hotas

[mc_dan13]

Is there a PC hotas joystick that works out of the box with VA or is it required to use the vjoy plugin on all hotas setups. Setting up vjoy and all its required software I'm afraid is over my head. No computer science degree here. LOL...

[Gary]

Hi, there.

VoiceAttack should work just fine with any joystick as *input* - that is, you press a button/button combo and VoiceAttack can react to that button/combo press.  VoiceAttack can also query the state of your joystick (what buttons are down, various axes, pov position, etc.).  This can be done via tokens or through the condition/condition builder interfaces.  Behind the scenes, this all happens through fairly simple DirectX queries, so, if your joystick is set up properly and can be queried via DirectX, VoiceAttack will be able to get information about it.

What DirectX does NOT provide is an interface that allows an application to present itself as a controller.  DirectX only queries devices attached to your PC (whether they are physical or logical).  Those devices require device drivers (authoring device drivers is a whole other (painful) domain) - VoiceAttack does not provide this out of the box, however, that is where vJoy comes in.  vJoy is a virtual joystick interface that comes with a driver.  Interfacing with vJoy was implemented as a plugin, so as not to overload VoiceAttack with reliance on proprietary software that changes periodically, and requires installing and maintaining a driver (which alone would be a real strain to support).  It *is* by far one of the more complicated things to configure for use with VA, however, it is at least some means to achieve what DirectX/Windows does not provide.  Once set up, though, it's pretty straightforward and generally works pretty well:  https://forum.voiceattack.com/smf/index.php?topic=463.0
I wouldn't say it requires a computer science degree, however, it does require close attention to its steps o_O