Not getting any response to throttle or shifter

[Andrew Nagy]

Hello,
It's been several months since I've used my simulator, and I'm afraid I'm having a problem. When I open a practice session, as I sit in the pits, I get no response when I press the throttle, and when I try to shift from neutral into first, it indicates that the shift was successful, but then it immediately drops back into neutral. I've had this problem in the past, and turning off and then turning back on my wheelbase (a Fanatec Podium DD1) has always resolved it, but not this time. I've updated all my firmware (I have a 100% Fanatec system) to the latest versions, but that hasn't helped. Does this problem sound more like an issue with my system, or an issue with the game? I have other issues as well, but I'd like to focus on this one first to at least get back underway. Thanks.

 

[Lazza]

If the controls respond properly in the rF2 calibration screen you can rule out controller issues.

Then it's vehicle status, and game functions.

Vehicle: is the engine running? Can't rev an engine that's off

Game: are driving assists like auto pitlane turned off?

 

[Andrew Nagy]

Hi Lazza,

Thanks for your usual quick response. Haha, that's a fair question about whether my engine is running - it would be just like me to not notice something as obvious as that. But yes, the engine turns on and idles normally. This is my first experience with the new GUI (I like it - it looks very clean and professional), so I had to search a little bit to find the calibration screen, but I actually found it pretty easily. The performance of the throttle and brake calibration is very weird: When I press the throttle, the brake status bar, not the throttle's, moves from 0 to 100%. But when I press the brake pedal, there's no response on either the throttle's or the brake's status bar. This sounds more like a hardware or connection problem than an issue with RF2, but there isn't a separate connection for the throttle and brake on my Fanatec Clubsport V3 pedals, and the one wire is connected to the wheel base (I've never disconnected it since I first fired up my rig).

Auto shift was turned on - when I turned it off, it corrected my shifter issues - I'm now able to upshift and downshift through the gears, so that's progress - thanks for the suggestion.

Any thoughts as to the cause of the weird, semi-reversed response of the throttle and brake calibrations? Thanks.

 

[Lazza]

Hi Lazza,

Thanks for your usual quick response. Haha, that's a fair question about whether my engine is running - it would be just like me to not notice something as obvious as that. But yes, the engine turns on and idles normally. This is my first experience with the new GUI (I like it - it looks very clean and professional), so I had to search a little bit to find the calibration screen, but I actually found it pretty easily. The performance of the throttle and brake calibration is very weird: When I press the throttle, the brake status bar, not the throttle's, moves from 0 to 100%. But when I press the brake pedal, there's no response on either the throttle's or the brake's status bar. This sounds more like a hardware or connection problem than an issue with RF2, but there isn't a separate connection for the throttle and brake on my Fanatec Clubsport V3 pedals, and the one wire is connected to the wheel base (I've never disconnected it since I first fired up my rig).

Auto shift was turned on - when I turned it off, it corrected my shifter issues - I'm now able to upshift and downshift through the gears, so that's progress - thanks for the suggestion.

Any thoughts as to the cause of the weird, semi-reversed response of the throttle and brake calibrations? Thanks.

Not really, maybe something switched around since your last run but it seems a bit strange. I recall you had some issues previously with erratic controls so maybe related.

Anyway, you may get away with simply reassigning the controls that aren't working.

 

[lagg]

Hi Lazza,

Thanks for your usual quick response. Haha, that's a fair question about whether my engine is running - it would be just like me to not notice something as obvious as that. But yes, the engine turns on and idles normally. This is my first experience with the new GUI (I like it - it looks very clean and professional), so I had to search a little bit to find the calibration screen, but I actually found it pretty easily. The performance of the throttle and brake calibration is very weird: When I press the throttle, the brake status bar, not the throttle's, moves from 0 to 100%. But when I press the brake pedal, there's no response on either the throttle's or the brake's status bar. This sounds more like a hardware or connection problem than an issue with RF2, but there isn't a separate connection for the throttle and brake on my Fanatec Clubsport V3 pedals, and the one wire is connected to the wheel base (I've never disconnected it since I first fired up my rig).

Auto shift was turned on - when I turned it off, it corrected my shifter issues - I'm now able to upshift and downshift through the gears, so that's progress - thanks for the suggestion.

Any thoughts as to the cause of the weird, semi-reversed response of the throttle and brake calibrations? Thanks.

I think that you don't have assigned correctly your pedals.
Go to the Assign Controls page and check how is assigned every pedal.

 

[Andrew Nagy]

More progress, although, as usual, I have no clue what I'm doing. I went to the Assign Controls page as you guys have suggested. I selected Throttle first, and the message 'Press key or controller (esc to skip) - Throttle' comes up. Not having any idea what that means, I went ahead and pressed the throttle to the floor, hoping that by some magic RF2 will recognize this action and assign the throttle in the game to the throttle pedal on my sim. But after doing that, it still says "Empty' next to 'Throttle' in the list. I did the same thing with the brake, with the same result. Then I went to the Calibrate Controls screen, and now the throttle registers from 0 to 100% on the blue status bar when I depress the throttle. But I still get no response when I press the brake or the clutch. But at least now I can drive the car, which I couldn't before, so purely by dumb luck, I made some progress. Could one of you please explain how the Assign Controls function is supposed to work, and what it actually does? I know my questions are always kindergarten basic, but I have zero background in any kind of gaming, so everything I'm doing in RF2 is a completely new experience. Thanks for your help and patience.

 

[Lazza]

More progress, although, as usual, I have no clue what I'm doing. I went to the Assign Controls page as you guys have suggested. I selected Throttle first, and the message 'Press key or controller (esc to skip) - Throttle' comes up. Not having any idea what that means, I went ahead and pressed the throttle to the floor, hoping that by some magic RF2 will recognize this action and assign the throttle in the game to the throttle pedal on my sim. But after doing that, it still says "Empty' next to 'Throttle' in the list. I did the same thing with the brake, with the same result. Then I went to the Calibrate Controls screen, and now the throttle registers from 0 to 100% on the blue status bar when I depress the throttle. But I still get no response when I press the brake or the clutch. But at least now I can drive the car, which I couldn't before, so purely by dumb luck, I made some progress. Could one of you please explain how the Assign Controls function is supposed to work, and what it actually does? I know my questions are always kindergarten basic, but I have zero background in any kind of gaming, so everything I'm doing in RF2 is a completely new experience. Thanks for your help and patience.

It should be exactly what you described - you click the desired control to assign, it says "press key or controller", you press the pedal or button or move the wheel (as appropriate) and the game will assign whatever you're pressing/moving to that control. You don't press the pedal or whatever until the game is asking for it.

It's not unusual to have to do this occasionally, sometimes the controller combination changes and the controls aren't assigned correctly. It should be a straightforward process.

The only cautionary note is that you can assign alternate controls for some of them, so find them and make sure they're empty. *** see below ***

I think these days the UI should update the assigned control properly, but at one point it wasn't showing the settings correctly so be wary of that. The calibration screen is your best indicator for things being assigned correctly.


Slightly more advanced, but worth checking if you can't work it out: the calibration screen has set min and set max buttons for the pedals. You can click these to define the axis extents, and it's immediate. So for a pedal, you don't touch the pedal and click Set Min. Then fully press the pedal and press Set Max.


*Edit @Andrew Nagy just to illustrate the alternate controls thing: see up the top there's Throttle, Brake, etc... and down the bottom there's Alt throttle, Alt brake, etc.



You want to keep the bottom ones -EMPTY- unless you have a good reason to have 2 controls assigned to the same thing, to avoid confusion. So make sure you're reassigning those top ones only.

 

[Andrew Nagy]

My Car Controls screen looks like this:

The throttle and clutch now behave normally when I calibrate them, but still no response from the brake pedal, although the brakes appear to be behaving normally when I drive in the game.

 

[Lazza]

My Car Controls screen looks like this:
View attachment 47276

The throttle and clutch now behave normally when I calibrate them, but still no response from the brake pedal, although the brakes appear to be behaving normally when I drive in the game.

That makes zero sense to me. You have the most amazing issues sometimes Does the brake behave correctly in the calibration screen?

This assigning controls stuff is something you should become familiar with because as I said it's not that unusual that they get messed up. Redoing the driving controls should take all of about 40 seconds to completely reassign.

If it's behaving ok you have I think 3 options:

• Leave it until it doesn't work again.
• Reassign the brake as above, and set its limits as above, and see if everything then looks and operates correctly (should show the assigned axis instead of empty).
• Remove the Userdata\player\controller.json file with the game closed, restart it and assign all controls as necessary.

This assigning controls stuff is something you do in basically all games, but I know you aren't a gamer. It doesn't normally cause issues, but starting with a fresh controller file can help rF2 oddities.

 

[Andrew Nagy]

Yes, I do have the strangest issues - more often than not, they're self-inflicted, but this doesn't really appear to be the case this time. So here's the latest; I had a couple of other issues (steering wheel in the game turning a lot more than the physical wheel, and the images not displaying correctly across my triple monitors). I'm proud to say I was able to resolve both of these issues on my own(!), so I took the virtual car for a drive, and discovered a couple of things. First, the speed limiter appears to be on, although I'm not seeing evidence of that on the assign controls screen. I used to have one of the buttons on my steering wheel assigned to turn off the speed limiter, but when I try to assign them to that now, I get a message that that button is already in use for something else(?). Second, contrary to my initial impression (which was clouded by the hyper-sensitivity of the steering before I corrected it), the brakes aren't working in the game at all. Here's my assign controls screen:

Does anything look out of whack on this screen that might explain my issues? To be honest, I still don't understand what this screen is telling me or what the items in it even does. What does "JOY1 [ ]" mean? I assume JOY stands for joystick, but that doesn't mean anything to me in this context. These controls look to me like things that enable you to make adjustments to the car on the fly, which I have no interest in doing. What does it mean when one of the controls is empty? Thanks again for all the help - hopefully it will all start working again soon.

 

[Andrew Nagy]

Edit: The brake issue appears to be a problem with my pedal assembly - When I go to the Fanatec control, I get no response when I press the brake (the throttle and clutch are working normally). So this particular issue doesn't appear to have anything to do with rFactor2.

 

[Lazza]

To be honest, I still don't understand what this screen is telling me or what the items in it even does. What does "JOY1 [ ]" mean? I assume JOY stands for joystick, but that doesn't mean anything to me in this context. These controls look to me like things that enable you to make adjustments to the car on the fly, which I have no interest in doing. What does it mean when one of the controls is empty? Thanks again for all the help - hopefully it will all start working again soon.

Basically all games have screens like this. In the old days games would have you using the arrow keys to move your character around, and sometimes you'd press other keys to do certain things - you might press P to pick something up, D to drop something, that sort of thing. The manual told you which keys did what, and you had to use those keys.

At some point some games let you choose which keys did what, for at least some controls. Driving games for example, they might default to the arrow keys for accelerating braking and turning, but you could change them to other keys. So the game will show "Throttle" and have "Up arrow" next to it, indicating what's what you use for Throttle. Then you reassign it to the A key, and now it shows "A" next to "Throttle".

So it's literally just a map of what controls you've set up to use for each game function. Most of the ones on that screen you probably aren't using and don't need to worry about.

Joy 1 will usually be your main controller, and if you only have a single wheel (with its own pedals) plugged in you'll only see Joy 1 there. I have a separate shifter and for me that's Joy 2, some people have separate wheel and pedals and shifter and button boxes and game controllers so Joy 1 and Joy 2 and Joy 3 and Joy 4 and Joy 5 and ... and ... ('Joy' does indeed mean Joystick, as a leftover from the early days when the only thing you'd plug into the game port was a joystick. Then we got wheels )


You might at some point drive a car that lets you adjust the ARB while driving the car, and right now you don't have anything assigned to that (hence they say EMPTY). So if you want to use that feature of the car, you'll need to choose a button/key to use for those things, and use that page to assign them.

Your speed limiter is empty, and if you're trying to assign a button for that and the game says it's already in use that means whatever button you're pressing is already assigned to another control. It'll actually be telling you what you're currently using that button for. It's up to you to decide which buttons you want to use for the various functions.

*Edit: I didn't mention your brake discovery as it's self-explanatory, but just to acknowledge it: well, that makes sense why the game isn't picking it up! You'll have to look into why that's stopped registering inputs - hopefully just something loose on your pedals. Once you get that sorted and it's working in the fanatec software, it should be easy to assign in rF2 as above.

 

[Andrew Nagy]

Thanks for taking the time to provide that nice explanation. The assign controls screen has always confused me, because I never understood why anyone would want keys on the keyboard to control things that are controlled by the pedals and steering wheel, other than, say, the speed limiter. But unfortunately, with my brake pedal being dead (I removed the pedal assembly from my cockpit, and checked for obvious things like a loose wire, but I'm not seeing anything), I'm afraid I have the arduous task of contacting Fanatec's support and sending it back ahead of me. From the comments I've read about Fanatec's customer service, it could be a very long wait before I'm able to try playing my sim again, and it looks like it doesn't like sitting idle for long periods of time, so I could be in for some new issues when I'm able to fire it up again.