New iRacing FFB Parameters 23S3

23S3 adds some interesting options. The slew filter interests me most as it might fix my issues with high kerbs on some tracks (which caused an injury through jolts) without me needing to run so much damping and lowering my SC2 slew.

Force Feedback

  • When calibrating a wheel, iRacing now checks that your selected maximum wheel angle and Force Feedback status match what we expect based on your detected hardware. A notification will appear if these do not match.

    • This is an effort to detect common errors with certain wheels, either that do not have the correct drivers installed or that have a maximum wheel angle set to a very low value by default. If you receive this notification, or need help setting up your racing wheel, please reach out to Customer Support.
  • iRacing will now try to automatically detect your racing wheel’s maximum force, and adjust the wheel force slider accordingly. This is used to help us safely and automatically calculate the force levels to send to your wheel. We can’t always know how your wheel is set up, so this may be an overestimate of your maximum force level. This is the safer guess, but in some instances it may limit how strong of a force you can request from the simulation. In those cases you can turn off the “auto-mode” and manually set your wheel’s peak value, if known.

  • Improved the force auto tune button so that it takes the wheels maximum force into account. This will lighten up the auto tune as the wheel force increases.

    • There is a new scaling parameter in the “app.ini” file, “autoForceFactor”. This value defaults to 0.5, and allows you to adjust the aggressiveness of the reduction. Setting “[Force Feedback] autoForceFactor=1” will remove all reduction, giving you a 1:1 force output. Setting it to 0 will effectively always give you 6 Nm of peak force at the wheel. Any value in between will blend between these two extremes. The default value of 0.5 should be a good value for most users.
  • A mappable button (Ctrl-A) has been added to apply the Auto Force adjustment found in the F9 Black Box.

  • For the Auto Force Feedback peak force detection, data collected when the car is out of control will now be suppressed. Also, data collection will be paused for several seconds immediately after an incident. The goal is to make this system more stable and consistent, even if you wreck.

  • For Force Feedback, a safety check has been added to detect if the wheel jumped in position (ie: we lost/gained communication with the wheel). If a communication interruption is detected, Force Feedback will be suppressed momentarily for safety.

  • A new slew rate limiter filter that is controlled via the smoothing slider is now available in the Force Feedback options tab.

    • This filter limits the rate of change of the force feedback signal so your wheel can’t accelerate beyond a fixed value. In essence it smooths out the large jolts while leaving the rest of the signal alone. A value of 25% will have almost no impact on your regular driving, while softenting out curb or wall impacts, and a value of 75% will smooth out most rumble strips and make curb hits almost invisible. If you find that you have to turn down the FFB forces below the level you would like because the jolts from curbs or accidents are too large, then try turning this filter up instead. Try a value of 50% to start, and turn it down to 25% if you feel it is too much.
    • You can go back to the old boxcar filter via the “[Force Feedback] smoothingFilterType=1” entry in the “app.ini” file.

Yeah, saw this over at iRacing in the release-notes. Needless to say, my personal preference would be to minimize these changes as far as I can. Happy to have the option to disable these things.

Of course, others may want to use one or some/all of them. All good, as long as it’s optional, no dramas.

I’m wondering whether the slew adjustment in iracing is what we already have in TD and so should be turned off or if there’s any advantage to running some in iracing and upping the slew a bit in TD.

It will be best to use slew in the sc2 controller, @zerolight - then we know things are executed with the least possible latency. Wherever possible, I avoid gaming filters and effects. I think this really is safety measure for those guys with dd wheels that doesn’t have slew rate.

It is different, but the same concept… it sort of spawned out of a discussion that a few of us had on the iRacing forums… We will see how it works…

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AKA Logitech & Thrustmaster DD wheels

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