HermitEngine's HOSAS Setup

09 Apr 2021

8 April 2021 is a glorious day. That’s the day I received my pair of VKB Gladiator NXTs. I finally have enough buttons at my disposal to not depend on Voice Attack any longer.

My journey in Elite Dangerous VR began in 2016 and I have been playing on and off ever since. Other than flightsticks, my basic hardware has remained the same. An Oculus Rift CV1, paired with a 1080 GTX. I have had thoughts about upgrading to a HP Reverb G2, but worry that my 1080 wouldn’t be able to keep up with it, and graphics cards are so expensive nowadays. However, the good old Rift has proven reliable and trustworthy and looks like it is a long way from giving up the ghost.

These are the bindings I eventually settled on. I used Joystick Gremlin to combine them and my TFRP Flight Rudder Pedals that were left over from my previous twin T16000M setup into one massive controller for Elite Dangerous to consume.

By the way, now that I have had them, I absolutely do not recommend rudder pedals for Elite Dangerous. Perhaps it is just because I got relatively cheap ones, but I could not find a good use for the actual “rudder” part of it. I tried to use it to control yaw, pitch, and even just lateral thrusters. They have proved fully unsatisfactory and hard to control in any one of these roles. I could see them being awesome if you were flying a propeller plane or helicopter, but for a space-craft operating in a pseudo-physical universe, it just bleeds speed unless you are able to keep it absolutely neutral the majority of the time. Right now, I just use the toe-breaks to control forward and reverse thrust and leave the rudder unbound. If I were to get another set of pedals, I would get race-car pedals.

Other than Joystick Gremlin, software that continues to contribute to my enjoyment include:

• EDProfiler. This not only provides sensible starting points for your graphics options, but lets you rapidly switch between flat-screen and VR mode for easy configuration. Also, it includes several GUI presets. I use the green one because apparently the green component of the OLED screen is bigger than the red and blue, thus text is more legible.

• EDEngineer. This helps to plan out or your engineering material needs. Based on what you want to make, you can create a shopping list that you can pin in VR. As you gather materials, things get ticked off on your list and when you have collected them all, you can then go and get the actual engineering done.

• NirCmd. I use this to switch audio/mic to the Rift when playing. This duty used to be performed by Voice Attack.

• EDPA. Yes, why not a little self-promotion? I would not have made it if there were not a niche to be filled. It tells me where all the engineers and tech brokers are. I also used it on my Colonia trip to sniff out all the juicy terraformables along the way. If I need to come back in a hurry by neutron hopping, it would have made that process a lot easier as well.