Returning to the game after many years and trying to setup my X-56 HOTUS. Setting in this game are very lacking, it looks like its still in the 1990's. My first problem is my throttle will only go between 10% and 90%. So I can't stop or go full throttle. I cannot find anywhere in the game to adjust the throttle range. In both the saitek software and windows I get full "Throw". I also want to be able to set throttle so 50% if 0 and it goes forward or reverse thrust. Is this possible?

This is how you ask for help?

You're probably looking for Options -> Controls -> Joystick

That controls axes and calibration. Button definitions are in Keyboard.

I have found that, but their is no setting to adjust deadzone or actual movement of the axis. When I move the axis of the joystick from 0 to 100 the game reads it as 10 to 90. I don't see anywhere to adjust deadzone or the axis calibration within the game. Both windows and Saitek software see full movement of the throttle. Unless I am missing something I don't have any calibration button. It only gives me the option to choose a curve type whi h always defaults back to linear.

It appears the issue is how the game is reading the axis. It shows an X axis and a Y axis. These correspond to the 2 different throttle levers on the joystick. These are locked together on the actual throttle unless needed to be used separately. If I unlock them and set one at 50% the other works 0 to 100. The game for some reason is adding them together even when only one is assigned to anything.

So, you can actually adjust the dead zone from the joystick menu, although it's a bit of a byzantine interface and not very friendly.

It's also possible that the X56 is falling prey to some new bug, due to the way we recently re-wrote a lot of the joystick code to (ironically) modernize and simplify the usage of gamepads, and add a new UI to that experience.

Flight sticks don't benefit from this new interface, since we can't make any assumptions about their layouts. It's also noteworthy that flight sticks and HOTAS rigs have actually become more challenging to support in recent years, since Microsoft apparently now believes that Xbox controllers are the only types of viable game controllers, and has practically eliminated any other options from their Xinput API (while also threatening to deprecate the older DirectInput API from newer OS versions).

We emphatically do care about HOTAS setups, and we'll try to take a look, in the near future. We do not have an X-56, but we have an X-45 somewhere in storage, which used to have a decent default config. A number of people have been successfully using HOTAS setups recently, but perhaps not controllers with the complexity of the X-56.

A last note, it is technically possible to manually configure joystick data from the config files (config.ini and wgaf.cfg, in the game's runtime directory), although this will be even more byzantine.