I am able to drive my quickest ever - relative to the car's ultimate laptime potential - and my most consistent ever in any sim based on an ISI pre-rF2 engine than I can on any other sim. Why? Because I could tune the FFB to tell me about all 4 wheel rotation speeds, front slip angle, how much i'm into the slip angle, how much I need to dial back before ai regain grip again, hell I could even feel the difference between rear getting loose because of a bad downshift-blip rather than having too much rear-brake. I could achieve top 5 GTL Rank and rF Rank times in almost anycar, and every single car in GTL. This is all down to being able to tune that FFB for me to feel what I need and want to feel from a car in order to push it to the limit and keep it there. This, to me, is more realistic OVERALL to pushing a car, even though - on paper - strictly just steering arm/rack forces is most realistic. I've been repeating this for years as why rF1 style FFB can be the best (once you put time into tuning it to what you need to feel from the car), but 95% of people seem to think I'm crazy and would rather have a wheel that feels nice and natural in the actual steering of the car feelings, but that tells you much less grip/slip/chassis info. I would rather have a wheel that does NOT feel natural in it's steering feel (even weird and unrealistic to many people) BUT (and this is a huge "but") it successfully transmits a crap-load of information about slip & grip angles, chassis dynamics, hell even engine revs and tyre rotation speeds can be felt in rF1 FFB. I could use the engine revs FFB to tell me about drive-wheel lockup and use that to out-brake almost anyone without having to resort to as much rear-brake as them - it was almost unfair the amount of the braking lock-up and limits info I could recieve. It baffles me that most people not only don't care for all this info, but even turn it off and advise others to turn it off. I mean how many people and forum threads advise people to change most of the "fake" rF1 forces to "0" in the controller file, and how many people and forum threads advise people to set the rF1 FFB to "Low", rather than "Full" or "High" so as to get rid of "fake" forces. Then people wonder why I can use more front brake balance, a more attacking and slightly understeering/more stable setup, and still blow them away on braking and corner entry, because I can get away with less rear-brake and oversteer in my setup in rF1 based sims because I DON'T turn all the "fake" car-info FFB effects off ("0" in the controller file) and I DON'T turn my rF1 FFB efects level to "Low". Man, I feel like I'm cheating compared to the others because of all the extra info I get, even if the steering feel itself may not be as nice, natural and realistic (unfortunately it's this natural and realstic steering feel that most people want, even at the expense of pure laptime-gaining knowledge info - it blows my mind). I've been saying this about all sims, compared to rF1 (and any ISI pre-rF2 engine based sim) for years now, even before rF2 came out. Most people just don't get it and think I'm crazy, lol
AC does have the option for canned effects, but does not enforce them. That said, this is beginning to be properly OT, so instead I'll answer to the original topic. No, I don't think the press is treating rF2, or other sims for that matter, unfairly. Each are appreciated for their respective strengths.
AC's canned effects are junk, they aren't even close to the super intricate ways you could tune and edit the "canned" effects in pre-rF2 ISI based sims - not even in the same universe.
I had the feeling with AC as i've tested last and it was a long time ago it would load up with to much vertical forces to build lateral acc resistance on the steering, while rf2 leaves the impression to use actually to less vertical load to build Fy forces transmitted to the steering arms. This is the main difference imho and why people have the impression of AC would better represent load variables and wheight shifting, because there FFB is dominated by vertical offset as i can rate it. The last builds of rf2 did make it even worse, while it was better before. The historics loose there character with nearly zero vertical dynamics such as steer bump effects in the steering, as example and an indicator for me that something is WIP again.
Thanks for your sharing. May I offer my thoughts on this? I think you confuse between sole FFB feel and collective feels from all your sensory. The FFB is just FFB, you cannot feel all (such as you described) from FFB. It makes no logical sense, though. It sounds like you are saying “my hands can see and can hear”. I worked on non-liner modeling before by using Neural-network. Here is what happening in your brain. There are three sets of input information in this case: 1) from your eyes (see on your monitors); 2) from your ears (hear from your spks); 3) from your hands (feel on your wheel). If all those feeds are numerical, usually, most effective/efficient way for your “brain/neural-network” to learn/train is that those three sets of information are diagonalized (de-correlated). However, in this case, all three sets of info are in fuzzy dynamic patterns instead, thus diagonalization process is not obvious. When you fine-tuned the FFB setting, you might have actually been under a “diagonalization” process against your eyes and ears inputs to max sensitivity and efficiency. Your final learned results still came from your collective information (eyes, ears and hands). But you are diluted to think all came from your FFB. Here are two simple tests may prove that: a) turn off your spk, then see if the original setting of FFB still produce consistent best of your lap time. b) Use different screen setup (change to triple-screen if you were using single one or vice verse) to try…. In a), you actually alter input 2), thus you may find another setting of FFB is “optimal” for you. In b), you altered the input 1) hence you may find different FFB setting too.
I can play rF1 based sims with my speakers off and with my eyes closed and still feel this stuff. I can change FFB settings in the controller file and then again play with no audio or visual cues and feel what I'm lacking or what I have gained with regards to FFB info. It's not some sort of delusion. I have no idea why you would think this. 'm not trying to be rude but I feel I need to be a little blunt here - your entire post is extremely incorrect and just completely "off".
Hi Spinelli: I am sorry that you somehow feel my comments offend to you. It is not my intention or by any means of offend or rude to you. Maybe just my wording not properly caused misunderstanding. As you said: “....but 95% of people seem to think I'm crazy and would rather have a wheel that feels nice and natural in the actual steering of the car feelings, but that tells you much less grip/slip/chassis info……Most people just don't get it and think i'm crazy, lol”, I am one of those 95% people. I just try to help and simulate a discussion on this subject, which seems pretty interest to me. In regarding “…hell even engine revs and tyre rotation speeds can be felt in rF1 FFB.”, well, we all know the fact of that RPM is strongly correlated with your gas pedal (throttle) and shifting, and far less correlated with FFB, though. If you turned Monitor and spk off, the inputs of RPM to your brain could be mainly from your feels of foot on throttle and hand on shifting action. Because you could have been trained at subconscious level so that feels of foot and shifting action are not registered in your conscious part of brain while driving (they might be naturally stored in your muscle memory). Hence you could have felt all came from your FFB feel. On question: why you feel that way on rF1, but not rF2? I think rF1 “physics” much simpler than rF2. Keep in mind that both rF1 and rF2 are not true real-time though. Main parts of dynamics were pre-calculated against many possible conditions and hence stored in large lookup tables in cache so they can be accessed at very fast rate (~360Hz) --- near real-time. Say if rF1 lookup tables are far smaller than rF2, which means that rF1 has less “patterns” than rF2. Then it could be easier for one to train rF1 than rF2 and indeed one might memorize those “patterns” in rF1. I think this is exactly what you experienced in rF1 (you can drive without speakers and monitors).
I think that given that the corvette of isi is as fast as the urd mod, people should mix them and run races with both of them, everybody would be able to enjoy the FF. Personally i love them both, they transmit different things to the wheel, but I enjoy driving them both. Frankly I have to say that I was very dissapointed with rfactor 2 a year ago, My time was always spent in Assetto, but I have to say that with the current state, I enjoy driving in rfactor 2 more than AC, the graphics in my Radeon r9 290 have improved dramatically, the performance is better than assetto with everything maxxed out and The Ai is challenging but fair. Only thing missing for me is an offline championship. I would love that.
It is a very poo conversion - on all levels - of a very old (over a year and a half old) early build version of pCARS' Audi LMP.
Cheers Guimengo, I just found this info out a short while ago... appreciate you posting though. Thanks.
The steering arm bone is connected to the suspension bone and the suspension bone is connected to the tire bone and the tire bone is connected to the track bone... ect ect. Hahaha. Seriously though. The steering arm is connected to the suspension and the wheel/tire is connected to the suspension. So naturally tire loads are transferred through all the parts all the way to the FFB. Like in real life. This is why changing the alignment impacts the FFB. Again, just like in real life. It all works out perfect and realistically. It's actually very simplistic. Just as RealFeel was in rF1/GSC. The only downfall is flat curbs aren't felt in the sim as you would expect. But most tracks have 3D curbs now. So they pull and shake like one would expect. Some crap converted tracks may not have 3D curbs though.
Interesting debate, but I am left wondering what these famous Spinelli "feel all settings" look like? Just curious?
Don't confuse the one found randomly on the internet with the R18 we are running at VEC. The one we are using this season at VEC was converted by URD as a placeholder until their mod is done. It also has URD beta physics. But last season we ran the R18 that is in the wild but we have a modeler on our team (WiZPER) that took that crap conversion and made it look WAY better. It also had different tires and physics.
Thank you Noel good post. I claim that the pedals are the most important input device in real life racing and sim racing......more gasoline when it burns
