Feeding multiple controllers into the Joystick Plugin

Today I started dealing with the Joystick Plugin for the very first time, because I urgently needed to get motion to Star Wars Squadrons as well as Lunar Flight. (The latter one once had a plugin, but it does not work anymore.)

My controller hardware consists of Thrustmaster Warthog stick & throttle as well as MFG Crosswind rudder pedals, and I wanted to use all three of them for triggering rig movements.

After searching the Internet a little bit, I found the Universal Control Remapper (UCR), which can be downloaded as a zip file from here: https://github.com/snoothy/ucr/releases

This tool is already briefly mentioned in some threads of this forum, but in my opinion it deserves a bit more attention because it is very easy to use and fulfilled my requirements completely.

UCR allows you to define multiple controllers as input devices and map them onto a single output controller, which is exactly what you need for the Joystick Plugin. And this can be done in a very easy way via a graphical UI. (UCR also provides some sophisticated configuration options like creating new "providers", but these were not needed in my case.)

Here are the steps I performed:

1. Download and unzip UCR (https://github.com/snoothy/ucr/releases)
2. Download and install a controller plugin that serves as virtual output device. I took 'ViGEm', which emulates an XBox 360 controller. This plugin is available here: https://github.com/Snoothy/UCR/wiki/Core-Providers
3. Run "UCR.exe". (No installation is required.)
   
4. Click on "Add Profile"
   
5. Select the input and output controllers.
   1. As input devices, I selected my Warthog stick/throttle combination (I have TARGET running, so that both throttle and stick are combined to a virtual game controller), as well as my MFG rudder pedals.
   2. As output, I selected the emulated XBox 360 controller.
      
6. For configuring the stick, I used the "Axes to Axes" mapping: Click on the + button and configure the mapping of the input axes (in my case the X and Y axes of the Warthog stick) to the corresponding output axes (in my case the RX and RY axes of the emulated XBox controller).
   
7. Proceed with mapping the other axes. Below you see that also my MFG Crosswind pedals could be mapped without any problems.
   
   
8. You can even map buttons of your input devices to corresponding buttons of the output device, if needed.
   
9. Save your config.
10. Activate your profile via the "Play" button.
    
    As soon as you do this, your Windows Device Manager will show the emulated output controller, in my case an XBox 360 controller.
    
11. Start your previously installed Joystick Plugin, find the correct controller, and select it.
12. Make sure that the Game Engine's Tuning Center shows the expected values when you are using your input devices.

That's all. Maybe this is of some value for some of you.

This could be helpful for me. Star Citizen has decided to not recognise my Xbox controller, but will recognise outputs from a vJoy/joystick gremlin virtual joystick combo. I can't get that combo to work neatly (yet, possibly never) so I will give this a try.
Thanks, John

Very nice! I use x360ce for that, but this one look bettter

Great contribution, @MarkusB !
Thank you for figuring out, how to connect multiple input devices to the plugin and thank you for writing a how-to! Much appreciated

Can confirm this works as advertised for my needs with Star Citizen. Thanks for your great help.