I don’t understand why this has been neglected. It boggles my mind that an engine of this caliber lacks support for a simple joystick. I mean come on.
Which Joystick? XInput joys, like the 360 controller, work just fine.
my cheap generic gamepad works in every other app but not in ue4, Ive had an answer hub post for awhile now but no answers as of yet, thought maybe I was using the wrong driver or something
The 360 controller is not a joystick, and is obviously supported. I’m talking about HOTAS joysticks like those typically used in flight simulators. Common examples are the Saitek x-52/x-55 or Thrustmaster Warthog. I saw in another forum an Epic employee saying they aren’t interested in adding support for this. I really don’t get why they are against it. It would be nice to see some ue4 flight simulators, but relying on the community to add this support isn’t working. Every single plugin created for joystick support on the forums either leads to a broken link, or a broken plugin.
Joystick, joypad, they are different but the term is often used interchangeably. Sorry to misinterpret your post. You’re looking for flight stick support specifically?
Yes, flight stick would be a better term. I guess what is really needed is a way to use DirectInput.
Hey Everyone,
Currently at this time, there are no plans to implement native DirectInput support. There is a work-around that you may be able to use, which is called “UE4uino” plugin. It was originally created for Arduino, but it seems to work with anything. It reads raw serial data and returns it as a string, which is what converts the information into what the older controllers use. Here is a link to the UE4Duino - Arduino Plugin.
Have a great day! 
Please add support for native DirectInput support. Some people want to use steering wheel/pedal set for driving/racing games, flight sticks with or without pedals for flight games. I know that there are devices that convert XInput into DirectInput such as CronusMax at http://cronusmax.com/ but some people may not want to buy the devices.
DirectInput is sort of deprecated and newer devices are better off adhering to the newer xinput standard. Xinput was created since DirectInput was too “generic”, and caused way too many edge-cases, which anyone who has had the pleasure to deal with know of.
Still, many devices use DirectInput and for a fairly skilled coder it could/should be a trivial case to implement a DirectInput to XInput wrapper for pseudo-generic/specific cases. As a (quite bad) workaround, xInput devices can be emulated on the side, for example with software such as x360ce.