Extremely Dangerous Unexpected Behavior in rF2

Thanks for the (honest) answer. I thought it shouldn’t be hard to fix though. There have been some rather simple solutions proposed in this thread. One would be to limit torque to e.g. 1Nm or speed when centering the wheel. If it’s not that simple then at least you could introduce a warning message so that user should let go of the wheel and only after he acknowledges the warning the wheel would center.

 

Another workaround would be to not reset the wheel at all.

 

I use to have the AccuForce Pro V2 and this was something that happened from time to time even in iRacing.
iRacing was mostly when crossing the start finish line there was a Jolt for some reason.

rFactor 2 had a similar event also at start finish or crossing the green pit lights. Seems to possibly be related to design and also DD specific.

I have el cheapo wheel now and it does not occur this way. Also min. force feedback and dampening was something that helped where it seems that going from zero force feedback with no dampening to game created effect of dampening or adding feedback created some type of jolt feedback in the control.

I don't know really but just I recall adding some dampening to the wheel and setting min. force feedback in game helped.
I don't know why el cheapo seems unaffected by this.

However, I can say that setting my wheel lock / ratio too low causes el cheapo to over react even down pit lane it makes all sort of racket and noise, and vibrates like crazy. I have no idea why but Le Mans for example.

If I set steering rotation to 900 and lock anything less then 200 then the wheel is crazy. I have no doubt that Accurforce would have tossed me out of the chair LOL.

Anyhow I would experiment with lock to see if there is a calc issue that might be creating this problem.
Only thing I can think of that seemed to help adjust some of this.

 

@Coutie
A year passed since last message and the problem hasn’t been fixed. When I click Restart race, wheel tries to re-center. For me it’s usually only around 5Nm of force, so it’s not that dangerous. But yesterday I restarted race quickly after a big crash and it felt like it used maximum force or near maximum of my SC2 Pro. If I weren’t prepared for that it could easily break my fingers or worse.
Please give it a higher priority

 

I thought it was resolved. For the last recent months, I only remember a few times where I have experienced something like this. Though I still keep my fingers away when restarting etc. just in case.

 

Simucube Pro, same problem here…

 

Moza user here, i don´t have that problem, but had with other wheels, maybe because in the Moza software we have a function to mitigate that or solve that. I also don´t use dampening in the software, it doesn´t feel natural, but is the default for rf2 in the Moza software, some dampening.

Sorry, forget my post, haven´t read all the forum before posting.

 

any news on this? It is definitely strong...

 

Happen to be one + residing in the Netherlands (S397=Dutch); issue not resolved yet, after so many years of warnings on their own forum, interesting case ...

 

Are you going to take it on? I am curious what your take on this is given that S397 does not make or sell the hardware and accesses it via an API that is designed by a third party (Microsoft). Also I wonder if all of the direct drive wheels we are talking about have proper CE certifications for each of the countries they are sold in.

My take on this is that these wheels are not toys. Most come with emergency stops. Probably all of them also contain warnings about the forces they can produce. No game by itself can make any of these products safe. They need such protections in the firmware, because you can also get spikes when a process that is sending it data crashes or has a bug. Some firmware has a form of protection even today. In any case these wheels are dangerous and should be treated as such.

 

Thanks for your insight.

First, there should naturally be a legally relevant interest (injury, for example, but not difficult), and for the sake of certainty, both S397 and Granite Devices (in my case) will have to be summoned. The case will likely be quite complicated, but my feeling is that it is not an impossible task from the outset.

We have all been sufficiently warned by the producers of these motors, but this does not negate the fact that every effort should be made to recognise and resolve evidently dangerous situations caused repetitively by the same software by those responsible.

Be that as it may, I would probably only go for it with Marcel Offermans as my technical expert.

 

My standpoint has always been that the most effective solution would be a limitation of forces at the firmware level. So whatever the software sends, it needs to pass through a filter that will limit certain maximum forces (probably partially user configurable). As an analogy, you typically also see such limits enforced by professional motion platforms (hexapods). Of course it won't be bad if the actual game also imposes some limits but that will never be a guarantee by itself. So as a user community I would encourage people to ask their wheel manufacturers to start addressing this. And to accept the consequences of this, meaning in some situations you will not feel the raw forces calculated by the physics.

 

If Must have already been mentioned.

1. never restart races, close session even rF2 and use the replay or start a fresh session.
Of course you well know the implications of fresh session so I would be running replays 24/7 if i was in that situation.

2. rF2 does not do well "restarting" it screws with things depending on exact conditions at the time like hardware resources and oh trying to strain your wrist or worse.

rF2 you work around issues that is ISIMotor.

Things like this you can work around but people ignore advice is why rF2 is down to 71% and most others are 91% or better

 

That’s a BS attempt to remove responsibility form S397. RaceRoom had similar (but less dangerous) issue for a year or so and they fixed it. All other sims do access wheelbases via the same API and no other sim I tried (tried most of them) has such issues.
“No game by itself can make any of these products safe.” - that’s a fallacy as literally no one in this thread asked for it or even suggested it. No one here asks to ameliorate crash FFB spikes etc.

 

If fixing these issues is so hard then perhaps S397 could add an option: “DO NOT center a wheel” to remove auto centering of a wheel all together?

 

Anyway, I think users of these wheels shouldn't ever rest their hands on the wheel and should handle them cautiously when driving. Maybe a consent message could be shown so the user declares that they know the risks and will use the wheel with extreme caution. I wouldn't ever play games with something that can cut me a finger off but if I'd do I'd be extra careful.

 

I'm not suggesting the rF2 issue should not be fixed but, sudden interrupt events can occur in any ANY game. When that happens, full FFB torque may be applied - period. It's why we have the safety kill switch with powerful DD-wheels. If it was easy to avoid that, those kill switches would not be needed in the first place.

We DD-wheel users, need to understand our personal responsibility in taking steps to protect ourselves, just as a wise person checks for traffic when crossing the street - no matter what local laws exist pertaining to pedestrian crossing right-of-way. Running a powerful DD wheel at full tilt comes with greater risk of injury. That is fact. I believe the claim that Max output provides the best FFB to be false. While it does help to avoid ffb signal clipping, the end result is a tradeoff, not a win-win solution. There are better ways to setup the ffb for great ffb + safety.

 

I must say I have never experienced any of these issues with a Moza wheelbase.
I can restart a race (via button or menu), no matter what the wheel's position is — if it's crooked then I will just start the race turning in... Or I can run into a wall going 300km/h and hardly experience a blip.
The Moza wheel is getting the same impulses as other wheels (heck, rF2 doesn't even know Moza). So it does seem to come down to how good a job the wheel's driver software is doing at filtering out excessive spikes.

 

“but sudden interrupt events can occur in any ANY game.” - Somehow it doesn’t happen in other sims (with exception of the R3E issue (already fixed) as I mentioned above).
“It's why we have the safety kill switch with powerful DD-wheels” - it won’t help with the issue we are discussing in this thread.
It did help me with other issue which happens(rarely) in multiplayer when the wheel starts to turn left and right with full( or at least very high) force.

 

I don’t know how Moza does it , but if hitting a wall at 300/h or hitting a high curb doesn’t cause strong jolt then it might just dampen all sudden , strong jolts regardless of the source of such signal - which often may not be desired because most of them may come purely from physics engine. So it probably has some drawbacks this way or another. In Simucube TD software you can also significantly lower slew rate(like >10 times slower than advertised speed) and add a lot of damping to ameliorate collisions FFB. Also I think iRacing introduced some collision detection algorithm a year ago or so, so that it significantly dampens FFB in case of collisions etc. R3E has a slider that allows you to purposely clip all forces above a given force. So there are ways around such issues at wheelbase firmware/ software level as well as sim/game’s level.