Simucube owners are growing fast, the community is getting bigger and bigger, lot of professional racers using SC2 products, probably its a good time to challenge Granite Devices team to look into what I consider to have a great value for customers and to diferentiate even more with the competition.
In a simple way, basically the idea is to organize/develop/support/trigger with professional racers what I call “Certified” true drive settings for each car, to try to mimic the REAL feel or at least something really close to reality for each and different car.
The level of immersion will reach a point without any paralell, off course this is to be done slowly, but overtime the Certified database will grow for the benefit of all that love immersion.
my opinion : there is no such thing as a “real” ffb, which is not real by definition but just the only way we have to feel the car. it’s a trick played on the mind.
real ffb would mean having a steering wheel that just doesn’t convey any - or very few - useful informations. real world racing drivers rely mainly on their body, much more than the wheel itself.
My experience dealing with a Top level championship winning real racecar driver and talking to others who have tried to help top level drivers is they don’t have much technical/ computer skills.
And FFB is so subjective trying to get people to agree that “this is the way it should feel” just ends up in arguments.
for iRacing especially, and likely other sims, there are differences in car models and also tire models.
For example, the LMP1 have much too strong FFB compared to other similar cars, and some GT cars have much too weak or uninformative FFB. Also kerb strikes affect the FFB in different way in different cars, so getting rid of those unrealistic spikes require different tuning for car to car. But this is something that normal driver would not care for, only the <5% of the users - the purists - seem to be tuning these.
Also, Nascar 87 cars in iRacing have a different type of steering rack, and at least I can’t drive those with same FFB settings than all other cars - I need to set much weaker FFB and much lower maximum slew rate (or more reconstruction filter) to get the car to be drivable and informative at the same time.
Then, there is also the “realistic” vs “informative” point.
In real life, cars have power steering which would attennuate many forces and nyances of FFB that the simracers - at least most of them - want and need to feel. Therefore having realistic setting is not highly valuable to us. The hugely lacking power steering modeling (or lack of it completely) makes it possible for the wheel to spike up to very high telemetry values in iracing (but also in other sims) and that makes it not worth the while to try to avoid clipping in kerbs, as those forces would just not be there in real life.
In cornering, the FFB seems to be very on-par with real life car measured forces, but this also varies a lot from car to car. We have data from real life factory BMW M8 GTE driver to indicate that the steering columun torque level is adjusted to around 7-8 Nm by the electric power steering. This does immediately say that the iRacing’s telemetry indicated values for this cars are way off…
iracing is the only sim that implements power steering, right? as far as I know the HPD ARX has it, but I never drove that car…so is it simulated in a useful way?
Yep, for 5 years of DD ownership.
Only changing in game car FFB multiplier, driver settings are the same.
IMO trying to normalize cars feel via driver filters is eliminating car character.
to look into what I consider to have a great value for customers and to diferentiate even more with the competition.