Thrustmaster Cougar Interview Part 2 - The Capabilities - Page 1 of 2
In part one of this series we looked at the hardware itself and no doubt that alone was enough to get some of you excited about the Cougar. In this part we get down to the meat and bones of what this stick can actually do. This part has been a long time coming because it was a very in depth interview and a lot of thought had to be put into how much of the content could Thrustmaster afford to reveal at this stage. Needless to say that certain details are being held back until nearer to release. As a result this interview only covers some of the capabilities of this HOTAS. So if you are impressed by the end of this article, remember, there's more yet to be revealed. Read on and find out why this all metal hotas gives me WOOD!!
FRUGAL: As we are going to be looking at the capabilities of the Cougar, the programming is probably a logical place to start. Are we going to see a move away from text files with the Cougar?
JAMES: Nope, we're staying with text files. That may surprise a lot of people in this day and age where joystick programming software lends itself to a "press a button, press a key" type of approach. And the reason is quite simple. That approach works well when your joystick isn't that programmable, and doesn't have many buttons or hats to program. It's the logical choice, as you're aiming your product at a different market to the Cougar. But when you have something like the Cougar, that not only offers a joystick with 4 hats, a dual stage trigger and 4 buttons, along with a throttle that boasts 10 buttons, 2 rotary axes, and a microstick, and on top of all this add the new Cougar rudders with their 3 axes, and then throw in an unbelievable array of programming statements, then the simple approach just won't work. Or at least, you lose the flexibility that text file programming offers. This is something we spent a lot of time discussing … which route to take. We'd probably sell more Cougars if we went that route, but the objective of this project is and has always been to produce the most programmable controllers ever seen. Which is what we've done. I’m glad TM decided to stay with text files because they are so flexible. Once you get to understand TM statements, and they really are easy to understand, it's nice to be able to look at all of them in one go - they're not hidden in some file that only allows you to view a particular button's programming whilst hiding the rest. Having said all of that .. well that's the answer to your next question!
FRUGAL: I agree that the text files are much more flexible but some people found the text files hard to program in the older Thrustmaster sticks. How is that being addressed in the Cougar?
JAMES: I understand why people had problems programming the original text files. The original manuals, and the DOS software that was used to program the controllers, although good for their time, are not up to today's standards. So here's how we've addressed that with the new setup:
1) You won't need to program your controllers at all if you don't want to. You can leave them in Windows mode, and if your game supports assigning the hats and buttons from within the game, then that's all you need to do.
2.) We've included files for nearly all the sims we could get our hands on - I think something like 30 or more at the last count. These files come with graphical layouts showing you what's programmed onto what hat/button, and ReadMe files explaining how to use the files and other pertinent information. And it's very easy to select the game you want to set up your Cougar for, press and button, and you've programmed your controllers with these files and you're ready to go.
3.) Foxy contains a whole plethora of wizards and tutorial files to help get you into programming quickly, and simply. With all the applications within Foxy, you'll barely need to actually type anything to create a sophisticated file. Even things like typing out macro names … I've provided over 1600 of these ready for you to use :)
4.) FoxyGUI is provided for those people who like to program via a "press a button, press a key" approach. It doesn't offer the comprehensive functionality of Foxy, but for many people, it'll provide them with enough programmability through a very simple and intuitive interface, for them to enjoy and get into programming their controllers.
5.) Finally of course, there's the difference between the manuals for the older F22/TQS controllers and the Cougar. The new manual is a lot more detailed and also contains chapters to gently introduce programming to people who want to get into it.
I really think we've covered about every angle for every type of user - from the not interested in programming whatsoever, through to the interested if the support and help is there, right through to the hard core veterans :)
FRUGAL: Will the Cougar use slash modifiers and be backwards compatible with current F22/TQS profiles?
JAMES: Yes and it depends. We’ve still got slash modifiers, some have changed, some have been dropped. We've tried to keep files as backwardly compatible as we can, so that people will have minimal changes to make, as well as not having to start from scratch again in learning how to program their controllers. There are some new rules that we've brought in, to try to add more structure to the text files used to program the Cougar. For example, before when you had a /O, /I statement, you could put them on the same line, and in any order. With the Cougar, you have to put them on separate lines, and the /I must come before the /O. But there aren't many of these rules so there won’t be much that people need to change with their files, and many files will work without changes. I provide at the end of the manual, and in the help files, a list of what has changed for people that are used to programming TM sticks. Many veterans will be able to just read that, make a few changes to their current files, and their files will be fine. Of course, for many people after reading about the capabilities of the Cougar, they'll want to make some major changes to their files anyway.
FRUGAL: Can you tell us about some more of those changes
JAMES: These are a few that I can discuss. For example we have the Auto-Repeat slash modifier (/A). What this does is to repeat everything after it when you hold down a button or hat. Let me explain further. The Cougar defaults to producing characters/macros once, and only once. So if I program the letter “a” onto a button and hold the button down it won’t produce a string of a’s. Before you had to use a /N modifier (no repeat) to produce a single character. This time we have made everything default to no repeat because 99% of the time that’s what you will want, a single character or macro. But when you don't want that behaviour you can use the /A Auto-Repeat modifier, or the /H Hold modifier. They're slightly different - something that is explained well in the manual.
Another new thing we have is the force modifier. Say for instance with the comms in Falcon 4 you have to press the keys "q q 1" to send a command to Awacs. Because these sticks are parallel processing you don’t want another button to be recognised in the middle of that "q q 1" because it will interfere with the Awacs command. So you can use a force modifier to force it to send the full "q q 1" before sending any other key presses.
FRUGAL: Whoah, did you just say that these are parallel processing?
JAMES: I sure did, welcome to the World's first parallel processing controllers. You can press all 28 buttons at once if you wanted and they’d all be recognised. The Cougar is fast …. very fast. Take a look at this.
Here James quickly loaded in a profile into his stick and opened notepad. He pressed a button and the letters T H R U S T M A S T E R appeared on screen. He then pressed the same button twice quickly and then took his hands off the controllers. The results were T T H H R R U U S S T T M M A A S S T T E E R R.
That's parallel processing for you. The Cougar hasn't waited for the first "THRUSTMASTER" to be typed out before recognising the second time I pressed that button. I could tell it to I hasten to add, but isn't that just gorgeous?! The controllers have no problem in dealing with nimble fingers combined with a heavily programmed condition!
FRUGAL: Wow, that is very impressive. Sorry, you were talking about the changes. Are we going to get all new Raw codes like we did with the Digital F22?
JAMES: Raw codes are out, although we do have something similar called USB codes. But you won't need to use them. I can use the KD (Key Down) and KU (Key Up) statements. Let's say I want to hold down the letter "a" for 1 second and then release it. The statement that would do this would be:
KD (a) DLY (1000) KU (a)
So KD (a) is the same as you pressing and keeping your finger pressed on the "a" key.
DLY (1000) adds a 1 second delay. KU (a) is the same as you taking your finger off the key.
The beauty about KD and KU is that I can use them with anything. For example the mouse left button:
KD (MOUSE_LB)
or I can take control of a POV hat:
KD (POVU)
There's a lot more I can do with just this statement but I don't think people want a programming tutorial now :)
FRUGAL: Some of my current files use toggles, are they still supported in the Cougar?
JAMES: Yes they are, but they have been much improved. Let me explain to people what toggles are before I go any further. Sometimes when you press a button on a joystick, you want it to produce a character, say an "a" and the next time you press it, a "b" and the next time a "c" and then the next time, you go back to "a" again and continue the sequence. That's toggling in a nutshell. So how can we have improved upon this - I mean what's there to improve? Well say you have a game like Quake where your weapons are on the 1 through 0 keys. You wouldn’t want to have to go all the way through the sequence each time to get to a specific weapon. So now we can reverse the direction you toggle through just by pressing a different button, or we can reset the toggle position back to the first character. This gives you a lot more control over toggles.
random irc quote: <DrFreud> care to talk about it? <eRAZOR> haha <DrFreud> we were discussing you, not me <eRAZOR> back off psycho <DrFreud> Care to elaborate?
Part 1
