The flight keys are yours now

· flight · site

Until today the keyboard was ours. W pitched the quad, Q and E rolled it, Enter armed the motors, and if any of that sat badly under your hand, that was that. The transmitter has been fully configurable for a long time: any axis onto any channel, expo, deadzone, four stick modes, a guided wizard. The keyboard had none of it.

There is now a Controls tab in Settings. Pick the drone or the gull, click a key, press the one you want. Every row takes two keys, so the alternate stays available, which is how "throttle down" has always been on both Shift and Ctrl. Escape cancels, and Escape is one of the few keys you cannot bind to anything: it is the way out of a flight, and you should not be able to lose it.

Reset is on three levels, because the one you need is usually the smallest. Each changed row grows a ↺ that puts that key back. Changed rows are marked with a dot and counted in the footer, so "what did I actually touch" is answerable without reading the whole list. And there is a reset-everything button that asks twice. Resetting deletes your override rather than writing today's default into it, which means a row you reset keeps following the defaults if we ever improve them.

While we were in there, we fixed something we had not really thought of as a bug. The letters printed around the game were hard-coded. The camera pill said V, the drone hints spelled out "W/S pitch, A/D yaw" in five languages, and none of that had any connection to what your keyboard would do. On an AZERTY or QWERTZ board your hand was always in the right place, because keys are stored by position, but the letter we printed at you was the wrong one. Now everything that prints a key reads it from your bindings, and where the browser will tell us, it prints the legend that is actually on your keycap.

Last piece: press / in flight and you get a card listing every control for the craft you are flying, taken from the same table the editor edits, so the two cannot drift apart. On a phone it is a row in the flight tools menu. If you have never opened it, a single line points you at it once, and then stops.

Your bindings are saved to your account, the same way the transmitter mapping already was, so they follow you to the next machine you fly from rather than living on the one you typed them on.

Drone tuning and controller calibration moved into the Controls tab too. Input now has one address instead of three.

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