eli5: how does calibrating your joysticks help with gameplay?

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All I’m finding is that it helps but what does it do to make playing a video game better?

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

When you calibrate your joysticks, you set them up to match the range of motion and sensitivity that they are designed to have. This can help prevent issues like drifting, where the joystick moves on its own without any input from the user, or unresponsive controls, where the joystick does not respond correctly to your movements.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Calibration of the joystick does two things.

It makes sure that when the joystick isn’t being moved, there’s no movement being recorded, and that when you move the stick to its extremes, it registers predictable, symmetrical movements.

That’s a longer way of saying after calibrating, the sticks don’t perform unexpectedly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So, devices like joysticks work by producing a couple of numbers that represent where the joystick “is”. As the joystick gets older the numbers that come out from the joystick might change a little from when the joystick was new, like the joystick being in the middle of randomly change a bit even when you’re not touching the stick, or the number might not go up as high as it used to when the stick is mov ed to its extremes. By calibrating, you can tell the video game stuff like “this number represents when the controller is at its maximum position”

So, when it’s calibrated the movement of the stick should match pretty well with what is expected by the game without any weirdness.