RealFeel settings and discussion post by Niels at home

This is a backup of a helpful post about RealFeel FFB

Original Post

FFB discussions are a blend of informative, entertaining and most of all subjective!

Someone will talk about what they feel in sim X, what they lack in sim Y...
Someone else will say exactly the opposite.

I've been fortunate enough to work with F3 / GP2 drivers and sim engineers. Their drivers will have totally different opinions on the sim FFB feel despite driving the same car in real life. The strength driver 1 will say is real is totally different from driver 2. Even the feeling when driving results in 2 very different opinions.

It is *very* hard to isolate the feel of one component in the car when driving being hot, working against G forces, bouncing around...

Not to be negative towards us simracers but if pro drivers don't know what it should feel like, we stand no chance ourselves! :) Plus these pro drivers use high end direct drive wheels which only very few of us can afford.

One thing is sure though, the steering forces might have nothing to do with the front tire grip levels at all. Steering should mostly get lighter even before you've reached the maximum grip at the front. This effect is only small in GSCE at the moment.

The FFB in GSCE comes purely from physics, both the mechanical forces from 'jacking up the car' (in karts for an extreme example) and the tire forces pushing and pulling on the steering arms. The tire part of the feel is not perfect, this force doesn't drop off enough as slip angle increases. If anything though the FFB in GSCE is a better 'front grip indicator' than in real life.

But most of us have a G27, Thrustmaster or perhaps a Fanatec Clubsport wheel. These are increasingly good, but also quite different and in each case not quite powerful enough.

So we have:
- even pro drivers don't know what the real wheel feels like
- meaning that us simracers are probably no better...
- Most sim FFB wheels are limited in force, speed, FFB deadzone..

And you get pages of discussion on each sim on every forum about which is better..

For GSC, the realfeel.ini you can find the parameters:

MaxForceAtSteeringRack:
Larger number = less steering forces, also less clipping (if you had any before)
negative or positive numbers should be kept, so you can go from -4000 to -5000 to reduce the FFB and reduce clipping. If the car has a positive value, say 8000, going to 9000 will slightly reduce the steering forces and reduce clipping.

Making the values smaller does the opposite, but beware of clipping. You don't want the higher half of the forces to dissapear in a cloud of clipping.

SteeringDamper:
This is the max change of FFB per 'time unit' basically.. Smaller numbers will make make the wheel not react as quickly to fast changes in force. Its not a pure damper but kinda works like one.

We use 11500 everywhere because we want EVERY change in sim physics FFB to be sent to your wheel.

Perhaps if we ever do a 1950s Cadillac we may adjust this value but really just keep it at 11500.

FFBMixerRealFeelPercent
Leave at 100. Sure you can mix with 'vanilla' FFB or with LeoFFB but I would advise against that. You would just be adding more variables that are tricky to judge into a blend that you most likely don't quite have control over.. More parameters isn't always better! :)

FrontGripEffect
This will reduce FFB as tire slip angle increases. Fundamentally realistic but the execution isn't perfect because it also mutes the suspension forces, rather than just the tire forces. You can experiment between 0 and 1, I typically don't like to go beyond 0.25.

SmoothingLevel
This is just a smoothing filter which will attempt to smooth spikes in the FFB, at the cost of some latency. I prefer as low latency as possible so I always use 0, as we do in our supplied settings. Bigger cars like the Camaro will purely from their physics feel smoother in FFB than a kart for example.

Kf, Ks, A, Kr
These are the ''parking lot'' FFB parameters from LeoFFB. These are only active at very low speed, and should not be felt once you are driving, even in a hairpin.
Kf: is the maximum force you feel when the car stands still, to turn the tires. 11500 is max.
Ks: is the stiffness of the tires, a higher number will make it feel less 'elastic'
A: escapes me at the moment! sorry! :)
Kr: How fast all of the above fall away as car speed increases. At higher values the forces drop off quicker as you speed up.

These last 4 numbers should not affect the car at all at racing speed. They just give the steering some weight and elasticity when you stand still. This is because the proper physics are not active at 0km/h and only start to work when you pick up some speed.

Kr we have often at about 3, which is actually makes some of the standstill forces still remaining at low speeds.

Very important: Kf, Ks, A and Kr don't affect the feeling at normal speeds, unless Kr is too small or the slowest corner on the track is super super slow.

Separating RealFeel from the Parking Lot values
To tweak the actual driving forces, you can turn the parking stuff off by setting:
Kf=0

To feel just the parking lot forces and how they diminish as you go faster, use
MaxForceAtSteeringRack=1000000000

This makes the physics forces almost zero so all you feel are the Kf, Ks, A and Kr values. If you do that with Kr at 10 and then with Kr at 0.5, you will feel very well how these parking forces fall away with increasing car speed.


Quick and Easy:
Forces *when actually driving* are the most important.
Set Kr fairly high, say 6, to make sure the parking lot FFB is never active when you actually drive at speed.

Then all you have to tweak is the MaxForceAtSteeringRack as described above, and some subjective FrontGripEffect.

In game, the FFB strength % is a great way to change the overall forces you feel. FFB can be set to 'LOW' for most wheels.


High End Wheels (direct drive)
Higher end wheels might benefit from damping. This can either be adjusted globally in the controller.ini (userdata/yourname/controller.ini) :

FFB steer damper coefficient="0.17500"
FFB steer damper saturation="1.00000"

These are not used at LOW force settings, so you must run MEDIUM to enable. Keep saturation at 1.0, and adjust the damper from 0.17500 to whatever works for your wheel. On SimSteering wheels I tend to go up to about 0.7, but this can be different for other wheels, plus it is subjective!

Alternatively, possibly easier, you can leave the in game FFB at 'LOW' and apply some 'overall damping' in your wheel software. On SimSteering for example you can have this 'permanently active damping' this way.

Hope this helps!