rFactor Better FFB Tutorial

DOWNLOAD UPDATED!! (Oct 8th, 2011)

I recently got hold of a friends iRacing account because he insisted I needed to feel this "incredible" "amazing" and "realistic" Force Feedback that he and other iRacing enthusiasts have been touting on-infinitum. I had no doubt that it would be better then rFactor's as rF's age has put it at a disadvantage. I tested with every car in the account on several tracks to get a "feel" for what the iR ffb was actually doing.

I was confident in my ability to duplicate it in rF, I spent the next week searching, tweaking, tweaking and then I did some tweaking to rFactors default Controller.ini, Realfeel and Leo's FFB.

With this concoction of a modified Controller.ini, modified default RealFeel (Thanks goes to this guy's tutorial for the original modification ideas http://www.eoaa.org/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php?t=338) and the painfully difficult editing of Leo's FFB settings. I was finally able to settle and do some testing (and more tweaking).

What this FFB will do is... Well you have to feel it. I think this feels better than iRacing. You will need to adjust every car with realfeel's numpad hotkey's, but with these settings I feel every crevice and bump in the road. I can feel the brakes lock up and the steering goes numb. A locked up tire will pull the steering wheel. I can even feel the slight pressure difference on the steering as the front of the car goes up and over hills and then gently lands again.

===TUTORIAL START================================

For all the Fanatec users, remove the PorscheWheelPlugin.dll from your plugins folder as it interferes with this!


I am using a G27 with a larger wheel than stock and used both 900 and 720 degrees of rotation for testing. Some forces may be set stronger for me than you would like but adjustment is pretty simple.

1} Download this zip. (Updated As of 100811) It contains all the plugins you need with the default settings set already. http://www.mediafire.com/?4f1r9k5oiyqbdxo

2} Move the files to their appropriate location Overwrite or remove any previous versions of Leo's or Realfeel!
2011-02-23_031738.png


3} Change the lines in your rFactor\userdata\yourname\Controller.ini There is a copy of them in the zip but I will post them here as well. http://paste2.org/p/1263317

4} Go to your Driving wheels control panel and set it up as follows. Even if you aren't using a logitech the spring, damper and strength setting should still be somewhere.
2011-02-23_015932.png


5} Change the "Front Wheel Lock Angle" line in rFactor\plugins\LeoFFB.ini

The very first line should be changed to your preferred steering lock used in "most" mods. Sometimes this won't be correct if a mod limits the angle but use an average. I use 22° if on 720° of wheel rotation and 28° if running 900° and the mod allows it.
2011-02-23_015858.png


6} Testing Once in-game you will not have to edit anything. Load a car such as HistorX or the Lotus23's or any mod that works with realfeel. I RECOMMEND USING A REAR WHEEL DRIVE CAR FOR A FIRST TEST!! When you go on track you WILL NO LONGER hear a voice say "realfeel is enabled" This was disabled in the newest realfeel. While sitting still you should find it difficult to turn the wheels and the steering wheel should stay where you turn it. This means that the Leo's is installed correctly.

** If you have severe oscillation when not moving simply lower the "Stiffness of Stationary wheels" value in the LeoFFB.ini

7} Adjusting the FFB
This is the hot key config used by RealFeel. The only things you should be concerning yourself with are the "Reverse FF", "Stronger FF", "Softer FF", "Decrease RFP mix" and "More Smooting" options.
12-Jul-09-rFactorCentral-4808_ReelFeel.jpg


A} Immediately in every new car you use set the RealFeelMix down to 90% (RIGHT CTRL + NUM 1) it will allow the Leo's road bump effects, rumble strips and grass effects to be felt. If you forget to do this the following adjustments will be off.

B} Drive the car at a decent pace turning back and forth. Once rolling ~25 mph you should be able to feel if the FFB is in the correct direction (Pulling to the center) or if the mod has the geometry backward (your steering wheel tries to go all the way left or right.) If it is backward you need to press "RIGHT CTRL + NUM 8". This will reverse the FFB for that particular car and you can continue.

** Note, when rolling forward for the first time around 12 MPH you should feel the Leo's stiffness fade and realfeel will take over. With some mods this transition is transparent in others there is a slight wheel shutter.

C} If the force is too strong you can use either (LEFT CTRL + NUM 9) to lower the FFB strength by 1,000 or (RIGHT CTRL + NUM 9) to lower by 100. Use NUM 7 to make it stronger. Drive for a while at high and low speeds, braking hitting rumble strips etc before finalizing this number.

If you notice your steering wheel vibrates alot when there should be no reason OR if you have to set the strength divider set under 1,000 it is recommended you use a smoothing level of at least 1 (RIGHT CTRL + NUM .)

A SPECIAL NOTE!! The RealFeel plugin's force is most dependent on the suspension CASTER of the car you are using. The higher the caster the stronger the force you will have straitening the wheels out at speed. If you find a car has severely low or high FFB. Instead of putting the Strength below 1000 or raising the divider above 8-9000 and risking over/under modulation try to adjust the Caster in the advanced tab to ~4-8 degrees. An example of Caster being an issue is the V8 Supercars use 15° of caster which is VERY HIGH. I set it to 7° and it was much easier to adjust the FFB correctly.

10} A Note on four wheel drive/ front wheel drive cars. You may find cars like the Historic Rally Cars or the HistorX Mini feel "funny". This is due to the front wheels being powered. What you will feel is, when coasting, it feels perfectly normal but when on the power through a corner the steering force will go light and even pull to one side. This is an effect known as torque steer. It is realistic for cars of this type and I have never felt it with any other FFB setup so that is a bonus.

That should be it. Now for every car you load the calibration procedure will be repeated and the adjustments will be saved automatically to your "rFactor\realfeelplugin.ini". It only takes about 20 seconds once you get the hang of it. I have included as many mods pre-adjusted as possible to help everyone with the transition. The following cars come set up by me.

Image1-2.png



Finally, Some mods simply DO NOT WORK with this FFB. I would point out the Saleen S7 Turbo mod as one. I couldn't for the life of me get that or the Mazda MX5's to feel "right". I tested as many mods as I could but if you find one that doesn't work or you are having issues, please post details here and I will take a look. Good luck and Happy Driving.
 
hmmm...

tried these settings out to the letter using trying two WTM cars with my G27. Anyone else got REALLY light steering forces??? I am getting plenty of bump / kerb feedback but steering resistance is not existent except when near stationary?? I notice max steering force is -65535; i have put RF to 6400 using R/CTRL+NUM4 but no effect. I have triple checked the setup to no avail...can someone "throw me a freakin bone here"!???
 
Make sure the RealFeel plugin is enabled first. What you describe is just the Leo's force. The realfeel Max Steering force should go closer to 0 for a higher strength level. The CTRL Num4 will adjust response. Go to the realfeelplugin.ini and check it there.

STOP STOP STOP

An odd turn of events.. The WTM has all the cars coming up as ONE car in real feel's eyes. So if you go from the holden to the supra you are using the settings you configured for the holden. That means what you downloaded from me should have been set up correctly or close to correct and already working. Have you tested with any other mod's?

WTM is in the ini under ...

[Group A]
MaxForceAtSteeringRack=-1500.000000
SteeringDamper=65535.000000
FFBMixerRealFeelPercent=90.000000
SmoothingLevel=1


I just went through every car in WTM and the settings work for every car or are close to perfect. I had to adjust very little up and down but seeing as this is a flawed on WTM part I would probably just leave it with the settings above for all cars.

WTM (Touring car Legends ) mod is known not to work great with Real feel. :)

So it turns out the WTM DOES work well with real-feel it just isn't set up to. I was wondering why I would load a car I hadn't driven and the force was a weird 1300..
 
Thanks for the quick reply chaps...

OK; i am using RF 0.92 / LeoFFB 2.0, the default steeringdamper is 11500 with maxforceatsteeringrack being 1500. I changed to 65535 / 1500; i then tried the Supra MkIV mod and the Suzuki Bio Cup mod as well as WTM again, still no steering FFB??? If i revert to rF's unmodified controller.ini i get forces back.

...much head scratching...
 
If your using this tutorial you should just use the plug-ins that are in the zip they should be current. The ini's layouts changed between realfeel versions and that could have something to do with it.

The controller.ini with the lines changed should output no force whatsoever only a few effects. It's then the job of the leo's and RealFeel to take over. It sounds like the leo's is working but not the realfeel. I would recommend just removing everything and starting again. Make sure to delete the realfeelplugin.ini and be sure you change the lines in the controller.ini without leaving any blank lines that weren't there or overwriting anything that shouldn't be.
 
Hey...panic over!

Adjusted the RF.ini values to match those in your ini; 11500 (came with the plugin) to 65535, changed minspeed from 10 to 16 (now there is the trademark "clunk"). It turns out i was getting forces before but had to turn RF to <600 to feel anything. I tried again after altering the values AND removing the cars from the RF.ini and all works well! Great setting that really feel dialed in.

...thanks for sharing...you learn something new every day. Now to WTM training for S3 ((q)cue rocky music)!
 
Hey...panic over!

Glad to hear. I was starting to think I packed something wrong.

If going down to 600 makes it too violent try raising the Camber. It should allow you to soften the force up to over 1000.

Oh anyone interesting in running the GMC Racing bus mod I would manually add this to their ini

[Racing Bus]
MaxForceAtSteeringRack=-8400.000000
SteeringDamper=5535.000000
FFBMixerRealFeelPercent=90.000000
SmoothingLevel=4

It has crazy wheel breaking force with the default settings.
 
Good read. Being a FFB tweaker freak I'm definitely going to try this one out!

EDIT: Tried with enduracer mod, noticed no difference, the mod still feels like ****. :)

EDIT2: After 3 hours of fierce tweaking I WAS ABLE to get some feeling into Endu mod, maybe this works!
 
Excellent stuff!! I myself have a G25 and for the last year and a half have edited my ffb and tried the various plugins but could never find anything i could stick with longer than a month lol after installing this its like my prayers have been answered ;) admittedly a little tweaking was involved with certain mods but the WTM and GT2 were the best ive ever had it straight out the box and with the ability to 'tweak' it in game which saves it for you is even better. You can feel everything and more importantly how the tyres are in the corner which iv always struggled with with default setup as it has a nasty clunk in the centre!
 
Been doing alot of tweaking in various aspects of rFactor and the most important seems to be editing the Cam file's Orientation offset's up/down tilt to put the horizon below the center line of my screen to better match my eye position. I don't choose to have the monitor up high but in order to keep from feeling as though I am driving constantly up hill I adjusted from most mod's default of -0.07 which is looking down and causing the horizon to appear above the center line of the screen. I would usually advise changing it to 0.00 as per my FOV tutorial to place the horizon to the very center of the screen but now that I am using +0.05 so that the horizon sits about 1/3rd above the bottom and it is a completely different feel.

If you sit with your eyes above the half way point of the screen. A negative value in there is preferable. If your eyes are dead center use zero and if below and your looking up then a positive value should be used.

2011-03-12_042138.png


Next I came upon researching at how the clutch on my G27 was engaging comparing pedal position to my rFskinHud clutch percentage output by rfactor to how the car was actually reacting in-game. And it was all wrong.

Lets assume 0 is the pedal all the way up and 100 is all the way down to the floor. A real cars clutch wastes about a third or less of the throw from the floor up and applies no grab. So 100 up to around 70 should be dead space. Then as the clutch is slowly applied to the 70-30 range the friction should go up exponentially. Finally 30-0 should be full contact and again dead space. This can be strange with such a small amount of throw with a G25-27 pedal but everyone's tastes are different. I ended up with this as my DXtweak2 modified pedal axis.. I haven't used it enough to really say if it is perfect but it is certainly better then stock.

2011-03-12_040445.png


NOTE// I have limited to 240 at the top end because the pot has some issues getting up to 255. You can probably go higher with a newer set.
 
Thanks Steven. Followed your FOV advice and now with the addition of the FFB settings I'm once again loving rFactor... Just the fact i get feedback as a potential rear slide is imminent is making me smile... nothing like being a nervous driver behind the wheel of a 650+hp beast I've really been missing that feeling... Cheers mate
 
Thanks Steven. Followed your FOV advice and now with the addition of the FFB settings I'm once again loving rFactor... Just the fact i get feedback as a potential rear slide is imminent is making me smile... nothing like being a nervous driver behind the wheel of a 650+hp beast I've really been missing that feeling... Cheers mate

ye completely agree! ivee not tried the fov thing, is it that good ?
 

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