Steering wheel rotation and stalling the engine

[Fleskebacon]

Two completely different things, with the only thing in common that they annoy me. A lot.

1. The steering wheel has no working option for soft lock, and setting the Fanatec control panel to anything else than 1080 degrees rotation makes the wheel not correspond to the correct rotation for the car. I have a Fanatec DD1. Any way at all to fix this? I have seen the issue discussed elsewhere, but it amazes me that this apparantly has no solution?

To clarify, the way the wheel works for me, is that the driver sets a 1080 degrees limit for rotation. Most cars need a lot less rotation than 1080 to reach full steering lock, but the steering wheel will gladly turn all the way to 1080 for these cars as well, even if full steering lock is acheived long before that. Setting the driver to "Auto", which works just fine in just about any other game, sets 360 degrees for all cars.

2. Why is it not possible to stall the engine? Regardless of which gear is engaged, you can accelerate just fine all the way from 0 rpm. Have anyone ever driven a car that runs just fine at 0 rpm?

Why are these stupid issues present in a well renowned game as AC?

An can they be fixed with mods or other magic tricks?

 

[RasmusP]

1. The steering wheel has no working option for soft lock, and setting the Fanatec control panel to anything else than 1080 degrees rotation makes the wheel not correspond to the correct rotation for the car. I have a Fanatec DD1. Any way at all to fix this? I have seen the issue discussed elsewhere, but it amazes me that this apparantly has no solution?

You can "calibrate" your wheel in AC to match the rotation lock with your wheel. Sadly you have to do it every time you're changing cars.
Instead of doing the calibration, you can simply set the rotation degree.
As long as it's more than the simcar, ac will do the calculation and match virtual wheel and real wheel to have the realistic degrees.

To know what's the degrees of each car are:
Set your wheel to 1080, select 1080 in the menu. Go on track, turn until the virtual wheel stops.
Then keep your real wheel in that position and reduce the degrees in your wheelbase until the soft lock is at that position.
Note down the degrees and set the AC degrees to that value.

It's annoying and Content Manager has an experimental setting to do this automatically while loading the track+car combo.
But I never tested it...

2. Why is it not possible to stall the engine? Regardless of which gear is engaged, you can accelerate just fine all the way from 0 rpm. Have anyone ever driven a car that runs just fine at 0 rpm?

The devs decided against engine start and shut off. You also have automatic pit limiters so...

It's meant for racing on tracks. When do race drivers stall an engine?
If you drop the RPM too far at the start, you'll lose lots of positions, same as when the engine would shut off.
For any other scenario it's not really necessary. Sure, it would add "realism", but it doesn't add much apart from "I want it to be real, although it has no other purpose than being there out of principle".

I agree that it should be there. Just wanted to show you the perspective of the devs.

 

[Fleskebacon]

To know what's the degrees of each car are:
Set your wheel to 1080, select 1080 in the menu. Go on track, turn until the virtual wheel stops.
Then keep your real wheel in that position and reduce the degrees in your wheelbase until the soft lock is at that position.
Note down the degrees and set the AC degrees to that value.

It's annoying and Content Manager has an experimental setting to do this automatically while loading the track+car combo.
But I never tested it...

The experimental "hardware lock" option in Content Manager is for Logitech and Thrustmaster wheels only, as far as I can see, so I haven't had the opportunity to test it.

I had already tried the method you describe, without any luck. But thanks to your answer I figured out what I was doing wrong: I didn't adjust the AC steering wheel angle to match the driver control panel.

Thank you!

This is a rather cumbersome work-around, but now it does work.

The devs decided against engine start and shut off. You also have automatic pit limiters so...

It's meant for racing on tracks. When do race drivers stall an engine?
If you drop the RPM too far at the start, you'll lose lots of positions, same as when the engine would shut off.
For any other scenario it's not really necessary. Sure, it would add "realism", but it doesn't add much apart from "I want it to be real, although it has no other purpose than being there out of principle".

I agree that it should be there. Just wanted to show you the perspective of the devs.

If this is the case, that they did this on purpose, then this has to be one of the worst design choices ever made in sim racing history!

The game has great focus on immersion and other small and unnecessary details in many other departments, so that Kunos doesn't want to pay attention to a detail like this just doesn't sound plausible.

Because race drivers do occasionally stall the engine, both on start, out from the pits, and last but not least - when they have had an incident and need to get back on track fast. It definately has a purpose, and is for sure a relevant element of a good simulation, which pretty much all other sims I know of got covered. Not game breaking, but very immersion breaking in some scenarios.

I think their "explanation" is just an excuse for not being able to fix it. They probably made it work this way initially, and then it just stayed that way until it was too much work to correct it, because it would affect other aspects of the drivetrain simulaton and so on. So they decided to just leave it like this, and made up this silly excuse, rather than just admitting that it was a stupid design blunder, which is now too expensive to correct.

Of course they have to maintain the illusion of their simulaton being the best and most realistic, and they can't admit to it having obvious flaws.

And fixing stuff like this probably isn't as easy as one would think. Raceroom spent some time with the opposite problem - engines stalling too easily. Getting the manual clutch with stalling and all this to work perfectly, like it does in Raceroom now, obviously wasn't just a quick fix.

So I understand that Kunos simply has chosen a shortcut here, sacrificing engine stalling and probably a lot of other small things that they don't think is worth the time it takes to implement. And that's an honest thing. But it's childish to make up excuses, instead of being honest about it.

(And I'm happy to see that we agree on this, so the rant is not aimed at you.

 

[Neilski]

Honestly, I'm glad that the sim doesn't model engine stalling.
It does for sure feel like something that would take significant effort to get right and that the effort would greatly exceed the value it brings to the users. There are dozens/hundreds of things I'd prioritise ahead of it in AC (I had soo many complaints about dumb stuff in AC, having come to it from LFS, and most of them are still there but I'm just resigned to them now).
Also though, the way I judge the clutch bite in a real car (when not doing a racing start) relies heavily on seat-of-pants feeling - the acceleration I feel through my body - which is entirely missing in sim driving unless you own a motion rig. So then you're left with judging the engine rpm and acceleration by watching the speedo and listening to the revs... Meh. Adding stalling would just remind me of the missing feedback.

 

[RasmusP]

But thanks to your answer I figured out what I was doing wrong: I didn't adjust the AC steering wheel angle to match the driver control panel.

Nice!

This is a rather cumbersome work-around, but now it does work.

I'm not sure what the auto lock setting for Logitech and TM does but from my perspective it would do 2 things:
1. Adjust AC steering lock to the simulated car
2. Tell the wheel driver to adjust itself to the same.

Now with your wheel, point 2 would have to be done manually, which is easily done via the fanatec settings via your funky switch on the steering wheel.
And point 1 should still work..

Maybe just test it with wheelbase strength set to 10% and see what it does?

If this is the case, that they did this on purpose, then this has to be one of the worst design choices ever made in sim racing history!

The game has great focus on immersion and other small and unnecessary details in many other departments, so that Kunos doesn't want to pay attention to a detail like this just doesn't sound plausible.

Because race drivers do occasionally stall the engine, both on start, out from the pits, and last but not least - when they have had an incident and need to get back on track fast. It definately has a purpose, and is for sure a relevant element of a good simulation, which pretty much all other sims I know of got covered. Not game breaking, but very immersion breaking in some scenarios.

To be fair, stalling engines come definitely after manual pit limiter!
Never seen a stalling engine while racing in F1 but I've seen quite some penalties for speeding in the pit lane.

AC has a LOT of these things, sadly..
No reasonable penalties for flag infringements, cutting the track etc other than making you brake for 20 seconds...
No spectator slots, almost no tyre temperature changes when adjusting pressure, camber and toe.

List goes on and on..

(And I'm happy to see that we agree on this, so the rant is not aimed at you.

Hehe yeah I know, nice of you to point it out though!

 

[Fleskebacon]

Honestly, I'm glad that the sim doesn't model engine stalling.
It does for sure feel like something that would take significant effort to get right and that the effort would greatly exceed the value it brings to the users. There are dozens/hundreds of things I'd prioritise ahead of it in AC (I had soo many complaints about dumb stuff in AC, having come to it from LFS, and most of them are still there but I'm just resigned to them now).
Also though, the way I judge the clutch bite in a real car (when not doing a racing start) relies heavily on seat-of-pants feeling - the acceleration I feel through my body - which is entirely missing in sim driving unless you own a motion rig. So then you're left with judging the engine rpm and acceleration by watching the speedo and listening to the revs... Meh. Adding stalling would just remind me of the missing feedback.

I don't disagree. The effort needed to do it properly might very well be better spent elsewhere. Raceroom has engine stalling and starting implemented very well (pretty much perfect), which took some time and obviously some effort. Doing this quick and dirty could probably introduce all other sorts of problems, which nobody wants - least of all the devs.

Judging the clutch bite point is one of the less intuitive things about sim racing, for the reasons you point out. And in AC this works just fine - you still have to manage the clutch properly to get a good start.

What really annoys me the most, is the devs' attitude towards people commenting on stuff like this. I read the same explanation from them elsewhere too, so what Rasmus wrote is probably quite accurate. It would be so much better if they just called it by its name and said "yep, we agree that it should be there, and that the lack of engine stalling makes the simulation less accurate, but it's actually harder to do than it seems, and it's not a huge issue, so we decided to spend that time elsewhere". That's an honest answer that decent people would respect.

 

[Fleskebacon]

Coming from Raceroom, I'm used to a handful of small annoyances - but AC probably has Raceroom beat by a mile in that department! Or is it just that Kunos and Sector3 have conspired to make sure they have different annoynances?

Is it really not possible to run a timed race against AI - can race duration only be set by lap count? Is there a 3rd party mod or app or something for that? (Off topic, but you guys seem to know everything there is to know about these kinds of annoyances.)

 

[Lizard Of Bodom]

Engine stalling "per se" is not implemented, indeed, but I often put 5th gear on Ruf CTR for example when idling and let clutch go so car actually stops idling and it doesnt allow me move so it is almost like "stalled". Need to put 1st gear, RPM goes from 0 to over 1k and I can go just then.
stupid workaround I know but hey.. :}

 

[Cote Dazur]

Is it really not possible to run a timed race against AI

In CM, all you have to do is hoover the mouse over the cursor for laps, it will tell you how long x laps is for that particular track. not 100% what you want, but to me it is 99%. As a bonus it will also tell you total length.
One less "annoyance" on the list.

 

[Stereo]

What really annoys me the most, is the devs' attitude towards people commenting on stuff like this. I read the same explanation from them elsewhere too, so what Rasmus wrote is probably quite accurate. It would be so much better if they just called it by its name and said "yep, we agree that it should be there, and that the lack of engine stalling makes the simulation less accurate, but it's actually harder to do than it seems, and it's not a huge issue, so we decided to spend that time elsewhere". That's an honest answer that decent people would respect.

Maybe you should just assume that for anything that's missing, it's not the team's first sim engine. If it got left out it's because they wanted to spend dev time elsewhere.

 

[Fleskebacon]

In CM, all you have to do is hoover the mouse over the cursor for laps, it will tell you how long x laps is for that particular track. not 100% what you want, but to me it is 99%. As a bonus it will also tell you total length.
One less "annoyance" on the list.

Thanks. I know. I'm a typical grown man, have become used to things always being exactly the way I want them to be... The solution is good enough. (But it's still annoying.)