No longer strictly true… We’ll, not for road cars anyway.
Our latest tintop (a Volvo XC40 compact SUV) has the ability to self-guide along motorway lanes and to actively assist the driver if he wanders off line in any situation.
It has the best - and least obtrusive - electric power assistance I’ve yet driven (small sample size!) with seamless variation in assistance depending on road speed etc. - and I’d be very surprised if high-end road sports cars don’t also filter/synthesise what you feel these days too.
Even the braking response is configurable and computer-controlled to a degree!
All cars have force feedback, just that mostly this is provided by physical electromechanical systems. Recently drive by wire is becoming more common and has even been used in a GT3 car. Our SC2 devices can provide a very accurate replication of the real forces of driving, however that misses a lot of other forces a driver experiences that do not come through the steering wheel. If you had a full motion rig then you would actually want just the replication of the real forces being fed back to the driver through the steering column rather than the added seat of pants and other enhanced feedback that most sims provide.
NuScorpii said: “If you had a full motion rig then you would actually want just the replication of the real forces being fed back to the driver through the steering column rather than the added seat of pants and other enhanced feedback that most sims provide.”
I have to disagree somewhat (opinions will differ). I find that having the wheel-ffb effects supporting the motion-effects actually enhances the overall experience significantly. You might think of it as applying something like “stereo effects” to tactile and motion, it can broaden and enhance the end result, and certainly provide increased immersion.
Pure competition racers may not agree though, “less is more” may apply in certain cases. I just don’t think absolute realism is always best when it comes to ffb in simulation. Of course, different people want different things from their sim-racing, and that’s the way it should be (imo).
This is where you sort of get into the Hypersensitivity of Gamers… Normal cars do not have a whole bunch of information come through the wheel it self… It barely transmits Road noise and generally only transmits weight change. the Bushings Rack and if it has a power steering system pretty much completely Dampen everything high frequency out of the system… All of the other information is transmitted through the suspension through the chassis and into our backsides which you do not get in the Sim arena unless you have a well tuned Motion or Vibration rig… This sort of causes a catch 22 for realism as what you think is real for a sim is not always Real and because we don’t have the ability to feel through our backside in most cases with the sim you want to feel that through the wheel But that is NOT true to life and those sorts of things in feedback make the wheel react harder and stronger than it really should be reacting… so the main thing is to understand where the differences are and figure out where on the spectrum you want to be and then tune it to be like you want… Generally though is the more you get toward hyper sensitive settings the more likely you will be having custom settings for every car as you will be tuning to try to get the maximum feel of information through the wheel that will cause some cars to be VERY harsh and others to feel much less so. So in the end the feel at the wheel is very dependent on what the person wants or in MOST cases think they want. This is also the problem with asking for settings or standard settings as in many cases they are NOT what will be right for you but you hope they hit on something close… Even the Standard SimuCUBE2 Pro iRacing settings for me were both Over Dampened and Over Reactive (at the same time, which is weird) … I haven’t yet come up with what I truly want out of it but am still working to find it.
You have driven a car in real life, right? Of course there is feedback… but it is certainly less than you get in most Sims. You get practically no feedback when braking, especially on road sports cars (unless you block the tires), in Sims like ACC or rF2 you get a lot of braking feedback on the wheel though. I had a hard time learning to “listen” to other sensations on real life track days, as I was used to have a lot of feedback in the wheel from all the Sim racing. In non-assisted cars like Formula 4, you get a lot of the usual forces the Sim produces. For me this was the closest I ever experienced when comparing real life to the Sim.
With GT3 with all the assist systems it is hard to give a “real life” FFB, as these cars are quite “dull” to drive and do not have nimbleness of a formula car (these are quotes from a GT3 driver I read about and a friend of mine who drives in the blancpain series).
The only way you could rely on “Telemetry Data” is if it was mandatory (which which would be another issue on its own) I believe you are underestimating the number of “enthusiasts” like myself, rightly or wrongly who don’t agree to send data and be spyed on.
Jamesc:
I am 99% sure if the wheel was able to replicate a GT3 car exactly then 99% of realism-chasers-filter-tweakers would still not be happy.
Exactly.
What people think about FFB vs Real life is completely incorrect and even if you achieve to make ffb exactly the same… people still not convinced and think to use a Logictech G29.
I saw settings that uses 16Nm for a gt3 car that you can drive with a finger an most of this people spend 12k on a simrig because ( want to simulate).
Agree to this as well, also normal cars feel extremely dull compared to sim racing.
It’s why I think it’s great when there are settings to adjust to whatever you prefer. I would actually like that in my real car too, but understand it might be somewhat hazardous
That said it’s also a matter where some people like the steering to feel how they think it might feel in real life, while others, as myself, prefer to have the extra juice of feeling added balance, braking, suspension and so on, that you would normally feel, not from the steering but in other ways, that you would not get in the “real steering wheel” itself.
Using higher $ on simulation does add more immersion to some, like myself, bc of the added sensations that are possible, although for most cars won’t make the steering feel that much more “real” in itself.
But there are things that are very real that you will only be able feel with higher end equipment, such as the feel of road surface that you will absolutely feel in most real cars. Rough asphalt vs butter smooth, both as vibrations in the whole car, including the steering wheel.
I’m not aware of cheap wheel bases that are able to produce this as realistic as for example the SC2, if given the right FFB signal. My old tspc certainly could not.
Oh, getting to like some aspects of the recon filter, btw. I have never fancied it hugely, but lately I do appreciate it more than I though I ever would. Still room for improvement, specially at the low values, where going from 0 to 1 is the biggest jump of all by a margin, but nonetheless appreciated.
Agree with this! Weight transfer, aero loads, wheel spin and locked brakes are both useful and immersive in a sim and I want those forces to come trough the steering more clearly in a sim environment than in a real car. Chasing 100% real steering forces is the wrong path for both software and hardware developers imho.
As a new user here I have stumbled upon this topic whilst researching the filter settings. I am currently finding some very good progress tuning both RRRE & Project Cars 2.
I am no expert in DD wheels but have owned an AF wheel for 6 years to now when I just got my SC2pro 2 weeks ago this coming Friday. However I am quickly learning how valuable the access to these advanced settings & filters can be as the default setups provided are far away from what I am using after only a day of tinkering and tuning.
Therefore my vote is firmly that you NEVER remove access to the Advanced Tuning via the filters etc. that would be a tragedy and really kill the fun of exploring and using those settings. At the very most lock off the Advanced settings in some way if you reallymust but please do NOT remove them.
This SC2 Pro is a killer and best fun I ever had in sim racing… I did not realize how awesome it would be and a gigantic step up from my old AF (even tho’ I did love that wheel !)
We are not removing any possibilities for adjusting the wheelbase. However, there is already internal non-adjustable filters running that can’t be adjusted,and therefore there is very diminishing benefit of having an adjustable torque bandwidth filter (difficult to understand and there is internal limits also) instead of the slew rate filter adjustment (which is much easier to understand). And, if we get our reconstruction filter v2 to a level that is good in all games, we will likely remove the reconstruction filter v1. This is just normal software development to improve things.
Ok nice to know, thanks. I have changed the Torque Bandwidth Filter in a few different sims and really cannot sense any difference. Should there be a difference in how it feels driving ?
There should only be a difference if you set it to very low (100, 330, 470 Hz or something), and even then it is better to use the slew rate limit filter to make similar softening of the feel.
+1 Please don’t remove any expert/advanced/low-level tuning options.
Coming from SimCommander for the AccuForce, they had a similar discussion and, over time, I’ve found it’s critical that end-users have the options because nobody is satisfied with simple, stock profiles.
We may be noisy but we’ll figure out the options ourselves if we have to.
I spent 5 years tuning SimCommander, and feel I became quite adept at it, and I never ran profiles similar to theirs.
TBW can go for sure, as Mika says, Slew-rate adjustment is a better filter to use and allowing you to achieve a better result at these typical frequencies we have been using since Argon OSW days, let’s say 680hz and up.
So it is a redundant left-over from early development days and serves no purpose. Just my humble opinion. But in fullest support that expert-tuning options remain
If we lock it at Unlimited, it’s fine as there are better and more accurate ways to smooth signal out without losing information. Plus it’s what was always recommended
But I am sure there will be users with different opinion on that, or just driving different titles that can be more rough with high TBW settings.
Keeping it adjustable is a reasonable compromise to make everyone happy.
Hi all! Great posts! My approach would be to focus not on how to reduce complexity or number of filters, but how to be able to change them while driving, which will make much easier to find the correct spot, just like the “competitors”. In that way, the negative of complexity of filters will turn into a huge advantage.
