bbosen - 5 days ago

On initial startup, LAC will assume you either have no joystick installed (in which you can just use your mouse and keyboard for flight maneuvers) or that you have the inexpensive, popular "Logitech Extreme 3dPro" joystick. If you want to use some other joystick or a console "game controller" instead, you will need to take special steps to configure LAC for it. Those steps will require at least 5 minutes of tinkering in LAC's "SETUP OPTIONS" -> "GAME" -> "CONTROLLER" menus, or else you will need to spend at least 10 minutes editing LAC's hidden ".LacControls.txt" file. Beginners will probably want to use LAC's menus for this, and they will benefit from reading the forum dialog and watching the YouTube video resource from THIS web page:

https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/flightcontrolhardware/thread/0da40ce6e3/

Beginners can find other helpful advice and resources in our "FlightControllerHardware" forum here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/flightcontrolhardware/

After your first experience investing the time to get your special joystick or console game controller working nicely with LAC, you will want some method of preserving your work for re-use the next time you boot into LINUX and LAC. If you are using an "Immutable" or "READ-ONLY" version of LAC, you'll lose all of your setup work unless you take some extra steps to preserve it for re-use.

The important thing to realize is that all of your configuration settings for LAC are always stored in two configuration files. If you save an extra copy of those two files in "The Cloud" or on a handy thumb drive, you'll easily be able to restore their content whenever you need to return LAC to the happy state you enjoyed when you preserved an extra copy of those two files.

Accordingly, you now need to know exactly where LAC stores those files and what they are named.

The two configuration files are named:

1 of 2: "LacConfig.txt" and
2 of 2: "LacControls.txt".

Both of those are simple "text" files that you can easily edit with your favorite, basic, simple text editor. Each is automatically adjusted for you whenever you use LAC's built-in menus to adjust any of its configuration settings, or you can edit the text content directly. You probably won't need to edit the text within those files very frequently, but if you want to try it you will find that the files themselves contain detailed instructions that anybody of normal intelligence is able to follow.

LAC always creates, modifies, and stores those files for you, and it always consults their contents on startup in order to restore the configuration details they contain.

Accordingly, if you want to preserve their contents for future use, you'll need to know exactly where LAC stores them.

LAC always stores those two files in a new, hidden folder that it creates in your LINUX "home folder". That folder is always named ".LAC". For example, if your LINUX username is "fred", that folder will be found in your LINUX filesystem at:

/home/fred/.LAC

So after getting LAC working nicely with his specialized joystick or console game controller (and after he has everything else configured the way he lilkes it), our sample user named "fred" would copy THESE two files to a handy thumb drive or to a handy place out in the "cloud":

/home/fred/.LAC/LacConfig.txt
/home/fred/.LAC/LacControls.txt

Then, after shutting down LINUX and returning sometime later for his next LAC session, fred would boot into his LINUX desktop according to his usual routine and then he would restore those two files to the locations referenced above before starting LAC. Thereafter LAC will resume its configuration with his hardware exactly as he had hoped. He can have his special settings after just a few seconds of tile retrieval instead of spending several minuts reconfiguring the details.