick hat for looking around, as well as for menu selections.

Indeed, it seems the radial menu settings complicate things needlessly. I admit I don't fully understand the complexity of all the player use cases and potential development limitations. But it seems a clean approach could be to just consolidate the radial menu settings with the dialog menu settings, thus preserving any existing bindings for POV look-around. I only delved into the POV settings since the current version of the game overtly supports analog axes and most flight sticks (at least many I've tried) already seem capable of mimicking analog axes with their primary POV hat.

Truth be told, I am really starting to consider that having a virtual joystick device mapper with some advanced functionality (hold-to-activate, modifiers etc) would really be an awesome thing to have for X4

I have tinkererd with Vjoy and joystick gremlin (again on Windows only) in the past to varied levels of success. But ultimately, the added overhead and confusion was just taxing. Initially I would be thrilled to get my multi-controller Frankenstein rig set up. But things would eventually need to be redone as updates rolled out, and setups would be difficult to keep track of between different games. So nowadays I try to keep things within each game's native config settings as much as possible.

[Fahnenjoker]

I would also like to bind the radial menu to my POV Stick (I have a Logitech Freedom 2.4) but it still seems only possible to bind it the x- and y-axis which is very unintuitive (also rolling is on the z-axis and its still active when the radial menu is open, duh).

Has anyone solved this yet? Is there a mod or something to make it work? Is there some way to bring this to the devs attention?

[Thornholt]

Same issue here >.>