Battlefield 2042 & JoySticks

So I tested my VKB Gladiator NXT/EVO first in Battlefield 6, then in 2042 after seeing they claimed to have “joystick support.” Two things popped up...

Problem #1- The games wouldn’t see any button numbers higher than 17, so I remapped what I needed into 1–17 and turned the rest into keyboard keys.

Problem #2- The real issue was the thumb mini-stick. When I first tested this out, I was still running my Star Citizen profile that I have used for a few years, which disabled the mini joystick and replaced it with a virtual mouse input. During this time the stick was recognized and worked just fine. The other night I reset everything back to factory, not realizing that the only reason the stick was actually working with Battlefield was due to how I had that mini joystick set up. Once the default axes were reassigned to the mini joystick (X Rotation / Y Rotation), the game started treating my VKB like an Xbox controller instead of a joystick. When I switched that mini-stick back to a virtual mouse inside VKB’s software (which removes X/Y Rotation), BF6 and 2042 immediately recognized the device as a normal joystick again. Took me a while to narrow it down, but this is the root cause for everyone who's had issues running higher end sticks on Battlefield these past few years. 

Basically for some reason the sticks of an Xbox controller and those two axes for joysticks share the same hardware ID profile. Doesn't matter if it's VKB, Virgil, JoyToKey, or VJoy- if either X Rotation and/or Y Rotation are enabled, it'll come up as an Xbox controller. 

So, how to fix:

In VKB software, disable X Rotation and Y Rotation on the mini-stick and set it to act as a virtual mouse. Alternatively, z rotation causes no issues and can still be used, so if you wanted to instead remap the y-axis of that mini stick to Z Rot, you could. 

No third-party remappers needed; there are several YouTube videos and guides out there that show exactly how to remap buttons and set up VKB’s virtual mouse if you haven’t done it before.

Or if you wanted to get a little more advanced,  you could use v joy to create a virtual joystick and joystick gremlin to remap any and all of your BKB buttons to be what you want on that virtual stick. Just make sure when setting it up that you uncheck X Rotation and Y Rotation. I've confirmed that a virtual joystick created this way will not come up as an Xbox controller. Using this method, if you have HOSAS or HOTAS, you can also combine the inputs on both into one virtual joystick, if that's how you wanted to fly.

If anyone ends up ever actually reading this and wants help setting any of this up, feel free to message me here or on Discord (Silversquirrel) and I'll happily jump on a call to walk you through it. I can confirm that using the VKBs to fly in both Battlefield titles is pretty epic.