HOTAS support for Freelancer

Some folks need to get their head out of the early 2000’s…

With recent additions to freelancer like Adoxa’s roll plugin this isn’t as far from do-able as we used to think.

Just takes some key/joystick planning, thought… and oh… i dunno… a will to do something out of the box your all crammed into.

It… lol… does however… suck, the response will never be fast enough to handle anything over a lvl10 enemy, Im a pretty kickass pilot (been playing this from the 1st year) and i can use a joystick too (old school… hehe) but given the option… you’ll go back to a mouse.

It’s 2012 folks… enough with the jaded reply’s about “we cant do that… you want another game” have many of you loaded up with them tasty “extras” we’ve been so deliciously delivered the past two years… in essence… Freelancer isnt the same as it was 4 years ago… stuff like this is possible now.

Just because its possible doesnt mean its usable. I hacked this up myself not too long ago just to see, and you’ll get your ass handed to you every time. its ‘possible’ but it isn’t feasible.

autoit ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoIt ) has a dx interface - it is possible to hook it by keystrokes and mouse positioning while setting relative positions. Keystrokes can be predifined in Freelancer via the keymap.ini - just maybe worth another thought. Ofc. it would be a seperated exe running in the background.

Since Freelancer isn’t updated any further but autoit is, there is a chance of a better interface.

yw

http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/23882-take-your-joystick-control/

http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/10953-joystick-udf/

The 2. one is an allready usable joystick emulation script.

It’s been a while that i scriped with autoit, i am sorry but i have to point you to the official Guides and Tutorials.

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/

The very Basics are:

Open up Scite (the autoit scripting editor), paste the script in it, press F5 (now the script will be checked and executed).

If it is working for you close scite, right click at the au3 file and compile it to an exe. This way you just have to start the exe and the script is hooked into your computers memory - waiting for a keystroke - or in this case a joystick movement.

I suppose to setup a while/wend operation calling the beginning of the function on a predifined keystroke - and another one to end the script - just to keep control over it. When using a while/wend operation, also integrate a sleep function for a minimum of 10 ms, otherwise you will get 100 percent cpu usage.

The operation would be something like this:

HotKeySet("{F12}", "startjoy")
HotKeySet("{F11}", "endjoy")
$z = 0

Send("{ALTDOWN}{TAB}{ALTUP}")
WinWaitActive("Freelancer","")

While $z < 1
sleep (10)
WEnd

Func startjoy()

; here goes the joystic script

$z=1
EndFunc

func endjoy()
	MsgBox(0,"ENDE","Abbruch",100) ; will open up a boxed message - if you want it to simply end delete this line
	Exit
EndFunc

```That's how i would try it - if i still would have a joystick around.