PC1 bManic's FFB experiment - Thrustmaster TX / T300

UPDATE! I changed Relative Adjust Bleed to 0.3 instead of 0.45 (which could cause some oddities)

UPDATE2!: More and more people with other wheel brands have tried the settings and it's starting to look as if these may work for quite a few wheels. T500 is confirmed as working pretty well, Fanatec GT2/GT3RS v2 also confirmed as working better than defaults and one Fanatec CSW v2 also happy.

UPDATE3!: There seems to be some confusion about Steering Arm Angle and what it is. It is NOT the same as Steering Ratio, which is a VEHICLE SETUP parameter. Arm Angle can be found in the car garage menu, under the Force Feedback Tab (it's the middle tab, between Vehicle and Summary tabs), the last option on the first page is called Arm Angle. This is the one I mean. Everything in this thread is about Force Feedback, not about vehicle setups!

Update4!: Brandon Wright noticed quite a bit of spikes and odd behavior which seems to be related to the Relative Adjust Bleed parameter. It is possible that my value of 0.3 is still too large so if any of you guys are suffering from these spikes then try a lower setting. You can go as low as 0.05 until you lose the benefit of the Relative Adjust processing block.


Hi guys,

So I finally had some time to play the game and I've spent the whole day experimenting with a new way to squeeze the massive FFB dynamic range into a range that our consumer wheels can tolerate while getting as much information as possible from the FFB (meaning: no hard clipping).

I would love it if you Thrustmaster TX and T300 owners would try these settings. NOTE: You must follow these instructions TO THE LETTER or the experience will be different to mine. Feedback that is provided without following every single point to the letter will be useless and thus ignored.

Why? Because the FFB system in pCars is extremely flexible and thus complex. It is also highly dynamic which means that a single tiny tweak of a crucial parameter (like tire force / master scale multiplier, spindle arm angle or the ratio of Fx, Fy, Fz and Mz) will alter the system. Thus, if you want stronger or weaker forces, use your Thrustmaster Control Panel program to control this! Do NOT change the in-game settings to achieve this!

These are my Thrustmaster Control Panel gain settings:

Overall strength of all forces = 75%
Constant = 100%
Periodic = 0%
Spring = 0%
Damper = 0%

Auto-center settings = by the game (recommended)

Step 1)

Set your Thrustmaster Control Panel settings. You can use my settings to start with. These result in fairly heavy forces. A good workout but not impossible to drive with. If you are a masochist, set the strength to 100%. I often drive longer races with the strength set to 60%.

Step 2)

Start Project CARS and reset your wheel then do the wheel calibration again as follows:

a) turn wheel FULLY LEFT AND RIGHT.. all the way! My TX wheel requires me to truly wrestle the wheel to get it 100%, otherwise it stops at 96%.

b) follow the 90 degree rotation to the letter.. this means you set your wheel so that it is physically pointing exactly 90 degrees to either left or right. Do NOT set it so that you get perfectly 900 or 1080 degrees here. Set it so that it is truly pointing 90 degrees to either side. For example, my wheel when set so that it is physically pointing 90 degrees results in a steering rotation of 882 degrees.

c) calibrate your pedals

d) configure your buttons

Step 3)

Make sure your FFB Strength in-game is set to 100/maximum! This is very important! It defaults to 75. Also make sure the FFB damping saturation setting is set to ZERO. It defaults to 25. (you find these options under the CONFIGURATION tab in the controls preferences)

Step 4)

Go into the "calibrate FFB" menu and set the following (parameters not mentioned should be left at default!):

Tire Force = 100

Deadzone Removal Range = 0.03
Deadzone Removal Falloff = 0.02

Relative Adjust Gain = 1.37 (sometimes it shows 137 and leaves the " . " out)
Relative Adjust Bleed = 0.30
Relative Adjust Clamp = 1.33 (sometimes it shows 133 and leaves the " . " out)

Scoop Knee = 0.12
Scoop Reduction = 0.08

Soft Clipping (Half Input) = 0.60
Soft Clipping (Full Output) = 1.79

Step 5)

Individual car setup FFB settings! I've only had time to test 3 cars but from these you can quickly extrapolate and get the general idea. The main idea is to have a Mz heavy setup and to set a good spindle arm angle and then to set a good Master Scale value so that the FFB "pushes" into the Relative Gain and Soft Clipping at proper levels. These usually end up in the 26 to 36 range, depending on how much down force the car produces or how heavy it is. Here are the settings for the 3 cars that tried:

<--- CAR SETUP - FFB TAB - --->

Lykan Hypersport:

Master Scale = 32

Fx = 68
Fy = 36
Fz = 74
Mz = 100

(note!! set all Fx, Fy, Fz, Mz smoothing to zero!!)

Steering Arm Angle = 2200

BMW Z4 GT3:

Master Scale = 28

Fx = 66
Fy = 44
Fz = 82
Mz = 100

(note!! set all Fx, Fy, Fz, Mz smoothing to zero!!)

Steering Arm Angle = 2000

Formula B:

Master Scale = 30

Fx = 68
Fy = 36
Fz = 74
Mz = 100

(note!! set all Fx, Fy, Fz, Mz smoothing to zero!!)

Steering Arm Angle = 2500
----------------------------------------------------------------------

That's it. You are done. Go into the game and enjoy pretty detailed FFB. To appreciate the full range of FFB I highly recommend turning off all driving aids. I'll add more cars to this thread once I have a chance to test some more.

NOTE!: I will NOT be providing FFB .xml files because they do not seem to work as expected. This is a complete system where every individual setting feeds into one another and thus becomes a quite complex thing. The general signal flow is like this (at least it used to be like this right before release):

Tire Force * Master Scale -> Fx, Fy, Fz, Mz -> Spindle Arm Angle -> Relative Gain -> Soft Clipping -> Scoop -> Tighten Center

As I've understood it, Relative Gain and Soft Clipping are non-linear functions and thus quite complex in nature. Even small input variations can cause quite a different feel in the wheel. Because there are two of these functions after one another and they feed an inherently non-linear device (your consumer wheel) you can probably appreciate how quickly things get complicated. You'll easily notice this by simply tweaking the Master Scale of each car or change the Fx, Fy, Fz, Mz relative ratios. Like I said in the beginning of the post, the main point is to squeeze as much "useful" information into the limited dynamic range of our consumer wheels and this means compressing the heck out of it.


You lucky s.o.b's with direct drive wheels can ignore all this and simply set pCars as fully linear and have a ridiculously awesome experience. You may still want to adjust the Fx, Fy, Fz and Mz settings like I have them above but disregard everything else (remove all soft clip and all relative gain and scoop stuff. Heck, I'd even remove tighten center).

Cheers!
bManic
 
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Are you sure it's not placebo? Periodic forces shouldn't be used by the pCars FFB. If something changes due to Periodic forces then I suspect there is a bug or some kind of "leaking" centering spring forces.

With "more responsive" forces, do you mean more detail or a wheel that reacts quicker to self-aligning torque/counter steer?

You can create your own .xml file with my car specific settings but the wheel settings can not be stored in a .xml file any more, which is a real shame. In the alpha/beta we were able to give individual wheel settings AND car settings for every single car in the game. I have no idea why they removed that possibility. :(

Anyhow, to create an .xml file just take a peek into one of Jack Spade's files and substitute my numbers for the ones he has.

Sorry I should have been more descriptive, but by responsive I mean that the wheel reacts quicker to forces. You could be right and it may have been placebo or I may have entered a value(s) in wrong but I will test everything again in the morning.

Thanks for your reply.
 
Hi Bmanic, I'm emanuele from Italy and last week I bought the new wheel as in object.

My feeling is bad.

I saw you review about wheel and PCcars on Racedepartment, could you help me about wheel and RF2?

How does configure it inside his panel and inside the game , player.join etc.

I hope you could help me.

Thank you
 
Sorry guys, I'm yet again bogged down by work. Wont have a chance to play until next weekend.

Just give the Formula Rookie similar settings to some of the other cars. I usually set all of them Mz biased and then just dial in the other forces a bit lower.. especially Fy which is such a strong force.

@Emanuele: I'm having a really hard time understanding you. I can't help with rFactor 2 as I do not own it.

If you mean pCars then try to follow my first post in this thread. That could help with the FFB feel. Perhaps ask somebody to translate it to your native language? I'm sure somebody here can help with that.

Cheers!
 
@bmanic Any luck in getting brake vibration FFB?

You mean ABS vibrations or just lock up "twisting"?

You can get quite heavy break "twisting"/squirming if you play around with Fx, Fz and Mz.. the problem is, with my non-linear settings it's quite tricky to dial in just the right amount so that you can clearly feel it but so that it doesn't get unbalanced.

If you mean ABS vibrations then no.. that is unfortunately impossible at this time because Slightly Mad screwed it up a bit.. the ABS is running at the full 600hz physics tick which means it's way faster in the sim than in most cars in real life. This means you get none of the "micro vibrations" from locking ABS because they operate at so fast refresh rate (much faster than reality). At least this is how I understood it from one of the developers when he replied to my complaints.

Hopefully this will get fixed at some point.. they simply need to make the ABS a lot slower. Or they could add a canned FFB effect for this like in iRacing and AC.

Cheers!
 
I meant just brake vibrations through steering wheel. Most other sims have it. I can't feel any through Pcars FFB. Like in AC you feel when you have flat spotted your tyres and when braking.
 
I meant just brake vibrations through steering wheel. Most other sims have it. I can't feel any through Pcars FFB. Like in AC you feel when you have flat spotted your tyres and when braking.
I managed to achieve this on my DFGT, unfortunately Andy I could not really tell you what the exact setting was that nailed it other than I think it was adjusting the linkage scale and damping to 0.85 & 0.81 respectively. It almost feels RRE like now which I consider to be the best feel of braking. Also I have been playing around with the second page of car specific FFB settings. I am sorry I can't be more specific but I have gone a bit tweaking mad at the moment. These are what I usually set for the individual cars on the secone FFB page.

8hs3R3t.jpg
 
Like in AC you feel when you have flat spotted your tyres and when braking.

I've never felt this on my T300. More and more I'm starting to think there's something wrong with either my wheel or my PC because there are many instances where people have described something that I've never felt and can't replicate. I've been round and round with Thrustmaster, they are of no help. Even contacted my PC manufacturer, they don't have much to offer either. :sick:
 
This bit is the bit quite a few forget to do I think:

Step 3)
Make sure your FFB Strength in-game is set to 100/maximum! This is very important! It defaults to 75. Also make sure the FFB damping saturation setting is set to ZERO. It defaults to 25. (you find these options under the CONFIGURATION tab in the controls preferences)


Thanks to Bmanic for these tips.:thumbsup:
 
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Very impressed with the settings, used them exactly as written. Am using them with the Fanatec GT2 wheel and have a couple of queries.

Firstly, I am feeling a very low vibration through the wheel when pressing the throttle at any level, is this normal and can it be removed?

Secondly, has anyone using a GT2 changed any of the settings from what is written to improve the feeling further?

Thanks BManic, fantastic work.
 
First of all, thanks a lot for sharing the settings Bmanic. Using exectly as you posted on my T500.
I get the feeling that there is a hole/step on slow transitions in low speed (chicanes for example). What do you suggest to correct this? I guess that's something related with the parameters below, or not? (can you explain those better?)
Deadzone Removal Range = 0.03
Deadzone Removal Falloff = 0.02
It would be nice if you posted a list with upcoming cars (BMW GT4 could be on the list:))
 
First of all, thanks a lot for sharing the settings Bmanic. Using exectly as you posted on my T500.
I get the feeling that there is a hole/step on slow transitions in low speed (chicanes for example). What do you suggest to correct this? I guess that's something related with the parameters below, or not? (can you explain those better?)
Deadzone Removal Range = 0.03
Deadzone Removal Falloff = 0.02
It would be nice if you posted a list with upcoming cars (BMW GT4 could be on the list:))

I turned my deadzone removal range up to .06 and it made the wheel feel a lot better, much smoother especially when transitioning past the center point of the wheel. Also seemed to get rid of the spikes I was having.
 

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