Stick it Up!

Thumb-travel range, the missing link

Not every thumbstick is made equal. Yes, they can often vary by the mechanism used to detect motion, from virgin potentiometers to chad Hall-effect sensors. Some of these sensors can be more precise than others, yes. Sometimes, the build quality itself influences a lot.

But it seems that I somewhat discovered a factor that was hiding in plain sight, but no one seemed to have brought up yet. And I did intensive searches on Google and YouTube.

It's the concept that the physical properties of the stick matter. More precisely, the thumb-travel range.

What is "thumb-travel range"?

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Thumb-travel range is a term I coined to describe the maximum physical distance (range) that a finger pushing an analog stick can go. Higher the range, more precise a stick can be. For the same "thumb travel" of 10 mm on both the Switch 2 JoyCon and the Steam Deck, you'll understand that the smaller JoyCon stick will be way more tilted and register a greater input value than on Valve's handheld.

You can think "thumb-travel range" of as the mouse DPI of our human thumbs. If an analog stick was ant-sized, even if it was in theory capable of infinite precision, the stick would always just register 2 values when used by humans: pushed or not pushed. There would never be input in-between these two states. And moving a 3D character with that joystick would be very jarring.

So it's not something that software can fix, plain and simple. It's like if somebody said that software can totally correct mouse input at 400 dpi, and that it would be as precise as if you had mouse input at 3600 dpi.

And that's the heart of my discovery: not really that extending a stick make it more precise, but that we need to consider TTR when developing games and when assessing joystick quality.

It is precisely what makes N64 games feel like N64 games

The TTR of the N64 is so high that developers took that fact into account.

The theory of the natural range

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When I'm using a N64 controller, I feel that I don't need to push the stick all the way in order to do what I want. I noticed that I naturally kept my thumb around the TTR of modern controllers (i.e. Xbox-like controllers)—let's name that range the natural range. With controllers with TTR extending that natural range, it seems that developers can reliably add new behaviors when exceeding that standard range. That's why modern platormers often have a dedicated "run/sprint" button, when Super Mario 64 didn't. Well, it didn't need one.

Wait. Is the N64 stick crisis now solved, then?

No wonder why N64 speedruners are struggling with joystick issues.

It seems that N64-enthusiasts are putting too much attention on the fact that the original analog stick uses a sensitive optical encoder instead of a common but less-reliable potentiometer. Yes, it tips the scales that the latter is prone to stick drift.

But if TTR isn't considered, all efforts are in vain IMHO. I'm certain that it could fix a lot of issues, or at least help the community to better understand by introducing this new concept.

What if we can make GCN-style replacement sticks—which are more reliable, with the added bonus that some even have Hall-effect sensors—to be as precise as the original N64-stick, but without its brittleness?

A game changer

Since I stumbled upon this "discovery", I'm now able to explain exactly why, sometimes, it feels weird playing games with some controller analog sticks. It feels good. (well, it at least explains why I sucked at it felt weird playing F-Zero GX on my Switch 2 using its JoyCons)

But the nice thing is that it's somewhat "fixable". You can fix any titlable joystick by… extending it's length. It's simple as that. You can use my tool just below to know by how much.

It changes EVERYTHING. For the first time in ages, I played a N64 game and it felt exactly like I remember it playing. Smooth. In control. And having so much fun.