Thrustmaster TCA Airbus Edition Configuration for FlightGear

This is my joystick configuration for the TCA Airbus Edition flightstick and throttle quadrant. It features automatic aircraft type detection, and loads additional configuration "overlays" to map aircraft-specific bindings to axes and buttons.

Installation

Unpack into a directory of your choice. If you've downloaded the source code zip from github, it will contain a single folder named flightgear-joystick-config-tca-master or similar; if so, you need the files inside that folder. If you've used git clone, then the files you need will be directly at the top level.
Copy or symlink all these files into the FlightGear joystick configuration folder. On a typical Linux system, this will be $HOME/.fgfs/Input/Joysticks.

WARNING: If you use the in-sim joystick configuration GUI, it will overwrite your XML configuration without warning, so it's a good idea to keep your original copies around, in case that happens.

Modifying / Customizing

Modifying default bindings.

Default bindings are defined in Thrustmaster-TA320-Pilot.xml for the sidestick, and Thrustmaster-TCA-Q-Eng-1&2.xml for the throttle quadrant. Inside these files, there's a chunk of Nasal code at the top, in a <nasal> tag, which I suggest you don't mess with, because that's the bit that does the aircraft detection and overlay loading magic; everything else is regular XML joystick configuration stuff.

Modifying aircraft-specific bindings.

Aircraft-specific bindings are defined as "overlays", and can be found in overlay/TA320-Pilot/ and overlay/TCA-Q-Eng12/. These files are named by aircraft type or family, and more than one can be loaded for a given type (more on that below). They are regular XML joystick binding files, too, but anything you define in them will overwrite the defaults.

Adding more aircraft types.

Overlays are loaded based on 3 values:

"Subtype": the exact name of the current aircraft model, as found in the property /sim/aircraft. For example, this might read "CRJ900LR".
"Type": the name of the current family of aircraft models, as found in the property /sim/variant-of. For the CRJ900LR, this would be "CRJ700".
"Family": a more general name of the aircraft type family, possibly independent from the specific FG model loaded. This one is found by matching against a list called family_patterns, found in tca-common.nas.

Typically, you would do the following to add a new aircraft type:

Fire up FlightGear, open the property browser (/ key), and navigate to /sim/variant-of. Note whatever that says, or, if it's empty, use /sim/aircraft instead, e.g. J3Cub.
Create new XML file in overlay/TA320-Pilot and overlay/TCA-Q-Eng12, e.g. overlay/TA320-Pilot/J3Cub.xml and overlay/TCA-Q-Eng12/J3Cub.xml, with <PropertyList> as the root element, and <axis> and <button> elements for each binding you want to add or override.

Some tips:

Overriding is done by merging XML subtrees, so you need to use the n="..." attribute to make sure the right ones get overwritten.
Because of the XML subtree merging thing, you cannot remove existing XML elements, you can only change their contents. A caveat with this is that when the default contains multiple bindings, you have to override them all, and if there is a <condition> anywhere, it will not be removed by overwriting the parent binding. This can be surprising at times, but there is not much I can do about it.
You can test your configuration more quickly by using the "Debug" -> "Reload Inputs" menu item inside FG; it will reload the entire configuration, and re-run the aircraft detection, so even if you fiddle with the latter, you still don't need to reload FG itself.

tdammers / flightgear-joystick-config-tca