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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Thanks bmanic, I will try your recommendations. This is the closest I've been to pure FFB perfection in this title. Cars feel really good.

As far as a stronger wheel goes, I guess there is a Fanatec CSW V2 wheel in my future. Probably in the Fall. What am I gonna do with all of this Thrustmaster stuff ?! LOL:roflmao:
 
Awesome settings and thank you a million times. But now for a stupid question :). How do you/I adjust the steering lock? I have very specific tastes as far as this goes. I mean I basically like it to be exactly how the car is in real life. Do these settings accomplish this? Thanks.
 
Yeah this is a problem now. I find I'm having to turn my wheel too much for my liking in fast turns. Or any turns really. Is there not an option to adjust steering lock on a per car basis? In about to have to set my wheel back to 540 in the TM profiler if there isn't.
 
Using your settings on the BMW 1M the steering ratio is till way too soft for me. I've got the setting at the quickest ratio in the tuning setup and for instance at Nurburging GP on the last turn before home straight my left hand is all the way over between 3 & 4 o'clock. That tight turn 1 my left hand is at 6 o'clock or even a little more. Isn't that too much turning or is it just that car is so soft?
 
Using your settings on the BMW 1M the steering ratio is till way too soft for me. I've got the setting at the quickest ratio in the tuning setup and for instance at Nurburging GP on the last turn before home straight my left hand is all the way over between 3 & 4 o'clock. That tight turn 1 my left hand is at 6 o'clock or even a little more. Isn't that too much turning or is it just that car is so soft?

Guys, are you mistaking Steering Arm Angle for Steering Ratio?? They are two SEPARATE things!!

All settings I'm mentioning are found in the Force Feedback Tab in the car setup! I am not talking about Steering Ratio which means something completely different!! Gotta clear up this confusion.

To be absolutely clear:

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.

I an NOT talking about the Steering Ratio that you find under the Vehicle setup. Everything in this thread is a bout Force Feedback.. not about car setup.

The Arm Angle parameter does NOT affect the steering ability of a car in any way. It is only a FFB parameter and translates to forces coming from the tires, through the steering rack.
 
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You could also leave everything to default except the wheel driver options. and just adjust the car FFB setups. The default ingame settings are pretty good if you just adjust the car FFB.

Its all about 4-5 values in the car FFB settings. 2 for the front 2 for the rear and 1 for overall strength for curbs. Its kinda simple if you ask me.
 
But what does that mean? How do I get it to 540 degrees in game?

No that is not changing the ratio, it changes the feel for understeer, lower values make it feel tight and opposite. it changes kinda everything in different ways. put 2100.0 instead of 1500.0 for GT3 cars for example. 1700 for formula and 2300-2600 for street cars. is my opinion it also make the car feels more heavy. Beside increasing that value i alter the master scale too.
 
But what does that mean? How do I get it to 540 degrees in game?

You keep confusing things. First of all, all the cars get their correct steering lock automatically. You just need to set your wheel to maximum degrees of rotation, the game takes care of the rest. Follow the calibration exactly to the letter.

Then if you want tighter actual steering (meaning you turn the wheel just a little and you get a lot of steering) you go into CAR SETUP -> VEHICLE Tab and find the page that has Steering Rack (it is expressed as a ratio 12.4:1 for instance).

Steering Arm Angle, or Arm Angle as it is called in the game, is set in the CAR SETUP -> Force Feedback tab. This has NOTHING to do with actual car setup and only affects how Force Feedback is translated from tires + steering rack.

I hope this is clear now.
 
I think I might have figured it out.. give it a go: It may be that you are experiencing buggy behavior from the Relative Adjust Bleed setting. Sometimes it has some really weird snappy spikes and they seem to happen more often if you run higher tire forces or master scale multiplier. Try setting Relative Adjust Bleed (in the controller settings) to a much lower value like 0.05. Does it help? I originally had it at 0.45 for my new settings but noticed odd spikes, especially over curbs and bumpy sections of the track so I dialed it down to 0.3. It is very possible this is not enough.. I suspect something is a bit buggy with it and I've experienced it before (at one point during the alpha it defaulted to 1.0 which was very weird and very buggy). So yeah, give it a go. Set it to a low value (original FFB settings default to 0.08 I think).

Cheers!

That seems to have made an improvement, I still get spikes but they're much more manageable.

Thanks for all your hard work. I still wish it wasn't necessary, but a lot of us would be lost without helpful people like you. :thumbsup:
 
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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.
Cheers!
bManic

Well credit due where it's deserved. I have followed Bmanics advice to the letter and I'll be honest, his help with the games FFB has transformed it for me. I have just done two races with the AI at Brno and Brands in the GT3 class driving the RUF and Ginetta and it was sublime. The FFB really is transformed. Incredible really. I just wish WMD/SMS has used these base settings as default.
apcrs_zpsw52jptyh.jpg


So credits where it's due Bmanic, nice one and thanks, We may not agree or see eye to eye on Pcars in general but you have helped a lot here for at least me and I expect many others.
Thank you.

Andy
 
I have the T500 and I find the wheel too heavy and not responsive enough. I've dialed back the Strength of ffb in the global thrustmaster cp to 60% from your 75% and it's still too much. However, when I set Periodic back to 100% from your suggested 0% I personally find it better.

Is there a way to use the xml files to store your settings instead of manually adding them in-game?

Cheers
 
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.
 

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