How to use racing pedals for flight sims

[Avenga76 835]

This came up in another thread but I though it was worth making a new thread with my guide on how to turn your sim racing pedals in to rudders which can be used for flight sims

This will work for any set of pedals.
 
Using vJoy and UJR to combine throttle and accelerator axis for use in flight sims

This is a quick guide on how to use vJoy and UJR to combine your clutch and accelerator pedals to be used as rudders in flight sims.
 
The problem with using Sim Racing pedals is that the clutch and accelerator are on a different axis. Flight sims will only let you bind the rudder to one axis so we need to use software to combine these 2 axis in to one virtual axis.
 
To do this I will use 2 programs, the first is a virtual joystick emulator called vJoy http://vjoystick.sourceforge.net/site/
 
This will create a virtual joystick that will appear in your games.
 
The second piece of software we will use is called UJR http://evilc.com/joomla/articles/9-code/autohotkey/1-ujr-universal-joystick-remapper
 
UJR is an application to remap one or more physical joysticks onto one virtual joystick. It supports axis inversion, deadzones, sensitivity, axis merging and more. In our case we will be using the axis merging feature to merge the clutch and accelerator axis and send them to the vJoy controller.
 
Start off by downloading and installing both programs.
 
Here is my config to combine my axis. I will explain what each field does.
 
Basically you are splitting the virtual X axis in half and telling the clutch to use the lower half and the acceleration to use the top half
 
Vjoy Stick ID is the number of the vJoy controller that you used in the vJoyConf, you can have lots of virtual joysticks if you want
 
I am configuring the X Axis as my combined axis
 
In the X Axis I have picked Physical Stick ID 2 which is my DSD pedals
 
Then I have selected Physical Axis 5 which is my clutch pedal
 
The you set the special operation to “rests h” This means that it will rest at the high end of its half of the axis i.e the center of the X axis
 
I have then set the axis to inverted so it will move from the centre to the left as I press the pedal.
 
This means that with the clutch pedals sitting in its resting position it is in the middle of the X Axis and when I press the pedal it will move to the low side of the X axis.
 

 
Now we need to set up the accelerator pedal
 
Go to the Axis 2 tab
 
Select X Axis and set the merging type to Merge
 
Then select the physical stick ID and axis of the accelerator
 
This will now make it so that when the accelerator pedal is resting then in will be in the middle of the X axis and when you press the pedal it will move to the right.
 

 
So basically you are setting the resting position as the middle of the X axis. You are then telling the clutch to use the lower half and the accelerator to use the top half of the axis
 
You set the clutch to go inverted so as you press the clutch the X axis will move from the center of the axis downwards, then the same with the accelerator, you leave that in the normal direction so as you press the accelerator it moves from the center of the axis upwards
 
It is pretty easy to set up and once you have it going it just works flawlessly.
 
The hardest part is finding the physical stick ID and Physical axis
 
Here are some notes about how to set them up in game.
 
With DCS and FSX, select the "vJoy controller" then bind the axis to that. Make sure you unbind the rudder from all the other controllers and only bind the rudder under the vJoy controller. Alternately you could remap all of your controllers in to one super virtual controller which could make it easier but I just use vJoy/UJR for my rudder and everything else direct to the real controllers
 
In Elite dangerous when you try to bind the rudders in the menu it will pick up the pedal movement and bind the axis to your real controller instead of the virtual controller.
 
This is because there is a millisecond lag in the virtual controller so the game sees the real pedals first. You need to change this so Elite Dangerous will use the virtual combined axis instead of the real pedals
 
In Elite Dangerous you can't tell it what controller to use in the game UI like you can in DCS or FSX but you can do it though the CFG files.
To do this browse to C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Bindings\Custom.binds then find <YawAxis> and change the binding device to the name of you vJoy controller and the key to "Joy_Xaxis" (Replace X with that Axis you are using on the vJoy controller)
 
Any other question feel free to give me a yell. It might sound like a pain to set up but it doesn't take that long and once you have it set up once then it just works for all flight sims
 
You can even use this to combine all your controllers in to one big virtual controller for games that only support 1 controller. one of the best features of vJoy in that it will always enumerate to the top of your USB list. This makes it great for games that only look at your first controller. It means it always sees the vJoy controller first so you can just make one big super virtual controller with all your physical controllers mapped to it. with 8 axis, 4 POV and 128 buttons you could map a lot of physical controllers to one virtual controller.

[sebj 616]

Hey Richard, I have done the same for Elite. You may want to help explain how to find a device ID - if there is a way to identify via registry for instance.  It can be a real pain doing it through trial and error.

 

good post!

[Mayaman 399]

Nice man, just saw this over at iRacing.  time to get busy.

[Avenga76 835]

Yeah, I just finished a skype call helping one of my friends set up his pedals as rudders and configuring Sim Tools control his GS-4 in flight sims.

He was really over the moon, it works really well, I just have to convince him to get VR now because VR flying is amazing.

[dougmorrissey 0]

Avenga,

Your instructions have gotten me further than I have ever been using vJoy and UJR. I have a prorblem getting UJR to split the "state" cloumn when selecting "Rests H". The slider still travels the full length. I am under the impression selecting "Rests H" should leave the travel in the middle of the slider. Screen Print 1 shows my clutch (RY Axis) depressed all the way and it's set to "inverted" and "Rests H". Going to Axes 2 in UJR I select RX which is my accelerator pedal, Physical Stick ID "2" and Physical Axis "4". Axis Merging is set to "Merge" on the RX Axix.RY and RX will not combine and I am obviously doing something wrong. Thanks in advance.

[Mayaman 399]

Wait, you got simtools to control the GS4?!!!  Can we talk?