Properly setting FFB strength/signal strength in iRacing and True Drive?

Simucube 2
1

I’ve been testing different ways of setting FFB on iRacing for while now. I’m starting to wonder if perhaps many of us are setting it incorrectly or perhaps could be doing it a better way. I happen to come across a technique that I find gives a different perhaps better and more realistic feeling to the Simcube Pro.

I know of 2 techniques that are commonly used to set FFB with iRacing. I’ll explain my 3rd new technique last.

Technique 1:

  1. Set True Drive Overall Strength to max. (Simcube Pro that’s 25.1 NM)

  2. In iRacing set Wheel Force to 25 NM

  3. Tune Max Wheel Force/Strength as Desired.

Technique 2:

  1. Set True Drive Overall Strength to desired force e.g. 13NM

  2. In iRacing set Wheel Force to 13 NM

  3. Use iRacing’s Auto feature to set Max Wheel Force/Strength

Alternate 3rd approach I’m now using:

  1. Set True Drive Overall Strength to desired force e.g. 9NM

  2. In iRacing set Wheel Force to your simcube’s max force capability i.e. 25 NM for the Simcube Pro.

  3. Use iRacing’s Auto feature to set Max Wheel Force/Strength

Using this 3rd approach it either completely eliminates or greatly improves the center zone notchy (for lack of a better term gap/clunk) feeling. I don’t know about you but in a real car I never feel that center zone clunk/notch feeling that we get on simulator wheel bases. In a real car it’s usually a smoother transition between turning left or right quickly or at most just a stiffening up at center at speed. i.e. re-centering force. With the third technique I also appear to get less noise or over abundance of FFB information. Which again feels more realistic. I apologize if I’m not using the right terms on how to explain these feelings I get in the wheel. I tried this 3rd technique for setting the FFB in the Toyota GR86 at Oulton Park. For turn 10 and 11 (aka Hislop) chicane the left right transition was really smooth and more realistic then techniques 1 and 2 above.

Could anyone explain if this 3rd technique is better or worse with regards to getting the most realistic FFB feeling out of the wheel? Again I find the wheel centering performance to be much better but I wonder if there are other drawbacks.

2

4th, what im doing:

  1. Set True Drive Overall Strength to desired force e.g. 9NM
  2. In iRacing set Wheel Force to 1, minimum value (you’ll never overdrive SC2 forces scales with more than 9Nm, no cars on iRacing output 9Nm on max Force)
  3. Use iRacing’s Auto feature to set Max Wheel Force/Strength
    [/quote] and tune down to not hear SC2 torque clipping beeps.
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3

Second approach is virtually the same as the 3rd approach except with the third approach you are doing two things.

#1. You are lowering the overall force the wheel can output to 9Nm (rather than 13Nm) the wheel will never go stronger . This lowers the specific output to the wheel or the force you feel at the wheel… This is probably why you hear less noise and get a perceived lower ticking over center transition as those ticks are now to low in amplitude for you to feel them. (good wheel settings with regard to filtering will solve all of that).

#2. By using 25Nm in wheelfroce you are limiting how LOW the Max force slider can go… So in ay car that has less than 25Nm when pressing “auto” it will stop at 25Nm… This will alter your specific output and again further lower the at the wheel force you get for cars that are lower than this 25Nm mark… For cars that would have an Auto Setting ABOVE 25Nm only change #1 would apply as a difference between approach 2 and .

If you use @Alfye20’s method this is EXACTLY the same as Option #2 just at a (possibly if you set below 13Nm) lower strength from the wheelbase. DON’t use this method if you are going to be using the MX-5 or other production type cars if you are going to run over about 13Nm in TD as you can overdrive the telemetry actually boosting it beyond its intended 1 to 1 ratio.

Any of those methods are likely to give you 95% of the fidelity from the car… Only approach #1 in the list will give full fidelity as “auto” does not provide full output as it clips the upper 5%… for some cars with spikier feedback this may not cut usable information but Other cars with smoother FFB it could.

OPTION #5 would be a better approach to your option 3 -

TD @ 9Nm
MF @ 25Nm
set “auto” then add 2 - 5Nm to the resultant number (if above 25Nm)

This would give you full fidelity at the expense of Specific Output.

So let me go over some Numbers here:
MX5 auto setting lets say is 13Nm
BMWGT3 auto setting lets say is 31Nm

Option 1:
Lets Say you found the feel you like at 50Nm with both cars
MX5 - TD @ 25.1Nm, MF @ 50Nm : Specific Output = .5:1 or 50% of Telemetry
GT3 - TD @ 25.1Nm, MF @ 50Nm : Specific Output = .5:1 or 50% of Telemetry

Option #2:
MX5 - TD @ 13Nm, MF @ 13Nm (auto set) : Specific Output = 1:1 or 100% of Telemetry
GT3 - TD @ 13Nm, MF @ 31Nm (auto set) : Specific Output = .42:1 or 42% of Telemetry

Option #3:
MX5 - TD @ 9Nm, MF @ 25Nm (Wheel Force set) : Specific Output = .36:1 or 36% of Telemetry
GT3 - TD @ 9Nm, MF @ 31Nm (auto set) : Specific Output = .29:1 or 29% of Telemetry

So you can see the real thing you are doing here is just altering the specific Output or force at the wheel based on telemetry. The lower the Specific output the lighter the wheel feels but as well if you get too low there is a point where the Wheelbase, Wheel, and your own arm Damping will actually cover up fidelity as the amplitude will be too low to feel. The thing though is the HIGHER the specific output you go without proper filtering on the wheel the sharper and more intense the wheel gets. You can use good settings and a strong wheel can feel more tame but with additional information that gets covered up otherwise.

EDIT I will add a couple of options here…

Option #4:
MX5 - TD @ 9Nm, MF @ 25Nm (Wheel Force set) : Specific Output = .36:1 or 36% of Telemetry
GT3 - TD @ 9Nm, MF @ 25Nm (manual set) : Specific Output = .36:1 or 36% of Telemetry (HOWEVER this will CLIP 6Nm of upper end detail from the GT3)

soooo…

Option #5:
MX5 - TD @ 12Nm, MF @ 33Nm (manually set) : Specific Output = .36:1 or 36% of Telemetry
GT3 - TD @ 12Nm, MF @ 33Nm (manually set) : Specific Output = .36:1 or 36% of Telemetry

Option 5 - VERY little clipping same output as Option 3 or 4. A little bit more headroom on the MX-5… Will clip cars that have telemetry over 33Nm

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4

Hi @smaypilot,

I see you also made a support ticket about this; we are closing that as it is more beneficial to answer here.

From our side:

Method 1:
This is dangerous and does not give any benefits. You will too easily feel 100% FFB in crash situations, and you probably don’t want that.

Method 2:

  • This is (almost) our recommended way. You might want to add a bit of headroom, i.e. if you want to have 13 Nm max forces when driving, set the Simucube’s strengths to a bit higher than that, so that crash forces can be felt but not unexpectedly strongly.
  • We do not recommend to use the wheel force or the automatic FFB adjustment, as you probably will get different results every time based on how you drove the car before the automatic option becomes available. Instead, always set some sensible Max Force in the in-game slider.For iRacing, around 30 to 35 Nm Max Force is good, as you likely will not clip any car except for the Indycars and the V8 Supercars, and if there is clipping, the clipping is just on the highest FFB peaks on bumpy tracks on those. Those additional FFB peaks do not contain any useful information to you as a driver, so clipping is not harmful there.
  • Fine tune with the in-game FFB slider to get the FFB level you want.

Method 3:
When you reduce the motor torque, it may affect the center notchiness and make the motor a bit less reactive. This can feel good. You are less likely to get FFB clipping as the wheel force has headroom,but that headroom might not be enough for many cars. For sure, this is better than your method 2 which would clip a lot of the time, but still, this method still uses the automatic FFB adjustment which does not give consistent results.

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5

I apologize for the late response.

So based on your response can you confirm the following is correct?

  1. Set True Drive’s Overall Strength to desired force with a little headroom.
  2. Start with a value in between 30 to 35 NM Max force in iRacing.
  3. Fine tune in iRacing Max Force but in the range of 30 to 35 NM?

Is there anyway to determine the realistic values of FFB for each vehicle in iRacing? From my understanding the GT3 cars range from 8 to 12NM max force in the real world. But I wish there was a way to determine that via the iRacing Game for each car. Like the FFB strength for the MX5 would obviously be less than an Indy Car. It’s just strange to me that we have to guess what the Steering torque of each vehicle actually is in the real world and set FFB strength based on hearsay.

6

Unfortunately, no. Except for a few cases, it is all based on hearsay as the real life cars do not have torque sensors on the steering column.

There have been a few telemetry traces from real life Indycar and V8 Supercars, and those are quite close match in iRacing.

But the other cars are way off. For example, BMW M8 GTE outputs about 9 Nm of force in Le Mans, where as iRacing telemetry outputs very much larger numbers. This is direct information from a driver who drove that car in Le Mans.

It is as if iRacing is modeling the steering column torque before power steering system is applied.

1 Like
7

Thanks for that. But again regarding:

So based on your response can you confirm the following is correct?

  1. Set True Drive’s Overall Strength to desired force with a little headroom.
  2. Start with a value in between 30 to 35 NM Max force in iRacing.
  3. Fine tune in iRacing Max Force but in the range of 30 to 35 NM?

Is this the correct procedure?

8

there is no outright right or wrong way presented in this thread, other methods have safety concerns so we can’t recommend them, and others have clipping and/or inconsistency issues. This last suggestion is a good one.

9

I’m currently working on a Motec tool for rf2, which helps you to set up your SC2. At least to get some kind of foundation for his attitude. It’s already working for rf2 and is in the “last” steps towards release.

I’ll get down to it for iRacing afterwards. The focus is on the “Overall Strength”, “Torque Bandwidth Filter”, “Slew Rate” and the “Peak and notch Filter”. I already have the base, but it will still take some time. I’ll take care of the rf2 tool first.

2 Likes
10

@Purple_Red This software you are working on sounds extremely interesting. Keep me in the loop or where can I follow to see the progress on this tool?

1 Like
11

“Software”! :grin:
I am a car Mechanic.

Good question, maybe I will make a small preview-video. I have to admit that I’M very curious what improvements other people will see in the near future. I’ll just do a few little things and label everything properly.

I hope it will help some, hopefully many. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t well received.

12

If only TD had an option to display FFB graph before and after applied PP filters.

13

Hello. what parameter should we touch in true drive to modify the feeling of road (essentially the suspension) my setting suits me well but I would like to reduce the force of this parameter. on certain circuit the force felt and really too powerful and not really realistic. Thanks

14

With iRacing the feel you get for the road via telemetry is fixed and the only way to truly increase it is to increase specific output alternatively you can decrease it as well with less force… However, you can “fake” it a little by using a lower reconstruction level as that will allow the stair step of the 60Hz signal to come through as a vibration.

What it sounds like you are having more issue with is hard road bumps. coming through sharper than they should… in which case you will have to play a bit to find the solution to calm… The easiest is to use slew to slow the wheel… after that you can use friction as well to slow the wheel but that adds weight… Inertial will help stop the wheel from hitting extents as hard and damping will help solidify feel as the wheel returns to a neutral position. It may take a combination of these settings to get the wheel to react how you want and with that the could affect smoother circuits making them feel like the road is too smooth if the filtering is more aggressive than is needed.

15

You can only go off of what the digital model puts out… If the car puts out 10 - 30 or 50Nm than that is correct for the model… Anything else is guessing and anecdotal… so the thrown around number of 8-12Nm is really just a guess… so that is why things are so questioned across the board as far as the “correct” strength to use…

In my mind with regard to iRacing it is whatever allows the cars you drive to run relative each other correctly… My anecdotal data from my real world experience I place “real feel” at about .6:1 but that is with a fairly calm wheel that is set-up to mimic more of a real world feel where it is not trying to reproduce everything the Telemetry has to offer through the wheel. it allows details to come through cleanly when needed… Some will find this too heavy on some cars for their normal use… This will generally put out 12 - 16Nm under normal driving with a GT3 (which from experience (though I haven’t driven a GT3), I would probably say is more the actual range of GT3’s and actually falls in line a bit with Daniel Morads levels (his are a little less but not my much he runs a .5:1 with a small in corner reduction.)

You can find out the 95th percentile value that is put out by a car by using the “auto” function in iRacing however, I honestly would NOT use that to tune your steering except to know that your max force is above that range to get full fidelity. if you tune to “auto” you are normalizing everything at MAX output and completely lose the relative forces between cars.

The one thing to also understand with power steering cars is that Race teams in most cases have the ability to adjust boost levels to ether make them easier or harder to drive based on their drivers (or Engineers) preferences. So two of the same GT3 cars could have vastly different steering profiles in real life. In the past the Engineers would actually run as little power steering as possible making it quite heavy in order to save weight as larger conventional Hydraulic pumps were needed if you wanted lighter steering… Now there are several ways that power steering can be done…

So iRacing does model power steering but they may not be modeling it maximum boost so there is a leeway there as well we as virtual drivers do some things in set-up that generally are probably out of bounds in Real car set-up that increase steering weight such as Maximum Caster (a BIG one in steering weight), lowest tire pressures, and Maximum Camber… So the car model may be actually putting out correct values based on the extremes being used that are not used in real life.

The iRacing overlay data that falls on target has always been compared with the real car when using the same set-up in the game as in real life… We screw that up a bit with doing unconventional things…