Force Feedback Guide for Project CARS

[Silvio Camolesi]

I'm not a mathematician, not a physicist, not a programmer, not a professional pilot or a mechanic. I'm just a guy who wants to get home, turn on the PC and start playing.

I can agree to adjust certain settings on my car, those concerning the car itself, but stay adjusting the equipment to be able to play, seems a little out of place.

And I know big part of my direct competitors may be using keyboard, mouse, console controls, or anything but not a steering wheel, not concerning with physical feedback.

So wait, I do not think I should spend hours or days setting things to make it minimally suitable for its goal.

I see as an obligation of the mathematicians, physicists, programmers, pilots and mechanics who helped develop the game, to give us something that is plug and play.

Maybe I'm wrong, but from the player point of view, is that what I see.

That said, I have a second question: why I need to set my controls to achieve a correct answer to something that, at least in theory, should always be the same for any situation?

If I have different cars with different weights, different suspensions and different tires, so I will have to have different controls for each possible combination?

Why to change some steering wheel parameter when I change the caster?

Why to change the vertical force if I change the tire?

I'm sorry, I do not see a point here. I understand that has some good intentions in this idea, but...

For me the feedback should be a direct reason of the forces acting on the steering bar and how these forces come to it, and it is something that should not be adjusted by the casual player.

[Lukas Macedo]

Quick bullet points as I see it.
1- toy wheels cannot represent 1-1 forces. So if you model the physics right and set the FFB to 100% real, It would be clipping forever.
2- changes in setup, change the FFB. Some of them will cause clipping (see #1). Caster is one of them.
3- Casual players fail to understand you do not feel weight transfer and grip cues in a real wheel. So a real FFB is bland and lifeless to them. Those come from your body.
4- Diff people like different things. FFB as an aid to drive is incompatible with real FFB that would reach a real wheel. This simple mismatch makes it impossible to reach a common ground in what is a good FFB.

Hope it helps.

[Bouyo]

Quick bullet points as I see it.
1- toy wheels cannot represent 1-1 forces. So if you model the physics right and set the FFB to 100% real, It would be clipping forever.
2- changes in setup, change the FFB. Some of them will cause clipping (see #1). Caster is one of them.
3- Casual players fail to understand you do not feel weight transfer and grip cues in a real wheel. So a real FFB is bland and lifeless to them. Those come from your body.
4- Diff people like different things. FFB as an aid to drive is incompatible with real FFB that would reach a real wheel. This simple mismatch makes it impossible to reach a common ground in what is a good FFB.

Hope it helps.

Thanks for the insightful post, it's a good point that you make and should definitely be a consideration.

I'd say though that in a real car, when you lose grip you CAN feel the wheel lighten a little, but more importantly when you regain grip the wheel will kick like hell. There's a lot you can't feel through a real wheel, but LOTS that you can. I think PCars gives you this, but only after a good deal of playing around with the FFB settings. The defaults are bad, no question. Why can't they be better?

The fact is that the community has been groping around for a couple' months now to get decent FFB settings and with a lot of success actually. But why the hell should your average player have to join the PCars forums, read and watch a bunch of tutorials posted by community members, just in order to get some decent FFB? As far as I know, most people are blindly plugging in Jack Spade's FFB settings. If that's the case, why didn't the game come with something equivalent that people could blindly adhere to?

[VBR]

Casual players fail to understand you do not feel weight transfer and grip cues in a real wheel.

That's simply not true.

When I drove a Caterham 7 Superlight during a Palmer Sports event at the Bedford Autodrome in 2009 (see my avatar), I certainly did feel weight transfer through the wheel. I was on the head to head course at a dead stop, when I tried to turn the wheel it was almost impossible to turn. When I floored the accelerator & dumped the clutch the wheel then went incredibly light (because of the weight transfer as you put it, or more accurately the front wheels unloading). As I came off the accelerator the front wheels began to load & the wheel started getting heavier again.

I tested the same thing out in Project CARS & guess what? The wheel had the same weight in it regardless of whether I was at a standstill, accelerating hard, or engine breaking. According to my real life experience, Project CARS is extremely poor at translating longitudinal weight shift effects through an FFB wheel, in fact it seems to be missing entirely.

[Bouyo]

That's simply not true.

When I drove a Caterham 7 Superlight during a Palmer Sports event at the Bedford Autodrome in 2009 (see my avatar), I certainly did feel weight transfer through the wheel. I was on the head to head course at a dead stop, when I tried to turn the wheel it was almost impossible to turn. When I floored the accelerator & dumped the clutch the wheel then went incredibly light (because of the weight transfer as you put it, or more accurately the front wheels unloading). As I came off the accelerator the front wheels began to load & the wheel started getting heavier again.

I tested the same thing out in Project CARS & guess what? The wheel had the same weight in it regardless of whether I was at a standstill, accelerating hard, or engine breaking. According to my real life experience, Project CARS is extremely poor at translating longitudinal weight shift effects through an FFB wheel, in fact it seems to be missing entirely.

PCars can relate longitudinal forces actually, it does it well, however not by default (at all). That's my gripe. Get some decent default FFB values SMS!

Try dialing down y axis and increasing x for more braking/acceleration effect.

[Schnizz58]

Project CARS is extremely poor at translating longitudinal weight shift effects through an FFB wheel, in fact it seems to be missing entirely.

Just because your FFB settings didn't allow it doesn't mean the game can't do it. I have driven a number of cars around Spa and you can definitely feel the weight of the car in the steering at the bottom of Eau Rouge.

[VBR]

PCars can relate longitudinal forces actually, it does it well, however not by default (at all). That's my gripe. Get some decent default FFB values SMS!

Try dialing down y axis and increasing x for more braking/acceleration effect.

I'll try that. Thanks.

[brownie-uk7]

I'm new to Pcars and so far really enjoy it but I have to agree the FFB is far from complete. In one of Pcars' competitor games I rely heavily on the feel of the wheel to understand what the car is doing. As above then I expect that accelerating will make the wheel lighter than when breaking/decelerating. I would also expect that when losing front grip in a turn due to understeer the wheel also becomes lighter and then "bites" again once you correct and grip is returned.

For now I only rely on visual cues as these are missing from the FFB. With SO many options I expect it is possible to simulate this but I have no idea how to. The settings from Jack come a little close with "66%" one but not really there.

I'll try these changes on the x/y axis but I don't really have the expertise or time to learn the required expertise to sort this out properly.

[Ian Bell]

I'm new to Pcars and so far really enjoy it but I have to agree the FFB is far from complete. In one of Pcars' competitor games I rely heavily on the feel of the wheel to understand what the car is doing. As above then I expect that accelerating will make the wheel lighter than when breaking/decelerating. I would also expect that when losing front grip in a turn due to understeer the wheel also becomes lighter and then "bites" again once you correct and grip is returned.

For now I only rely on visual cues as these are missing from the FFB. With SO many options I expect it is possible to simulate this but I have no idea how to. The settings from Jack come a little close with "66%" one but not really there.

I'll try these changes on the x/y axis but I don't really have the expertise or time to learn the required expertise to sort this out properly.

Nothing is missing from the FFB.

The defaults might not be to your liking is all. We're the first game to ship with pretty much no canned effects, everything being fed directly from the physics.

[tonypbeck]

Nothing is missing from the FFB.

The defaults might not be to your liking is all. We're the first game to ship with pretty much no canned effects, everything being fed directly from the physics.

I think the game is awesome, just the majority of us don't understand the physics of what is going on so we don't know how to set it up for the best use.

I personally have never been in a racing car so don't know what to expect or what I have set is realistic enough. I do drive but not at racing speed, well most of the time lol