Impostazioni volante - Ottimizzazione FFB

[tuttotommaso]

Ecco una guida presa direttamente dal forum ISI su come trovare la "propria" impostazione ottimale per quanto riguarda il force feedback...l'ho trovata molto utile ed interessante. Buona lettura!

P.S. A me google translate è stato moooolto d'aiuto

Hey guys,

I intended to write this consolidated post for the optimal ffb (force feedback) settings for rfactor 2 users sometime ago but I had been reluctant to do so considering how much time it took writing the countless posts in different threads. However, it'll save me time and effort from repeating myself in the future (not that i really minded) if i do make this dedicated thread/post, so here goes.

The below may look daunting but it'll be worth it....i promise.





Defining the problems

There are two problem areas that affect the ffb performance of your wheel in rfactor 2 (but this also applies to any and all racing sim titles). These two problems occur in the low end forces (known as an "initial ffb deadzone" issue which causes a complete looseness in the ffb initially which affects your performance mostly in the slow speed corners) and in the high end forces (known as an "ffb clipping" issue which causes the wheel to max out at 100% force too early which affects your performance mostly in the fast speed corners).

The reason we should address these two issues is that they are the key issues to unlocking our fullest driving potential, allowing us to drive more subconciously (a.k.a. being in the "zone"/"flow") which is where we operate with the least amount of conscious effort and yet perform at our best and more consistently so. In my own personal experience having found the perfect settings for my own wheel, i have seen a giant and easy 1-2 second lap time and consistency improvement in all of my personal bests (where my performance had plateaued for many months leading up to it). The improvement did not occur the moment i made these ffb adjustments but in my case it was less than a week later (so maybe I could argue that it was pretty instant after all).....hopefully that gives you enough reason to read on.







Setting up our wheel profiler correctly before we start

Before we get started, we need to setup our wheel profilers correctly. Here i have screenshots of the Logitech g25/27 and Thrustmaster t500 profilers with the correct settings. You should have spring and damper and any spring-centering/auto-centering disabled. These effects are not realistic and should only come from the dynamic ffb calculated by rfactor 2's physics engine. Adding it like this from the profiler is not at all realistic as it simply adds a layer of static (i.e. fake) effect ontop of the dynamically calculated real-time ffb in rfactor 2 (which you don't want to be degrading in any way). Lastly, you can play with the "overall effects strength" a little but try to leave it as close to default as shown below (and if you want to increase them, do not go higher than 110-112% for the logitech g25/27 wheels and no higher than 70% for the thrustmaster t500...and i use 70% on my t500 which feels best imo, so don't worry with upping it a little on g25 wheels too. Going any higher will not increase the maximum force of your wheel but will instead start to cause the very issue we are trying to fix in "Part 1" below). This generally applies to all other wheel users as well.










With that out of the way, let's begin with the high end force issue (a.k.a. ffb clipping):

Part 1 - the high end forces (a.k.a FFB Clipping - the most important issue): What is it?

To answer that, i must first explain how ffb works. The physics engine in rfactor 2 calculates the forces generated at the virtual steering wheel and this correlates to some amount of force generated at your ffb wheel. The relationship between how much force calculated ingame to how much force is generated by your ffb wheel is decided by rfactor 2. Please note however that when i say "the amount of force generated by your ffb wheel" i mean as a percentage of the maximum force producible by your specific ffb wheel....as the same 40% ffb signal sent to a leo bodnar wheel, t500 and a g27 will each generate a different amount of force felt by the user. Each wheel is producing a force that is 40% of the maximum force that is producible by the different ffb motor's in each wheel, just emphasizing the fact we're not dealing with absolute values here as rfactor 2 doesn't care what wheel you are using.

Fortunately, we are able to control the relationship between the forces calculated at the virtual steering wheel and our ffb steering wheel. This control is called the "car-specific FFB multiplier" ingame:



(side-note: Also set your ffb smoothing to 0, pretty much works on all wheels but some older wheels like g25/27 may experience rattling which is unfortunate and you can reduce/remove the rattling by adding smoothing but it is strongly advised you set it to 0 as this will give you the purest/raw ffb detail)

Generally speaking, increasing this value will increase the strength of all the forces on your wheel. Vice versa, decreasing this value will decrease the strength of all the forces on your wheel. At first this may seem like a great idea as you can just increase the strength of your g25 by increasing this value. But it comes at a detrimental (yet not immediately apparent) cost to your driving performance. At a certain point/value, you will hit what is know as the "ffb clipping" margin. What this means is that whilst on track, when you are driving in situations that produce the highest force at the virtual steering wheel (such as high speed corners), the game is asking for more than 100% of your wheels maximum force. Of course this is not possible so instead your ffb wheel remains at a constant 100% force, meaning you miss out on that all important detailed information regarding the cars balance and traction when you drive in that ffb clipped region. In fact it's worse that just "missing out" on the information, what's actually happening is that your getting mis-information from your wheel. Think about it for a second....your ffb wheel is telling you the force is constant yet the car could be increasing in forces at the virtual steering wheel which would otherwise be telling you that the car could be about to oversteer (or worse yet snap oversteer) or understeer. Instead your mind is being told that the car is in a stable 4 wheel slide when on the screen you are being told a different story. At this point, the ffb is completely useless to you and you have to rely on guess work from visual cues on screen alone whilst also manage the confusing sensory mis-information you are receiving subconsciously from your ffb wheel.

To better illustrate this, here is a pictorial representation with a simple sine wave that you can imagine as being the change in ffb force strength and direction as it is sent to your ffb wheel as you navigate a high speed left-right s-curve corner:

(colour coded words represent areas on the diagrams)



Now, if your like me and want to have as strong an ffb wheel as possible without running into the ffb clipping issue then you need to know what is the right "car specific ffb multiplier" value (which as explained earlier is not dependent on what wheel you use....unless you have a bodnar wheel where perhaps you don't want to use the full force of your wheel because it is simply too strong). By default, the "car specific ffb multiplier" value is set to "1.0". For all the cars i have tested (maybe only 70% of all the cars available for rfactor 2 at present except the newly released kart i tested where "1.0" is fine) this is simply too high and will give you the ffb clipping issue. (A summarised theory as to why ISI and other sims set the default value so high which unintentional causes an ffb clipping issue is that most users are still using older wheels such the g25/27 which are pretty weak in ffb. So in order to boost their general ffb weakness, especially noticeable in the low end forces and not helped by the huge initial ffb deadzones on these older wheels, they must set this value higher by default in order to make the wheel feel like it has any strength at all....fortunately "Part 2" below explains the new tool we have at our disposal to remedy this problem). The most ideal "car-specific ffb mult" value is (almost) always lower than "1.0" but you don't want to go too low and end up not using (i.e. wasting) the full range of ffb force output at your wheel's disposal. (As of recently, i've find some cars requiring a little more than 1.0...you really need to test with the tools explained a little later. It's very easy). Here are the 3 possible outcomes:




So, how do you find the ideal/optimal value you ask?

The quickest, easiest and most simplest way (short of asking others who have found them already) is to use TechAde's excellent "rF2 Pedal & FFB Overlay Plugin" for rfactor 2 (http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.ph...Overlay-Plugin). Simply download the latest version, drop the "rF2PedalOverlayPlugin.dll" file into your rfactor 2/plugins folder. That's it. Then when you go into the game and on track, wait about 10 seconds and in the top left hand corner you will see this (only smaller):



The blue bar represents your clutch position, red:brake, green:accelerator and lastly the key point of interest, the yellow bar represents the ffb force sent to your wheel. When this yellow bar reaches 100% (a full bar) it turns red to show you that it is maxed out at 100%. You do NOT want this bar to ever turn red when you drive around a track unless you are driving at the limit of traction around a corner, over kerbs, gravel or crash/bump the car into a wall or another car. If you see this bar turn red in a normal race situation around a track (also not including spinning as this is not "normal" and falls outside the normal driving envelope)...you are getting ffb clipping which as explained is a big no-no. To find the optimal "car specific ffb multiplier" value simply involves you testing different values around a track. Doesn't take a lot of time and once you find the right value for a car, it's usually the same for all tracks. If other tracks do clip however, just set it a tiny bit lower and leave it as that for all tracks.

For the few cars i routinely drive, i have found for example that the Renault Megane value is around "0.75" and for the Panoz it is around "0.85". You will have to test this for yourself and to find values for other cars. It really doesn't take a lot of time and it's completely worth it. It can get a little tricky trying to perfect this value to make sure the ffb is not clipping when your going around high speed corners and can't focus on the bar graph in the corner and i sometimes end up deciding to notch it down/up 1% every so often to check if it's still clipping a little bit or not.

When i first tried this out i wrote a piece here describing my experience and emotions of my discovery (though i cannot and do not claim to have discovered this as it is nothing new that others have not already discovered and shared elsewhere on the internet). You can skip it and read on if you want of course, i just go into more detail how my performance improved exponentially overnight and why.

http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.ph...l=1#post247786





(side-note: please complete part 1 before working on part 2 as they are somewhat interrelated. Working on part 2 first and then working on part 1 after will more than likely result in you needing to repeat part 2 again.)

Part 2 - the low end forces (a.k.a initial ffb deadzone issue): What is it?

The majority of ffb wheels suffer from an initial ffb deadzone issue simply because the initial low end forces are not able to overcome the internal resistance of the wheel due to friction (with the exception of the best wheels such as the leo bodnar wheel which are direct drive and what little internal resistance exists is miniscule compared to the full range of forces it is capable of....some 200-300x stronger than a g25/27).

Here is a graph of the ffb response curve of my T500 wheel in the green line (to demonstrate this):



Notice how the first 8% of forces sent to the wheel produces 0% force output at the wheel. This demonstrates the static friction of the wheel. As a result, we also get a delay in any ffb force output at the wheel. Take for example, a 20% force sent to the wheel actually results in a 10% force output at the wheel. As well as the initial deadzone region, this is not ideal and the result is a loose feeling of the wheel around the center when driving in a straight line, initial turn ins and exit of corners and much lower ffb forces than should be in the slow speed corners where the forces are generally no greater than 10-30%. Much like the ffb clipping issue, the wheel is giving you mis-information and negatively affects your performance for the very same reason. The wheel is telling you the car is in a stable 4 wheel slide when the car balance could be changing and in fact oversteering or understeering. (I must mention however that although this graph shows an 8% deadzone, the reality is that this is for static friction and not rolling friction which in my experience is around 3-4% for the t500. Even though it sounds like a tiny amount, in practice it still makes a significant difference when you feel any and all previous deadzone removed).

The blue line represents a modification to the response curve that cuts away that unwanted deadzone. rFactor 2 developers have recently added a new line to the controller.ini file (but as of the recent updates to rf2 i believe it's now the controller.json file) in the ":\rFactor2\UserData\player" folder. The line is called "Steering Torque Minimum". To find the ideal value, you need to test for yourself and this doesn't take long either. My advice would be to start with a value of 4% (which equals a value of "0.04000") and then jump into the game with any car (make sure you have fine tuned your ffb multiplier first however as this can affect the correct deadzone value) and see if your wheel is oscillating when stationary (Thanks to Comante for correcting me in saying that you should do this with the car at very slow speed for the best/most-accurate results....explanation below in "edit 3"). If it is, go back and lower this value but if it is not oscillating then increase it until you find the wheel starts to oscillate or vibrate. Rinse and repeat till you find a value that only just starts to oscillate/vibrate the wheel a tiny bit and the value is accurate to within 0.1% (e.g. 4.1%, no need for 4.1275% accuracy lol). Then back it down a tiny bit, maybe by about 0.1% (so imagine you find it just starts to oscillate/vibrate at 5.4% then take it down to 5.3% or 5.2% instead) to avoid the small oscillation/vibration all together. (Thanks to Luke Dykstra for noting that you must have the "steering torque minimum" value represented to 5 decimal places for it to work. So that's "0.03000" for 3% deadzone and NOT "0.03" or anything else. - UPDATE: no longer needs to be 5 decimal places with the new json file format for the controller.json)

This is what happens when you set the "steering torque minimum" too high causing that unwanted oscillation:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-fjY0pFLA



You will now have ironed out any and all initial ffb deadzone on your wheel in rfactor 2. Enjoy!





Finished

Ok, that's all. Boy that took a while to write up.

I will be updating/correcting as i go along re-reading it and i will post below with any edits or new editions I make.

Hope you find it useful in unlocking your own full potential too.






Updates/Edits

edit 1: Thanks to Luke Dykstra for noting that you must have the "steering torque minimum" value represented to 5 decimal places for it to work. So that's "0.03000" for 3% deadzone.

- edit 1 update: no longer needs to be 5 decimal places - see edit 8 for details.

edit 2: Those who read my posts in the past and who also followed my settings of 100% overall strength in the t500 control panel to reduce the initial ffb deadzone, I now use 60 or 70% overall (60% being the default value) as it seems to feel better and with the new steering torque minimum (of 3% with 0.75 ffb multi for the megane) the ffb feels sublime!

edit 3: Thanks to Comante for pointing out that it is much better/accurate to test the oscillation/vibration when trying to find the perfect "steering torque minimum" value when the car is moving even if only 1km/h instead of being stationary when you test this. The reason being that with the car moving very slowly, it is when the wheels are actually rolling that there is the least amount of resistance on the movement of the steering wheel (imagine trying to turn the steering wheel to park when your stationary vs with the car moving ever so slightly which requires less steering effort by the driver). You want to remove the oscillation/vibration in all driving situations and if any oscillation/vibration were still to remain it would show itself in the car moving slowly situation.

edit 4: If you do share settings for the same wheel, note that any difference in your Logitech (or whatever wheel you use) profiler settings will affect what the "steering torque minimum" should be for each user. For example, increasing the "overall effects strength" in the Logitech/Thrustmaster profiler will reduce the deadzone a bit which means the amount of deadzone that remains to be removed with the "steering torque minimum" amount could be different for different users. This is why i urge you to not only ask others for what values they are using but to couple it with your own testings to confirm they are right for you too. Perhaps share what your profiler settings with the specific rfactor 2 values you use on your specific wheel please.

edit 5: Wajdi raised a good point regarding what "ffb smoothing" value ingame to use. To help others find the right value for themselves, here is an explanation for what ffb smoothing is and why you may or may not wish to use some amount of it:

For those who don't know what "ffb smoothing" is ingame, it is a way to smooth out the high rates of change in the ffb signal. Why would you want to do this you might ask? If your wheel suffers from annoying rattling in rfactor 2 you can increase the "ffb smoothing" value ingame to help alleviate the problem. But if you plan on using anything higher than the default value given to you by rfactor 2 (after you hit the "detect" button in the controller settings ingame which will configure a recommended "ffb smoothing" value for your particular wheel) then only raise it as much as need order to reduce the rattling issue of your wheel to acceptable levels. If the value is set too high however, you are at risk of losing crucial ffb data.

Here is a simply demonstration of how smoothing affects the ffb signal (which i should add in this example could be considered with excessive smoothing if it were an ffb signal):



If the rattling (common for g25/27 users) is not an issue or you have non, feel free to set "ffb smoothing" to "0" for the purest ffb straight from rfactor 2's physics engine. Setting "ffb smoothing" to "0" gives you the best possible ffb feel and detail. rf2 defaults this to "4" which i would always advise setting it to "0", especially for CSW/T500 users, there is absolutely no reason to use anything but "0".

Here's another graph showing the possible outcomes to different smoothing values:



edit 6: As a case and point that you need to do your own testing of the car specific ffb multiplier, the newly released Karts are perfect with the default "1.0".

edit 7: If you want to generate your own graphs for the response curve of your own wheel, here are the instructions on how to do so...





First download WheelCheck.exe: http://uploaded.net/file/2e784k4f

Next, plug in your wheel and then open "WheelCheck.exe". Once opened, click the "Spring Force" drop down menu and click "Step Log 2 (linear force test)" and the test will immediately begin. Leave it to run it's course and then when your wheel stops moving (you will know because it goes from weak force to strongest force in the iteration test) close the program. Then go to your "Documents" folder and find the newly created log2 xxxxxx...etc file. Make a graph of it with "force" values along the x-axis and deltaX (or deltaXdeg) along the y-axis.


edit 8: Thanks to Mee for reminding me with the new json file format for the controller.ini file, now called controller.json, you do not need to input values to 5 decimal places for the "steering torque mininum" value to work. Just put in a value to as many decimal places as you want/need.

Edited February 5, 2015 by tuttotommaso

[Mandingo]

Ma chi di voi possiede il fanatec CSW V1 ed ha delle buone impostazioni sia in game che sul volante ?

Driver fanatec V. 200

Firmware Fanatec V. 053

[Altair]

Io ho il v2 ma le impostazioni sono le stesse! Sul profiler 100% dampening in gioco 99% dampening Min for 2-3%, sul volante dampening al 100% for 100/120 Spr 0. In game Gain tra i 60 e gli 80 dampening 10%