Have Your Say: Force Feedback Expectations

[Eckhart von Glan]

Richard Burns rally+g25/27 ffb it's close enough to real life experience. I don't know why recent games can't get close to that

yep, this sense of actually knowing what each individual wheel on the virtual car is doing at a given time, seems to be very difficult to do

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

.. but the newer games do like the newer wheels ...
now we have the opposite the more options we have in ffb ... the more complicated it gets to set it up..

noticed the first aspect, too; and spot on on the second one.

 

[Magnus Stjerneby]

personally i think that its to much to fiddle and tweaking. I like simulator games because it suppose to be realistisk and equal for all. but it isn't really the case now. Industrial standard with no twerking allowed is the way to go in future ffb

 

[Emery]

- Works on G27 and similar. If FFB is bad on those wheels, it's bad. If someone says some FFB isn't good "Because it's not good on consumer wheels, only DD wheels" I call BS

Update rate. You have to have a slider to accommodate wheels (e.g. Logitech) that can't handle high update rates. Even if you get past the lack of dynamic range of wheels that only have less than 5 Nm of torque. Preferably this is a preconfigured setting when, in-game, you pick your predefined wheel model.

 

[Emery]

Industrial standard with no twerking allowed is the way to go in future ffb

One size does not fit all budgets.
Below 4 or 5 Nm = entry level, typically okay for feeling understeer, but inadequate for aerodynamics
5-10 Nm = enthusiast level, 1/6-1/3 of real forces over aerodynamic range, 2x-3x cost of entry level
10-30 Nm = pro level, 1/3 to full real forces over aerodynamic range, 3x-10x cost of entry level

 

[WOKOWEN1]

Good but what is the feel you talk about...

So if a game back then nailed it what happened now with the newer wheels and newer games..
I still own my g25 and love the feel it had, in say gt legends over my t500.. but the newer games do like the newer wheels.. Even though the basic premise of ffb should not of changed, why do older wheels suffer...
its like they forgot the basics in a effort to baffle us with glits that's not needed..
similar to the cries of the older sims where better because they had more options...
now we have the opposite the more options we have in ffb the worse it gets.. or the more complicated it gets to set it up..

I am talking about recent games not providing a good ffb for such affordable wheels. It seems to me like it is all done wrong by the game devs just to make users buy new products in search of a cure for the lower realism experience.
When I play RBR with a g27 prettymuch all feels right. That's all I know.

 

[Rob]

FFB, and track physics in game where trick your brain into thinking you are driving by attempting to simulate body g-force via wheel resistance. Hydraulic seats and inflatable seat inserts are closer to getting the actual feel, omitting sound and without actually driving, but I don't have $10,000 lying around.

Therefore, ffb being a trick, everyone will have a very different point of reference. Jan Magnuson told me once that a wheel in a high end professional simulator would not be acceptable for home use. Jan said he prefers heavier ffb if not in a professional SIM, since tricking the brain is just fine for learning a ton of non physical stuff.
Since game makers mask actual detail with resistance, and even games like assetto could improve on detail -- car to car contact isn't dramatic enough and wheel gullies should strike terror -- the game is superb at minimizing resistance and elevating detail. Personally, I only drive with enough resistance to make my brain have a good idea whether the car is power steering or not, and the g-forces it is likely to produce, in my own head.

 

[Skidmeister]

I

So if you drive a car with wings(open wheelers) the down-force builds in the car so it gets heavier should the ffb in your wheel get stiffer the faster you go.. (ok there will be a upper limit to this )

So if you drive a car with wings(open wheelers) the down-force builds in the car so it gets heavier should the ffb in your wheel get stiffer the faster you go.. (ok there will be a upper limit to this )

I got a chance to race a formula Atlantic car that had pretty good aero grip once. The feeling was that the wheel got heavier with more speed. The tires had more grip and became stickier, thus needing slightly more effort to make them change direction. But the increase in speed reduces rolling resistance so that negates some of the effect of tire loading.
I Actually prefer to limit my FFB so I don't have to fight the wheel. If I turn forces up to an unrealistic amount just to gain some feedback from a sim, I loose the ability to use my fine motor functions to make subtle changes and the more powerful muscles are forced to take over. At that point FFB is actually making me slower and is not helping me convey what the vehicle is doing. In a perfect situation you will still maintain road feel on the straights with realistic forces being applied over bumps and turns. Also with high torque direct drive during crashes I have learned to just let go, as the wheel produces such violent results you could probably get hurt.

 

[Skidmeister]

Downforce makes the car "heavier", so of course the steering effort should increase. Unless you have power steering.

The common problem is that if your wheel can only produce 2 Nm of torque and you have it set to produce 2 Nm of torque while going 55 mph (90 kph) because "it's too light otherwise", then you've got no room to feel the heavy steering when going 165 mph (270 kph). There is no way for a game to compensate for this lack of torque at the wheel!

A wheel that can peak at 5 Nm is about as small as you can get away with to have sufficient dynamic range that you can feel the change of torque over a range of speeds where aerodynamics take effect.

Lack of torque can be one problem as you have stated. Another problem is the way a standard electric motor works. It was not designed to produce FFB. The fact that most lower end wheels will have to overcome inherent problems with excessive default friction and inertia as well. This might mean adjusting settings in your FFB in a way to try to overcome this. Just like a graphics card your controller has a maximum bandwidth also, It can not produce effects faster than it can read themand "write" them, and its possible to muddle effects together like skipping frames when this occurs. By increasing a controllers bandwidth, manufacturers can provide greater detail in the FFB. Yet another reason to keep upgrading hardware as software integration increases.

 

[Skidmeister]

When I play RBR with a g27 prettymuch all feels right. That's all I know.

Well even vinyl records are making a comeback

 

[ozm8ey]

I like strong force feedback feeling. If its not strong enough I find it very unpleasant

 

[DrRob]

I read lots about different class of wheels and how that affects their ability to produce FFB.

Sorry for the maybe simple question, but how do you all actually classify wheels? I read about you saying torque for example. Is there some kind of ranking for the wheels or maybe soemone can give me an idea what "entry level" means, "enthusiast" and "pro"? Which wheel would you classify into which rank and on which basis? I just took a quick look for some numbers on my T500 and the search gave me a 150Nm and 3000 rpm for the used motor. But that has nothing to do with the actual capability of translating that into FFB forces.....

 

[Emery]

Fanatec and Thrustmaster wheels generally fall into the enthusiast range. Provided you don't try hanging too heavy of a steering wheel on them, they have enough torque (amplified by the belt pulley ratio) to provide torque for the player to experience 4-8 Nm at the wheel rim.

Logitech's maximum torque, out of all the wheels they've produced over the years, is < 3 Nm.

The point about the heavy steering wheel rim is that too much mass becomes inertia that makes steering response slow if you don't have a motor with the torque to accelerate quickly. For instance, many Fanatec users shun their BMW rim because it is significantly heavier than the others.

 

[Magnus Stjerneby]

I like strong force feedback feeling. If its not strong enough I find it very unpleasant

 

[thewarmer]

My first experience with force feedback was at the arcade. It was OutRun and if you went off the road the wheel would shake side to side. The first time it really took me by surprise and I thought I had broken it somehow. That was fun, but I really learned to drive with Atari's Hard Drivin'. It was all there the shifter, the clutch, turning the key to start the car, and the force feedback of the wheel in that long turn if you took the long route. I loved that game and always wanted something like that at home. Well, I've got a good computer a decent wheel and pedals set and a fast monitor. All I need to do now is to fab a key to start my sims.

Hard driving was the first Arcade game to have FFB by Atari so that was my first time with such a control type.
For me that was brilliant for its time. I really wish some body would return to that game maybe has a mod for AC . Yes you could even blow your engine. & its neat trick was you had to beat a real players ghost car to win the game , very far ahead of its time.

 

[Terminus Est]

using a g27
the one thing about ffb that annoys the hell out of me is how different it is from game to game. it takes you a couple of hours usually to get it kinda right, but you always think there might be a better experience out there, you just did not press the right button, slide the right slider, set the right number. personally, iRacing is my favourite when it comes to how you feel the mass of the car reacting to turn in, apex and getting out of the turn. rbr is the other standout.
searching forums for advice is fine, but then again, settings are very personal and i found out that most of the sets offered did not work well for me while others solved the problem from one klick to the next.

that said, i have never put in the effort necessary to get it right in ac and rF2 and so uninstalled both of them, they might be spot on for all I know, i just never bothered to find out because with limited time, one game (iRacing) for track and one for off track (atm WRC7) are alI i can handle.

This sort of thing would never be acceptable for peripherals in other genres. There needs to be an FFB standard so that future games with future wheels (software and hardware, only doing it on one side wouldn't cut it) "just work", and work the same way for everybody, instead of people having to hunt down setups and fiddle with sliders for hours. That, and FFB for the clutch and H-shifter in wheels thus equipped.

Amen. I've never been able to grasp why developers seemingly ignore the most essential part of their sims: wheel configuration and FFB tuning. All the graphics, audio, cars and tracks go for naught if the player can't understand what the wheel is telling them. Every sim forum, without exception, has people trying to find wheel/FFB settings that will help them to enjoy their purchase. A FFB wheel is the USP of racing sims. Only flight simulator controls come close. So why does it seem to be an afterthought?

Because nobody in sim racing development bothers with game design; they consider things that like beneath them for stupid elitist reasons and tweak the tire model and physics over and over and over (frequently making it worse, not better) while the UX gets left to rot. Even the simcade titles aren't bothering with game design and UX anymore.

 

[TylerDurden4321]

Which wheel would you classify into which rank and on which basis? I just took a quick look for some numbers on my T500 and the search gave me a 150Nm and 3000 rpm for the used motor. But that has nothing to do with the actual capability of translating that into FFB forces.....

That is 150mNm before the transmission! People have measured the T500 at ~5.5Nm and the G27 at ~3Nm, but in very unprofessional ways. David from iRacing measured the T500 at actually only 4.4Nm, which is what my feeling tells me too. It's also a big brushed motor that produces tons of friction. A brushless motor has a way higher efficiency with much kess friction, which is why my TX (which feels toy-like in build quality and weight compared to my T500), with a much smaller motor and a non-external power supply, can feel even stronger than my T500 in a cold room(measured by David at 3.9Nm).
An ideal motor for FFB would be very small but able to take high currents without melting the wires(and coating) of the motor coils(clever cooling solution will be a big thing for the next gen of entry-mid level wheels)
You also must not forget the transmission aspect: Gears? Toothed belt? V-belt? How many gears and belts are needed?

Below direct drive wheels, all FFB wheels are not strong enough. In race cars the self aligning moment easily goes over 30Nm, in the ground-effects era of race cars when power steering was still forbidden, teams actually applied negative castor angles, which made the steering feel like garbage at slow speeds, but it was the only way they could turn the steering wheel at higher speeds because the downforce made the steering that heavy. Today, teams set the power steering so that the maximum wheel torque is 20 to 30Nm.
In consumer car studies about drive-by-wire steering solutions, FFB motors with torque around 7-8Nm are planned (but you have to consider much heavier and larger in diameter consumer steering wheels that will make the steering feel lighter (and muddier) than with a 1kg 28cm sim FFB wheel).

 

[DrRob]

Emery and TylerDurden, thanks a bunch for explaining that to me. Very interesting insight!

 

[TylerDurden4321]

Emery and TylerDurden, thanks a bunch for explaining that to me. Very interesting insight!

You're welcome. If you're interested, why teams set the power steering assist comparativley low so drivers still get somewhat long arms(and why you want a fast and very high torque FFB wheel ideally),this older video from Niels Heusinkveld is fun and interesting:

(2:30 - 3:12 especially)

 

[TylerDurden4321]

It can not produce effects faster than it can read themand "write" them, and its possible to muddle effects together like skipping frames when this occurs. By increasing a controllers bandwidth, manufacturers can provide greater detail in the FFB. Yet another reason to keep upgrading hardware as software integration increases.

This signal bandwidth is mostly PR bullshit in my opinion, because of...

• the motor inertia,
• the transmission inertia (if there is one),
• the steering rim inertia,
• FFB update rate can't exceed half of the game's physics update rate (AC's is 333Hz --> 166Hz, software can smooth steps if your wheel has higher rates, but back to your gpu comparison: AA makes your picture better, but not sharper and more detailed, also the AA solution would be more like "bilinear" than complex MSAA),
• the more wires in a motor coil, the more voltage/current smoothing(in form of electronic damping by condensators) is needed to avoid dangerous self-induction spikes.