rFactor Better FFB Tutorial

DOWNLOAD UPDATED!! (Oct 8th, 2011)

I recently got hold of a friends iRacing account because he insisted I needed to feel this "incredible" "amazing" and "realistic" Force Feedback that he and other iRacing enthusiasts have been touting on-infinitum. I had no doubt that it would be better then rFactor's as rF's age has put it at a disadvantage. I tested with every car in the account on several tracks to get a "feel" for what the iR ffb was actually doing.

I was confident in my ability to duplicate it in rF, I spent the next week searching, tweaking, tweaking and then I did some tweaking to rFactors default Controller.ini, Realfeel and Leo's FFB.

With this concoction of a modified Controller.ini, modified default RealFeel (Thanks goes to this guy's tutorial for the original modification ideas http://www.eoaa.org/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php?t=338) and the painfully difficult editing of Leo's FFB settings. I was finally able to settle and do some testing (and more tweaking).

What this FFB will do is... Well you have to feel it. I think this feels better than iRacing. You will need to adjust every car with realfeel's numpad hotkey's, but with these settings I feel every crevice and bump in the road. I can feel the brakes lock up and the steering goes numb. A locked up tire will pull the steering wheel. I can even feel the slight pressure difference on the steering as the front of the car goes up and over hills and then gently lands again.

===TUTORIAL START================================

For all the Fanatec users, remove the PorscheWheelPlugin.dll from your plugins folder as it interferes with this!


I am using a G27 with a larger wheel than stock and used both 900 and 720 degrees of rotation for testing. Some forces may be set stronger for me than you would like but adjustment is pretty simple.

1} Download this zip. (Updated As of 100811) It contains all the plugins you need with the default settings set already. http://www.mediafire.com/?4f1r9k5oiyqbdxo

2} Move the files to their appropriate location Overwrite or remove any previous versions of Leo's or Realfeel!
2011-02-23_031738.png


3} Change the lines in your rFactor\userdata\yourname\Controller.ini There is a copy of them in the zip but I will post them here as well. http://paste2.org/p/1263317

4} Go to your Driving wheels control panel and set it up as follows. Even if you aren't using a logitech the spring, damper and strength setting should still be somewhere.
2011-02-23_015932.png


5} Change the "Front Wheel Lock Angle" line in rFactor\plugins\LeoFFB.ini

The very first line should be changed to your preferred steering lock used in "most" mods. Sometimes this won't be correct if a mod limits the angle but use an average. I use 22° if on 720° of wheel rotation and 28° if running 900° and the mod allows it.
2011-02-23_015858.png


6} Testing Once in-game you will not have to edit anything. Load a car such as HistorX or the Lotus23's or any mod that works with realfeel. I RECOMMEND USING A REAR WHEEL DRIVE CAR FOR A FIRST TEST!! When you go on track you WILL NO LONGER hear a voice say "realfeel is enabled" This was disabled in the newest realfeel. While sitting still you should find it difficult to turn the wheels and the steering wheel should stay where you turn it. This means that the Leo's is installed correctly.

** If you have severe oscillation when not moving simply lower the "Stiffness of Stationary wheels" value in the LeoFFB.ini

7} Adjusting the FFB
This is the hot key config used by RealFeel. The only things you should be concerning yourself with are the "Reverse FF", "Stronger FF", "Softer FF", "Decrease RFP mix" and "More Smooting" options.
12-Jul-09-rFactorCentral-4808_ReelFeel.jpg


A} Immediately in every new car you use set the RealFeelMix down to 90% (RIGHT CTRL + NUM 1) it will allow the Leo's road bump effects, rumble strips and grass effects to be felt. If you forget to do this the following adjustments will be off.

B} Drive the car at a decent pace turning back and forth. Once rolling ~25 mph you should be able to feel if the FFB is in the correct direction (Pulling to the center) or if the mod has the geometry backward (your steering wheel tries to go all the way left or right.) If it is backward you need to press "RIGHT CTRL + NUM 8". This will reverse the FFB for that particular car and you can continue.

** Note, when rolling forward for the first time around 12 MPH you should feel the Leo's stiffness fade and realfeel will take over. With some mods this transition is transparent in others there is a slight wheel shutter.

C} If the force is too strong you can use either (LEFT CTRL + NUM 9) to lower the FFB strength by 1,000 or (RIGHT CTRL + NUM 9) to lower by 100. Use NUM 7 to make it stronger. Drive for a while at high and low speeds, braking hitting rumble strips etc before finalizing this number.

If you notice your steering wheel vibrates alot when there should be no reason OR if you have to set the strength divider set under 1,000 it is recommended you use a smoothing level of at least 1 (RIGHT CTRL + NUM .)

A SPECIAL NOTE!! The RealFeel plugin's force is most dependent on the suspension CASTER of the car you are using. The higher the caster the stronger the force you will have straitening the wheels out at speed. If you find a car has severely low or high FFB. Instead of putting the Strength below 1000 or raising the divider above 8-9000 and risking over/under modulation try to adjust the Caster in the advanced tab to ~4-8 degrees. An example of Caster being an issue is the V8 Supercars use 15° of caster which is VERY HIGH. I set it to 7° and it was much easier to adjust the FFB correctly.

10} A Note on four wheel drive/ front wheel drive cars. You may find cars like the Historic Rally Cars or the HistorX Mini feel "funny". This is due to the front wheels being powered. What you will feel is, when coasting, it feels perfectly normal but when on the power through a corner the steering force will go light and even pull to one side. This is an effect known as torque steer. It is realistic for cars of this type and I have never felt it with any other FFB setup so that is a bonus.

That should be it. Now for every car you load the calibration procedure will be repeated and the adjustments will be saved automatically to your "rFactor\realfeelplugin.ini". It only takes about 20 seconds once you get the hang of it. I have included as many mods pre-adjusted as possible to help everyone with the transition. The following cars come set up by me.

Image1-2.png



Finally, Some mods simply DO NOT WORK with this FFB. I would point out the Saleen S7 Turbo mod as one. I couldn't for the life of me get that or the Mazda MX5's to feel "right". I tested as many mods as I could but if you find one that doesn't work or you are having issues, please post details here and I will take a look. Good luck and Happy Driving.
 
Steven:

I love these settings now that I have gotten used to them, especially "closed-wheel" cars. I have made some minor preference adjustments for "open-wheel" cars.

I have a question though...I have one MOD that is giving me problems. The FOV is fantastic, but apparently something inherent in the mod causes the virtual mirrors to stretch the objects, or maybe the correct way to say it is the objects in the virtual mirrors are stretched.

What is odd is that this is an update of an earlier mod and the original mod does not have this problem. I noticed that the cockpitinfo was different, so I copied and pasted the old info into the new cockpitinfo file and still the same problem.

I hope this question is not too "off-topic"...but do you have any suggestions??? or this a problem with the mipmaps in the upgade...if you know.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!
 
Mirrors for cars from what I understand are based on a texture supplied with the mod. If the texture is out of whack it will be wrong. I have noticed a few mods place the origin of the mirrors below the rear bumper which can also get annoying. Hopefully it will be fixed in another version or more mod friendly in rF2.
 
Personally what I do is putting 90%...

After that I adjust the FFB to what I find authentic depending on the type of car... Open Wheelers should be stiffer ;)

Don't forget also to have a proper steering wheel rotation and steering lock... Should be about 450° and 20° in those :)
 
Steven,

Thank you for this excellent tutorial. Like many others I have poured countless hours into trying to get RealFeel to FeelRight :) and have time and again given up in frustration. It seems like you may be onto something here, and I'm excited to get it working, especially since I too have up to now held up iRacing's FFB as the best I've ever experienced.

I followed your procedure last night and have some questions. First I should state that I have a Fanatec Porsche Turbo S Wheel, which unfortunately seems to lack some of the options the Logitech wheels have in their drivers, but I did set my Dampening to 0 and tried Autocenter Spring (for the Fanatec wheels it's just a checkbox, you can't select a strength) both on and off.

1) My test cases were the DRM Revival Mod 1.1's Porsche 935 and Team ORSM's V8Factor Unleashed beta 0.9 on Virtua_LM's excellent Sebring track. The latter already had an entry in your RealFeelPlugin.ini (V8 Supercars), even though I believe you were probably using the previous version of the mod, which was V8Factor 1.3 (I suspect this because you mention that the V8 cars have caster set to 15 degrees, whereas when I checked mine, they were at 9, making me think Team ORSM lowered them in the new version).

2) When I got into the car, I lowered the mixing to 90% (verified by audio and checking ini file). First a question about mixing: you seem to indicate that dropping the mixing from 100 lets Leo's effects come in...but my understanding of the mixing is that it sets the ratio between RealFeel and rFactor's 'default' FFB effects. So is the presumption, then, that Leo's effects override the 'default' effects, and therefore mixing really does control the balance between RealFeel and Leo?

3) At very low speed, up to about 20 km/h (=12 MPH), I believe Leo's FFB is in control, as you mention. In this region though, I get absolutely awful left and right violent turning of the wheel. It's nearly uncontrollable; I don't dare let go of the wheel or else it'll violently shake my entire setup. This can't possibly be how it's supposed to work, is it? Any ideas why this would happen? I tried adding Deadzone on my wheel to no effect.

4) Perhaps it's a limitation of the track I chose, but never, in any situation, do I feel any kind of bumps, road surface details, or anything like that. In fact even the kerbs hardly ever have any noticeable effect on the FFB. FFB is definitely there, in terms of making it difficult to turn side to side and in giving a slight warning of a slide starting, but I get absolutely none of the intricate details that you say you've been able to feel.

5) Your controller.ini file has rFactor's FFB Effects Level set to 4 (=full), but I thought I'd read in a few different places that these effects are 'canned', i.e. are not really representative of what's going on with the wheels and suspension, and that the only 'real' FFB was Level 1 (low). Any thoughts on this? Am I possibly confusing rFactor with GTR2/GTR Evolution?
 
1. The two mods you tested with are good mods.

2. The default FFB in rFactor is shut off with the modifications to the controller.ini and realfeel at 100% is meant to over-ride everything else so lowering it to 90% brings up only the leo's. If you removed the leo's and realfeel dll's and tried to use the default rF FFb you would find nothing there but rumble strip effects(see 5).

3+4. What you are describing is unfortunately the same thing my friend on ventrilo described using his Fanatec GT3rs wheel with my setup. I troubleshot for hours with him and it was very hard to describe what he was feeling but essentially it came down to "this ain't right". Until I get hold of one of the wheels to test myself I am afraid it is just Fanatec owners beware.

5. Since the default FFB is disabled setting to full only allows the "canned" effects to stay active if you like. This setup individually disables the throttle vibe and brake vibe but leaves the rumble strip effects on but lessened. If you don't want that bit of extra effect when on rumble strips either set that full to low or find these lines in the controller.ini and edit away.


FFB rumble strip magnitude="0.15000" // How strong the rumble strip rumble is. Range 0.0 to 1.0, 0.0 disables effect.
FFB rumble strip freq mult="0.60000" // Rumble strip frequency multiplier 1.0 = one rumble per wheel rev.
FFB rumble strip wave type="0" // Type of wave to use for vibe: 0=Sine, 1=Square, 2=Triangle, 3=Sawtooth up, 4=Sawtooth down.
FFB rumble strip pull factor="-0.75000" // How strongly wheel pulls right/left when running over a rumble strip. Suggested range: -1.5 to 1.5.
FFB rumble strip update thresh="0.07500" // Amount of change required to update rumble strip effect (0.0 - 1.0)
 
I mean with cart factor the default real feel was lot better than these 2 combined. Also I'm not sure if I know how to set the Front Wheel lock angle in LEO's. I'm using 360degree wheel and 15-20 steering locks in garage.

Set leo's to what you usually drive in game. Like everyone said. I drove the Cart Factor cars yesterday and this FFB worked fine after I reversed the direction. Then I switched cars and had to do it again without changing directions which means each car MIGHT hava a different geometry and is individual settings.

Here's what I settled with.

[CART 1998]
MaxForceAtSteeringRack=-1700.000000
SteeringDamper=65535.000000
FFBMixerRealFeelPercent=90.000000
SmoothingLevel=0

Not a massive change from default. Also I was using 19° of steering lock and 880° of wheel rotation. Not realistic but for testing I wanted it to stay with what I know.

 
Hi Steven many thanks for this tutorial. I'm having trouble with the V8Factor Unleashed (v0.9) mod and a G25 and wonder if you could help me please.

Firstly I have done everything in the first post and feel very little FFB, also whilst stationary the wheel is easy too turn, I raised the RealFeel strength effects but still nothing, also tried reversing them (as my ingame FFB is reveresed -100%).
I then changed the Control Panel settings to 150% and finally got somewhere, the wheel shuddered when stationary and was Hard to turn up until 25mph when RealFeel kicked in but then it goes back to being very light even after raising the RealFeel strength.

No matter what I do (tried all the FFB option upgrades for the mod) the FFB is very light and I just cant get it to work properly, thanks if you or anyone can help :)
 
ok thanks for that, I installed and tried that mod but again the FFB is very light, I feel the rumble strips but not much else. I even went back and re-installed everything but no luck, very confusing. Standard ISI FFB works just fine so I know the wheel is'nt broken!
Tried changing the ingame FFB settings aswell but nothing, as I've said RealFeel worked fine when I used it last time, just strange its not now :(
 
Steven, thanks for the answers. Dialing "Stiffness of Stationary wheels" down to around 6.0 in LeoFFB.ini helped tremendously with calming the wild low-speed oscillations. It's not perfect, but much better.

From further testing, it almost seems as if using LeoFFB alone is the best option for me, as with no other combination do I get a satisfying 'road feel'.

A question about your step 7, "Adjusting the FFB", though: you suggest driving a bit and raising and lowering the FFB strength with the hotkeys. My question is, what exactly should we be looking for here? :) In other FFB tweaking threads I've read, people have suggested using the RealFeel console as a guide to tweaking the FFB strength (MaxForceAtSteeringRack) such that the rightmost column of the console output (output force sent to wheel) never exceeds 100%. I presume the thinking behind that is that you don't want the sim to be simulating forces higher than what your wheel can communicate to you in its designated range of FFB strength. Does that sound right to you? Do you ever use the console to tweak this parameter? I guess I'm just confused about what should feel right in this regard.
 

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