F1 2016 Setting up hotkeys for MFD

[Booth.the.doberman]

I can't drive and operate the MFD. I try. I fail. I try harder. I fail harder.

Hotkeys to operate the MFD would be really nice. You know, one button for fuel mix up and a second for fuel mix down. One button to increase diff and one to lower it. One button to walk through the tire menu.

Piece of cake, right? Well, it's not that easy. First, you could be in one of any of five submenus (tire wear, tire temp, fuel/tire/diff, goals or off). Then the tire picker rotates around the choices whereas fuel, diff and bias stop at the far left and far right.

So you just can't say that when you press button "A" that it should go down, right to increase bias because you could be in the tire wear screen. Anyone thought about this? Or have any ideas?

 

[Geert de Vries]

D pad right = fuel mix up
D pas left = fuel mix Down

Not that hard really

 

[Dick Hobbs]

D pad right = fuel mix up
D pas left = fuel mix Down

Not that hard really

Not that helpful really either. The OP is right, for the wheel user the new MFD through the D-pad is a dog's breakfast.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

Yes, I neglected to say I'm using a G27 wheel. I would like to program some of the G27 buttons to do those functions.

I think in a bunch of ways F1 2016 was designed for people who don't intend to use a steering wheel. Even the menu items when you use a steering wheel use either the keyboard or controller notations (X, A, Y, etc.). It almost gives you the impression that Codemasters is saying: "Look, if you want to use a wheel, you probably ought to be running some other game."

 

[Hatsu]

To be fair, the newer wheels have their D-Pad on the wheel itself and not on a seperate piece like G25 and G27. You could use the Logitech Profiler. Here is an example http://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/using-g25-to-navigate-menus.631/ for F1 2012. This mod won't work on F1 2016 but could be an example how to achieve a better experience for you.

 

[Geert de Vries]

Can't you use profile the arrow keys of the keyboard to use as a dpad?

 

[Ho3n3r]

Not that helpful really either. The OP is right, for the wheel user the new MFD through the D-pad is a dog's breakfast.

But it's still way better than 2010-2015. No matter which menu scren you've selected, just press a D-Pad button and the options menu comes up. It can hardly be any easier - except if what the OP is suggesting, was done. However, it's far from a game breaker as it is now.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

Let's get back on track here. The original question is whether anyone has done anything or thought about a way to program hotkeys to control the MFD and get those controls on the wheel. Keyboard use and off-wheel DPad ideas don't meet the objective (which may not have been that clearly stated in the original post, I'll agree). In pre-2015 versions, the MFD design allowed you to set up hotkeys because a specific set up button presses always took you to the proper place. In 2016, you need to look at the MFD and press several buttons to navigate the menu. It may seem easy when you think about it, but when you try to implement it, you start to see all of the things that affect a one-button solution. Last night, it occurred to me that I might be able to use something like joytokey or xpadder to program the clutch to do something. I have to think about that some more.

 

[Dick Hobbs]

To be fair, the newer wheels have their D-Pad on the wheel itself and not on a seperate piece like G25 and G27. You could use the Logitech Profiler. Here is an example http://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/using-g25-to-navigate-menus.631/ for F1 2012. This mod won't work on F1 2016 but could be an example how to achieve a better experience for you.

2015 and before, it was a breeze to set up fuel, tires and brakes on my G27. I am still scratching my head how to do this in 2016. How on earth do you scroll through the menu items of the MFD displayed in the corner of your screen with a D-pad remote from your wheel whilst barreling down on a 2nd gear corner at 200+ mph? Before 2016 I never had to take my hands off the wheel. There was no reason to change the way those three menu items were selected to implement the MFD.

 

[Hatsu]

A possibility could be that you enter the buttons for the H-Shifter in the actionmap.xml in the G27 section as a second line for the D-Pad. I can't test this myself as I'm out for the weekend. So you could use the H Shifter for navigating in the menu.

 

[Iko Rein]

A possibility could be that you enter the buttons for the H-Shifter in the actionmap.xml in the G27 section as a second line for the D-Pad. I can't test this myself as I'm out for the weekend. So you could use the H Shifter for navigating in the menu.

I used to do something like that for F1 2013 & 2014, where in G27 you could use the gear shift to select the fuel mix and decide on the tyres, see this racedepartment mod link. They changed the system for F1 2015 (ie. you could not map both keyboard and G27 actions to same function), so I didn't bother to try make it work.

This year I just edited the actionmap for G27 to have following key mappings:
Top left: DRS -------- Top Right, MFD up (Still works as talk to pits, when MFD is not active)
Mid left: MFD -------- Mid Right, MFD down
Bottom left: MFD left ------- Bottom right: MFD right
And I also added it so, that you can change all pages (car setup etc) with the gear pads and use the same up - down and left - right from the steering wheel. This works now so, that it is doable while racing, ie. hands can stay on the wheel all the time.

It is still work in progress, there are still some small details, like I still have some of the 'OK' buttons are still tied to the d-pad, but mostly the ones I use are on the wheel. I could share that with you guys, if there is interest in that.

//Iko

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

I'm interested in pursuing this, but I may take a different approach. I have a usb game controller interface that I bought to add buttons to the G27. That will probably necessitate using something like xpadder, joytokey or autohotkey (which looks the most promising) or Python's Pygame. That actually will give me a little more programming power. I think the biggest issue to overcome is knowing programatically where you are in the MFD menu structure so you can get to the setting you want. You have to know you're in the tire wear screen, for example, to know how to get back to the change menu and then down to the brake bias selector. My objective here is to use no buttons except those I can place on the steering wheel. I also want to look at the Logitech Profiler a little more. You can assign a button there as a modifier, which effectively increases the number of wheel buttons from 6 to 12. It would be great if you could use the clutch pedal as that modifier, but Logitech doesn't include the clutch in the profiler. These are just some ideas I've been thinking about.

 

[yusupov]

i ended up mapping my look left/look right buttons to fuel mix; if youre on the main screen its one very easy press to go up or down. my only issue w/ it now is being on the 'wrong' screen & accidentally flipping to the wrong mix.

look left/right i put on the dpad...tbh i almost never use it (heyyo flashbacks!)

still very clumsy for me to scroll up or down (thinking now, should prob map this to the manetino dial which i already press to bring up the MFD) but im not at a level where i really need to alter the brake balance or diff more than once or twice (if that level exists; idk how much time can be gained adjusting these on the fly...obviously brake balance is extremely important irl but theres not even a hotkey for it, which is either a serious oversight or a sign its just not that important)

 

[Dick Hobbs]

Ok, I've worked it out and have it working on my G27 but I don't like it as much as the 2015 and older setup. Same method as previously but now does require you to take your eyes off the track.

I just map three D-pad buttons to three of my wheel buttons, one as scroll button and two for left and right select. I have my MFD on my wheel #7 button, D-pad down on #20, D-pad left on #23 and D-pad right on #22.

So, if I want to change fuel mix, I hit #7 which brings up my MFD and then I hit either #22 or #23 depending what mix I want. This is the easiest because when you call up the MFD, fuel mix is already highlighted.

If I want brake front bias, I hit #7 then #20 then #23 for less bias or #22 for more bias.

If I want to tell the pits what tires I want on my next stop (and this is where it is really clunky) I hit #7 then hit #20(4-times) then scroll left or right with # 4 or #3

Like I said, a dog's breakfast. Before some genius thought this one up, all you had was just a 3-press button combo without even looking at anywhere but in front of you and you had your selection. You should not have to look at a silly menu traveling at 200mph in a racing car.

 

[Iko Rein]

... You can assign a button there as a modifier, which effectively increases the number of wheel buttons from 6 to 12. It would be great if you could use the clutch pedal as that modifier, but Logitech doesn't include the clutch in the profiler.

If you edit the logitech profile file by hand, you might be able to add the clutch as the modifier.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

Logitech says it is the responsibility of the game developer to provide the clutch stuff. I'm not sure it's possible to edit the profiler. There is an SDK but that's going a little deeper than I want to venture. There doesn't appear to be an xml or cfg file that can be edited in the profiler.

 

[Iko Rein]

... You can assign a button there as a modifier, which effectively increases the number of wheel buttons from 6 to 12. It would be great if you could use the clutch pedal as that modifier, but Logitech doesn't include the clutch in the profiler.

If you edit the logitech profile file by hand, you might be able to add the clutch as the modifier.

Logitech says it is the responsibility of the game developer to provide the clutch stuff. I'm not sure it's possible to edit the profiler. There is an SDK but that's going a little deeper than I want to venture. There doesn't appear to be an xml or cfg file that can be edited in the profiler.

the .xml files are in the %appdata%/Local/Logitech/Gaming Software/ I used to edit that for the mod I did for F1 2013 & F1 2014. You can edit them e.g. with Notepad++ with the XMLTools add-on.

 

[Rodent]

Man I would love if they gave us the option to bind individual commands. I quite like the new mfd compared to previpus games but half of my f1 rims buttons sit unused.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

I've looked at a couple of things and this is my latest (probably misguided) observations. The windows joy.cpl process shows all of the axis controllers as well as the POV and the clutch. There's another program called DXTweak2 that also provides some info on the wheel and pedal and allows you to change the calibration on them (including mapping curves). I looked at Iko Rein's 2013 xml file and understand how to do that. Finding the "name" of the clutch pedal, however, is a little more challenging. After looking at several programs, it appears to be known as Joystick 1, Slider 1, but I'm not sure how that would get entered into the xml. My aspiration of using the clutch pedal may not be achievable, and I'm not going to dwell on it. I'm not ready to give up on the whole thing yet, though.

 

[Booth.the.doberman]

I'm depressed. I just spent some time trying to get the Shift key in the Logitech Profiler to work. I thought it would be great if I could assign, for example, G27 button 8 as the Shift key and then I could make Shift Right Paddle be DRS. So to get DRS, I'd hold button 8 while shifting up. "Oh no," said Codemasters with a scowl. "You can't do that." It appears F1 2016 ignores the button assignments in the Profiler in favor of their own actionmap file. To illustrate further, I programmed G27 Button 7 to send an "M." Then I told F1 2016 that to get the MFD, press the "M" key. The expected behavior is that when I press Button 7, it generates an "M," F1 2016 sees that and opens the MFD. Negatory. I need a beer.