Accuforce pro edition ffb wheel

The thing about the non DD wheels is that they can put out a reasonable amount of force but they dont do it in the envelope that is good for driving. MAybe its the smoothness of the DD, I dont know but you can easily handle higher forces and get the benefits of it. You can easily tell when grip is going when driving at higher forces. You can feel the edge so much better.

With the CSW and others you have to tune the FFB to avoid clipping and you are working well under those forces required to easily tell you what is happening even though those forces are not that hard to manage. You can never play in that envelope of forces because on the CSW you will end up with lots of clipping.

 

With the csw v1 it always felt dead around the center. Just drove it today and it was lacking that feel of what the car is doing when I change directions quickly.

 

The clipping is something that can be really limiting for many wheels, even if the wheel is robust enough to maintain higher force settings. It will be nice to eliminate that issue for the most part and have our physical limitations determine how we set things up vs. hardware limitations. It's always great to read about the increased range and dynamics offered by DD.

 

I would be very surprised if that was true. Last I heard SimXperience will offer another wheel to race teams only for fitness training. I don't believe the current wheel is a 25Nm wheel, though Berney has mentioned on the forums that they've experimented with a wide variety of motors, and one of them might have been a 25Nm before finalizing on what the final consumer product should use.

 

It was some time ago when that was posted but, in the scheme of things and based on the timelines for the various testing phases, I'd be very surprised if they changed the program so much as to swap out different motors. I think that it's more likely that they chose to go with more conservative settings for safety reasons. They may also be monitoring things for a time before saying anything further on the matter - makes sense IMO. From a business POV, it's better to take a conservative approach where safety is a concern.

 

Ok, so I tried:
Gain 50 Damper 50 - Wheel felt over dampened, yes drivable, but wheel didn't spin up as fast to recover from aligning torque, which made drifting very difficult.
Gain 50 Damper 25 - A bit better, but again, over dampened, with signs of oscillations.
Gain 20 Damper 25 - Dame as Gain 50 and Damper 50, but weaker. Required a lot of manual countersteer.

I couldn't find any setting from the sim that gave me as good feedback as the SimCommander FFB. This maybe specific to the AF and work perfectly fine for OSW, but AF with just AC settings doesn't seem right at all. It's either too dampened, or oscillates. Never quite feels natural.

 

I recently built a DIY servo wheel and am using 100% power in the driver, 30% in AC with 26% damping.
Its tolerable, but still oscillates in high speed (depends on car ofcourse). In lower speeds i dont get oscillation.

I think we need a speed sensitive damping control built in Assetto corsa for servo motor direct drive wheels, what do you think @Lord Kunos ?

 

Well I don't get why we have oscillations with 0 damper, given that these wheels are very fast and responsive. Shouldn't they self-align with no extra effects?

 

From my reading, it seems all wheels will have some degree of oscillation, it comes down to software solutions to solve it either in-game or driver.

 

So oscillations come from servo overshooting?

 

The servo is not overshooting as such. You are possibly used to a servo that is given a position to go to, like in a CNC application. I.e., servo is told to rotate 37.878 degrees... In this case the servo, depending on it's parameters for movement could overshoot and then come back.

For this mode it works differently, it is being told to move in a direction with x amount of torque and it will do that until it is told to do differently. Of course there are many such instructions per second and it all depends on what the car is doing and the user input influences that.

Essentially the game works out the torque on the steering rack and asks the wheel to exert the same force, so it is different than a servo working in positional mode.

 

That's the same with my G25, dead when driving straight ahead for a few degrees left and right of centre. I had assumed the CSW would be better in this respect.

I find the FFB dead zone a major break in immersion, it just doesn't provide that solid stable feel like a real car does when driving straight.

 

Not exactly like dead going in a straight line but that resistance you feel when the wheel changes direction. It just feels lifeless and I have to interpret what the car will do instead of what the car is doing. I'm hoping the af will remedy this for me. Also without my rig giving any motion, I have to rely on the wheel that much more.

 

Makes me think it'd be a better solution to have the game send the center point + force, so the on-wheel software can fill in the spaces more intelligently. If you're just a few degrees off center but sending high forces (due to high steering force car) you need quicker updates than FFB sends.

 

That would be nice. They could also do what iRacing is doing in allowing the controller to send a flag that would disable any filtering/effects and let the whee's driver decide what to do with them. This is what the AF does there and the results are impressive, even though the standard FFB is pretty good.

 

Yeah, the lack of forces near center really can hurt immersion and adding center-spring has detrimental affect on the overall FFB by nullifying other frequencies. I think the increased range of DD should help with that and the AF reviews seem to support that.

I also read that Berney & Co. are working on implementing some brake-lock specific feedback to SC4. That could prove quite useful.

 

Turns out SimCommander also captures feedback from the front suspension, which works really well in AC. Where before driving down Spa felt like driving over glass, with this effect you can feel every bump. Also makes you think twice driving over any of the alligator strips. It can be pretty intense.

 

Here is a quick introduction to AccuForce Analytics that attempts highlight some clipping related features
http://simxperience.com/Portals/0/Videos/AccuForceAnalyticsIntro/AccuForceAnalyticsIntro.html

 

Seems like a very good utility. Especially for non-direct drive because if you have enough power its not easy to suffer any clipping.

 

We discovered an issue with AC and SC4 where the "Road Rumble" effect found under "Road Bumps" in SC4 causes violent spikes in the FFB. This is only an issue when using SC4 to drive the FFB but, it can totally ruin FFB by inducing dead-spots followed by spikes and jerks of the wheel into the FFB. The result is like energy building up in a capacitor and then suddenly released at a certain point, all at once. This effect was not immediately apparent, it took a few laps to begin to slowly reveal itself and then continued to increase in frequency. When the RR slider was moved to zero, the spikes completely stopped and normal FFB function was restored.

The absence of the particular effect is not a major deal as the road rumble seems to be the fine detail in the track surface but, it is vital to understand the cause and effect for good FFB in AC if one want's to use SC4 to drive FFB until a fix is found. AC's suspension-data output seems to be well up to the task of filling any voids, adding some fine detail by mixing in some low-frequency Suspension Bumps. This is very effective in filling out the FFB in AC if you don't like the lifeless wheel feel on straights and certain track sections - i.e., mega detail, full-featured FFB, especially when using some level of engine vibration.

The only things missing IMO are that of engine-torque feel and shifts. Of course, these are small details but, for immersion players, these can add a lot to the overall experience. Pcars does this really well and it is a great effect to feel the engine-torque when stomping the throttle, and bouncing off the rev-limiter. Shift-engagements can also be felt through the wheel quite noticeably. This is all done without taking away from the vital FFB information we all rely on to handle the car. I hope that Kunos sees fit to add these effects to AC's FFB output via telemetry.

One of the major advantages to using SC4 to drive the FFB (there are many IMO) is that one is able to reduce the Self-Aligning-Torque to any level you are comfortable with while still feeling the effects at the levels desired - so great. Again, this can all be done on a per-car/per-track basis so each car can have the FFB characteristics one wants - whether it be for competition or for immersion purposes. In fact, I believe this level of customization can actually satisfy both player-types at the same time if you find yourself somewhere in-between. Personal SC4 profiles can also easily be shared with others and one can use an app on other devices to change settings in SC4 while in-game. The software is loaded with Easter Eggs.