Joysticks and Controllers and P3DV5 - some other stuff!
There are almost never ending threads on various forums with people encountering problems with setting up their joystick or controllers with P3D. Unfortunately I cannot provide a HOWTO due to the endless permutations of such devices. I can share with you a lesson hard learnt. P3DV5 is not forgiving to a setup where you introduce a conflict between the key commands allocated within the program and what you want the controller to do! I learnt this the hardway after spending 3 whole fruitless days chasing down what I first thought was a model clash, then a scenery clash, then a display driver issue, then maybe a disk error or corruption issue. The problem started when I carelessly (in retrospect) reallocated a number of functions done by key command by P3D to my joystick buttons. Like a lot of simmers I had grown accustomed to doing this because of poor VC modelling, old 2D panels in FSX and before it made life easier then! What happened was I could load a model and a scenery then use my new joystick allocations to switch views to the mouse view pan (I like this in the VC because it enables me to quickly shift my view to the area I am interested in to operate a button or control etc.) repeatedly the sim would hang then CTD. Check of the event logs - no errors no other software issue infact nothing logged at all!
Back tracking over all the changes - I had rebuilt P3D from the ground up due to some other corruption issues (caused I believe by a sudden mains power failure mid sim - WIN10 does not handle such events the same way as WIN7 did - WIn7 would tell you this had happened and basically let you restart in safe mode or whatever - NOT WIN10 it just restarts unless it is totally fractured). This caused all sorts of issues that various repairs would not rectify so bite the bullet - clean it all up and start again. Plenty of backups etc so time consuming and major reloads of some stuff as I reconfigured a number of things that in retrospect were not a good idea (not keeping as much as you can out of the main sim and using the addon xml method extensively by the way making xml addon scripts you soon learn who has hidden anti-piracy buried all through their initial installation as well).
So I worked out that for some reason P3D was letting me add in new control commands and not getting rid of the old ones or overwriting them so you could have 2 or 3 such commands for one function trying to work - in other words instant recipe for command conflict when the sim is running and hence the crash to desktop outcome - it just cannot handle that!
I minimised what I wanted buttons to do first! In other words if the VC has a button or a switch use that via the mouse not a controller button. I was left with brake, park brake set, trim, normal throttle, spoilers and a mouse view function and I ditched the rest. I then went through the P3D setup menu in the sim and eliminated any obvious duplicate entries for the same function. Saved all that and now the joystick works perfectly, the sim runs perfectly again and no more CTD by something as minor as going from VC to F11 to then trying to mouse view pan.
Now this maybe obvious to some but also using FSUIPS to smooth things out is also worth the time and effort.
May not work for everybody but an interesting insight and a lesson well learned.