The pc port of re4 has horrible deadzones. Without any mods, it takes about half of your stick's range before Leon or his weapons start moving. This makes quickly responding to things and adjusting your aim really hard because you have to jerk your stick all over the place. In addition, the deadzone for moving and aiming (no matter what stick you're aiming with) is cross shaped. This is fine for moving with tank controls, but it's bad for aiming, because it means that unless your stick passes a certain threshold, you will only be moving your gun directly right/left or up/down. Here's an example of what a cross deadzone looks like:


In this example, all the blue sections would only register a cardinal direction, and the red section registers nothing at all. In the gamecube version and on dolphin, aiming only has a circular deadzone, so there was just a small red dot of non-responsiveness in the middle, and pushing the stick past that would directly translate your stick inputs into weapon movement, making precise adjustments easy.

This is what to do if you want the fastest solution possible, and don't want to mess around with steam input, but it comes at the expense of accuracy.

1. Download re4_tweaks here https://github.com/nipkownix/re4_tweaks

(If you're playing with the HD project texture pack, it comes downloaded with it).

2. Press F1 to open the re4_tweaks menu

3. Under controller settings, make sure the box over the deadzone slider is checked, slide it somewhere between 0.4 and 0. The closer to 0 you get, the smaller the deadzones will be, but also the more sensitive turning Leon will be. Choose whatever value feels best for you. Then save your changes.

4. This will get rid of the vast majority of the deadzone, and most people will probably be fine with stopping here. However even at 0, there's still a bit of a cross deadzone that makes diagonals feel a little more sluggish, you can test it yourself by pulling the stick all the way to the side and wiggling it up and down while aiming. Unless you're really moving it up and down a lot, the sight won't move vertically. You can also observe it by pressing a direct diagonal direction very slowly and seeing that the sight only moves in a cardinal direction at first.

So re4_tweaks still leaves some cross deadzone, is there anything that can be done about that? Well, thanks to Steam Input's anti deadzone setting yeah, it's not exact but it will get you pretty close to how the gamecube aiming feels.

IN ORDER TO MAKE THESE CHANGES FEEL RIGHT, MAKE SURE THE DEADZONE SLIDER IS SET TO 1 IN RE4TWEAKS

1. Create a new controller profile for re4 by right clicking on the game in your library WITH A CONTROLLER CONNECTED, then select manage and controller configuration. You should have a default configuration selected, so you're gonna want to click edit on that.



2. On the left side of the screen there should be a bunch of headers for categories for button adjustments. Scroll past all of them and go to action sets. There should be one action set that's called default, click the gear to the right of it, click add layer, and call it something like "aiming" so you remember what it's for.





3. Go to the trigger settings, and add a new function for hard pulling the left and right triggers by clicking the gears to the right of "full pull" on each trigger. Press the settings button to change what it does, navigate to the heading at the top of the screen that says action layers, and then select hold action set layer. Choose the layer you just created and make sure you turn off the sliders for it beeping and displaying things. Now when you pull either of the triggers for aiming the gun and the knife it'll change your sensitivity (after you make the changes in step 4). You want this because if you aim and move with the left stick and you get rid of the deadzone entirely, it'll make turning way too sensitive and Leon won't walk in a straight line when you move him.



4. Set anti deadzone by switching to the action layer settings for "aiming" in the top using the shoulder buttons on your controller, and go down to the sticks. Select the settings icon next to the stick you use for aiming. Then go to set deadzone, turn it to custom, and make it cross shaped. There should now be an anti-deadzone slider visible. I would recommend setting it to 15072, because the deadzones for this port on pc with an xinput controller are around 46% of the maximum joystick value (as seen in the chart to the left, made by u/EternalDahaka). You can experiment with the slider if you want, but keep in mind if it's set too far below the game's built in deadzone, then there will be noticeable deadzone in game, and if it's set too far above the game's built in deadzone, then Leon's gun will jump around since the game is setting your stick value too high to compensate for deadzone values that aren't there.

Then, go to deadzone buffer, under the anti-deadzone slider, and add a deadzone buffer. Without this, your input will probably drift when you're not pushing the stick, as the deadzone will have been functionally reduced to almost nothing. Unfortunately, despite what the wording would imply, this buffer actually adds deadzone back and doesn't add a circular deadzone. So you want to make it as small as possible without your stick drifiting. I use about 10% of the slider's max value since my controller is a bit beat up and will drift at anything lower.




6. Save your controller profile and play. Diagonal aiming should now be noticeably smoother, and the wiggle test should show vertical movement. At 15072 anti-deadzone on my controller, there was slight cross deadzone visible on the diagonal test, but only when moving the stick very lightly. Additionally, since the re4_tweaks deadzone slider is at 1, Leon's movement should have large deadzones, like the gamecube version.

- With method 2, the aiming in the Del Lago section is kinda weird and jumpy, I assume there's not really a center to the harpoon cursor.

- If you move the joystick perfectly diagonally and Leon's gun isn't traveling on the x and y axis at the same exact speed, don't worry! Re4 has different controller speeds for horizontal and vertical aiming, it's 100% normal.

Thanks to u/EternalDahaka for taking the time to measure this port's deadzones. His graphs can be found here: https://i.imgur.com/0eeaLUE.png and here: https://i.imgur.com/eqPd3bV.png. Thanks to everyone at re4_tweaks for helping make this kinda ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pc port up to par with what it should have been all along. And thanks to LethalPlacebo for making this guide

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?l=s&id=2630231444
which is great but a bit outdated since steam's controller ui changed.