Thrustmaster Cougar Interview Part 2 - The Capabilities - Page 2 of 2
FRUGAL: Does the Cougar have the ability to emulate the mouse on the microstick?
JAMES: You can actually assign mouse control to any axis, the microstick, the stick, you can even control the mouse with the rudder pedals. Say you want to play a game like Operation Flashpoint with the stick but the game only supports the mouse, no problem, just tell the stick to be the mouse and you can now use the stick to control the game. In Falcon 4 you could assign mouse control to one of the hats or the microstick, or both at the same time, so you can interact with the cockpit without letting go of the stick and throttle. So it's perfectly possible to have the microstick controlling the mouse, and as well use a hat for finer mouse control. You can also program mouse buttons onto anything.
You can set up your own mouse curves as well so you can change the speed, acceleration and sensitivity of the mouse. We have advanced mouse movements too. I can tell the mouse pointer to go to a particular point on the screen and it will go there. Then I can tell it to go from there to another point and then tell it to rotate a knob and it will do it. Take a look at this.
Here James quickly loaded in a profile into his stick and opened Paint Shop Pro. After selecting the standard paintbrush tool he pressed a button on the stick and the mouse pointer moved across the screen drawing this picture.
FRUGAL: Wow!!!
JAMES: I thought you may like that :)
FRUGAL: On the digital F22 you can use all the buttons as DirectX buttons within a game, is this also possible on the Cougar?
JAMES: Yes is the simple answer. But why give you a simple answer when I can get lost in detail and programmability :) You can assign any button as a DirectX button at any time. Each button can be in Windows mode, Programmed mode or actually both to confuse the issue. In Windows mode the buttons are seen as DirectX buttons, which means that the sim decides what they do. When they are programmed the sim doesn’t see them and they become more like the keyboard. You can mix and match these, you can have any button seen as a DX button and you can program it as well. You can mix the programming with the DX buttons or you can separate them, you really can do what you want - there’s no restrictions at all.
FRUGAL: The Cougar has plenty of hats but are these hats 4 way or 8 way?
JAMES: The hats are physically 4 way switches but they are programmable as 9 way buttons, up, down, left, right, middle and the corner buttons. Now sometimes people have trouble getting the corner positions because you can hit up before you hit right etc. On the Cougar we get round that in two ways. The first is a physical change - the hats now stick out more and have more travel - they're very much nicer to use and have more controllability. The second is through programming - you can change the sensitivity of the hats so you can just tell it to be a little less sensitive to give you time to get into the corner positions. You can also set up a hat to act as a mouse, POV (Point Of View) control, to control the arrow keys or to emulate the numeric keypad, with simple statements. Before with Thrustmaster you had to program all that in with hold statements etc, but now you just say I’d like to use Hat 1 as the keypad thanks very much. And don't forget, with Foxy's Composer, or FoxyGUI, you don't need to know what these statements are. You just select the options and Foxy will take care of the rest for you. We can actually do more than that - a lot more, but I'm afraid that's still commercially sensitive information :)
FRUGAL: In our first interview you said that the Cougar has 10 axis including the rudder. How flexible are these as far as programming is concerned?
JAMES: Well, now I'm glad you asked me about that :) I hope as more information becomes available that people will see just how much more we can do with the Cougar, than anything else out there. And one of the biggest changes we've made is the programmability of the axes …. all 10 axes. Basically there are 2 golden rules when it comes to programming the axes:
1.) An axis can be programmed to generate characters, or be seen as a default analogue axis that you normally expect (ie the throttle controls the thrust) or a combination of both. And I shouldn't really just say characters - I mean anything. Characters, mouse buttons, POV, any macro, mouse movement statements, logical flags … etc. etc.
2.) All axes are equally programmable. We don't distinguish a throttle from a rudder axis - they're both axes, and hence both equally programmable.
We've made programming the axes to produce characters extremely versatile and powerful, and yet easy. Unlike the current F22/TQS, you can also set up the axes to respond differently for different positions of the throttle's dogfight switch and the joystick's button S3 pinkie switch, so there's an awful lot of power there for you. The analogue side of axis programming is also extremely powerful, with the ability to do all sorts of things that just can't be done with the current crop of flight controllers on the market. And again, you're not restricted to one particular behaviour from any axis - it can all be changed in flight. One thing I'll pick up on having read some threads on the various forums is a question that people who don't have rudders ask - can they still have some sort of rudder control? Yes is the answer, and there are various ways it can be done. For example, the rudders could be controlled from anywhere, like one of the other analogue axes (eg. the Throttle's Range knob) or even from a hat if that's how you prefer to fly.
[snip] - At this point unfortunately, I'm afraid I have to stop. As you know I'd love to publish the details of just what we can do in terms of axis programming, but we're having to hold off from releasing further information on this for the time being, as it's too commercially sensitive to release yet. You'll just have to take it from Frugal that it's pretty mind blowing! But before I leave this, here's a post from Mark that appeared on a forum …. it says it all …
"Without mentioning the programming, let's first go to the precision, which was part of the main problem with the old set... for X and Y axes, we're giving about 3000 distinct values (no spikes), and all other axes, 256.
Next, by programming, you can completely control these axes, meaning, real time curving of the analogue values, trimming (yes, real-time, and via programming utilities, so you can trim the XY axes by playing around with a hat). Programmed swapping of axes, programmed mouse movements, programmed reversing of axes, programmed DirectX buttons, digitally programmable axes to 6 layers. To let you know just how programmable this set is, I worked out the number of individual programmable positions (toggles, UMD and IO positions, axes) and came up with the fact that there are theoretically 7905 possible programmable positions!!!
Also, all the macros are performed at the same time, meaning that several long macros can be executed at the same time, up to 32 of them!
I've ranted enough, but what can I say, I'm proud of our baby. Also, if there's some feature that there's enough demand for (and it's physically possible), the code in the Joystick is flash upgradeable, making it even more flexible."
FRUGAL: This seems to have just about every feature I could want in a HOTAS including some I would never have dared ask for.
JAMES: This is one of the many reasons it has taken so long, although obviously some delays, especially recently have been beyond TM's control. When we first got together at ECTS one of the things that was discussed was whether we could get this out in time for last Christmas 2000, which was certainly possible. It wouldn't have been a bad set up either, probably similar to the F22/TQS combination. But it became apparent as we started knuckling down on the project, that we had the opportunity to get a lot more out of the controllers than any of us had originally imagined.
It's true to say that all of this programmability went through one hell of an evolutionary process. And something like 30 odd revisions to the (huge) manual as it grew and grew over what must be coming onto a 10 month period now I guess. We just kept coming up with ideas, and the statements required to implement these features. In fact the last feature went in about 3 days ago … just one more to squeeze in as our deadlines rapidly approach :) Seriously, I cannot think of anything that I would want to do in a sim, that these controllers can't do. But I'm sure in time people will, and that's fine, because these controllers are flash upgradeable, and software can always be upgraded. So I know some people aren't too impressed with how long it's taking to get the Cougar on the shelves. Well all I can do is put a hand up and say "Yes, sorry everyone … one of the reasons your Cougars are delayed is because we just couldn't stop adding feature after feature. What a blast we had doing it as well!" And that's just the hardware/programmability. You should see what we've done with the software as well. No other controller has ever shipped with such extensive software and help to support it. But that's something I'm sure we can discuss another time :)
FRUGAL: Thanks again James for taking the time to share the features of these controllers with us.
JAMES: Always a pleasure buddy! I'm just sorry we can't publish everything at this stage, but I'm sure you and your readers understand that it's too useful information for others :)
In the final part of the series we will look at the software that will be provided with the Cougar.
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