Game controller just doesn't work with the old Google Earth flight sim

[mmcirvin]

In my first burst of posts about flight simulators several years ago, I noted that the Easter egg flight simulator in Google Earth Pro tried to support game controllers, but didn't work well enough to be usable with them (it was an addendum to the post on X-Plane 11, which handles them with no trouble, though I did mess with the settings quite a bit there to make it work like I liked--back then, I think I was using an XBox One or XBox 360 controller hooked up through USB, rather than the slightly less ancient Bluetooth PS4 DualShock I'm using now).

Well, now it doesn't work at all. When I launch it on my current machine, going into the flight simulator mode with a controller active offers a "Joystick enabled" box that is checked by default, but if you leave that on, the simulation just crashes. Probably just as well, since it never centered correctly, which made joystick control basically unusable.

Comments

[mmcirvin]

It's a whole scene I haven't gotten into--always thought of it as too much trouble to bother with, as most of my gaming had been on consoles in recent years aside from some retro stuff. Intel Macs of course had Bootcamp, which gave you a whole native Windows install on your Mac and effectively made it a Wintel PC, but I never actually tried that so I don't have a leg to stand on lamenting the loss of it.

Looking into controllers some more, I see some energetic Reddit discussions about "best game controller for Mac" that just come down to personal preference between the design of PlayStation or XBox controllers. My impression is that all the major modern wireless controllers are standard Bluetooth devices and just work. My XBox 360 and first-generation XBox One controllers don't just because they're very old. But even they can be made to work plugged in by USB (with the old USB Micro port).

I see that Apple actually sells PS5 DualSense controllers on their online store, along with a bunch of other third-party options.

[thewayne]

Computer games, aside from table-top games, have always been my thing because I've had seven operations total on both hands/wrists and I just can't handle console game controllers for any significant amount of time.  Keyboard/mouse: no problem.  I still have to be careful as I also have problems with my right shoulder/elbow.  Basically my body is a mess.

[mmcirvin]

Ah--the big RSI trigger for me is mouse clicking with my right hand, particularly if it's way over to the right of an extended keyboard. I think I wrecked myself between coding on Solaris X11 workstations and messing around with my Mac in the 1990s.

So I mouse left-handed, which for some reason is fine, or use a laptop trackpad, also fine. If I were a PC gamer, the FPS player's convention of mouse look + WASD would not fly--I'd have to remap those movement keys to be more accessible to the right hand so I could gun with my left. Cursor arrows would work. (When I play Atari games in Stella with the keyboard, I usually use cursor arrows for movement, which I figure is more Atari-like since the CX40 joystick was made to be operated with the right hand, left holding the base and left thumb on the fire button. It was an ergonomic nightmare, but we didn't know any better.)

I am not otherwise left-handed. But people who watch me working probably think I am.

(I recall trying to reverse the three buttons on those Unix mice for left-handed operation, and discovering that software support for it was really, really, really spotty.)