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Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Well, encoders tend to have a max rpm rating, but it could be something else.. Sounds like a weird issue; it could be the optical encoder, or the electronics behind it..
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
If it makes a lot of noise, you may be putting too much force on it trying to steer quickly. The DFP hates its users so it tries to resist this, and it can 'skip gears' making a grinding sound. This makes it loose calibration.

Also steering really quickly means a VERY high motor speed. The steering sensor is on the motor, and it may not be able to 'read' at 5000rpm, so it looses calibration..

Either way, ditch it and get a G25
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Seems so, I should not post after nights that where too short..
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Its the least I could do to add some fear to the normally quite fearless virtual racing.. Actually I haven't got hurt in the 1.5 years I use them, but yeah nicely rounded pedal plates would look and feel a bit nicer..
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Yeah I can imagine it is tricky to do with the G25 pedals. Witn mine, this is a short clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-AsKH1b1kM
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Or in LFS, press the 're calibrate' button , press the pedals only as far as you desire, and then click 'lock calibration'.
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Its not a noticable hit here, testing the framerate with FF, the meter is a bit jumpy, occasionally hitting 100, dropping to an occasional 80something when i steer.. The same happens without FF, not an obvious change.

Low framerates are generally bad though; and considering how ultra cheap processors are these days, you really have not much of an excuse owning a rig that doesn't run at 50+ fps during busy moments..

Still I can't explain a big drop.. I run a sempron 64 processor at 2.4ghz, nothing much.
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Scawen will have a happy X-mass, we will have a happy Y-mass
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
I don't know.. I seem to recall that I suddenly noticed this 'spring' in LFS with the previous big patch (the one months ago).. Not sure if it was there before..

Of course in reality there will be some flex in the steering rack, but I don't know if you should model that this way. It doesn't seem to get in the way and LFS still responds very quickly.

I tend to believe in '1:1' copy of the actual physical wheel though, no springs/dampers in between..
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Yes I noticed there is a 'spring' between the physical (logitech) wheel and the graphics on screen. GPL and N2003 use this too, to quote a Papy dev for 'FF purposes' and probably to smooth the otherwise extreme forces that could occur with a rigid steering rack and Uber Arnie (tm) driver.
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
On the software side it is easy to check; well if you use a 3rd party program (realfeel in rFactor, hopefully soon a hotkey will show it in LFS..)..

The hardware side, you'd need to measure the power draw on the FF motor, which isn't as easy. Surely with 150% force set in the driver, you'd be maxing things out on the hardware side very quickly.
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Feeling a drop off all depends on:
- how well alligning torque is modelled
- how much the weight of the car / downforce acts on the caster
- how you set your wheel up; do actual max game forces correspond with the maximum FF your wheel can take or does it 'clip'?

Pretty soon, some caster will outweigh so much of the alligning torque that the FF wheel won't be 'smooth' and subtle enough to let you feel the difference.
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Would also work ish, though its usefull to see the %, go on the skidpad, turn hard, tune so its ~80%, leaving some margin for more extreme happenings on the actual circuits.. (of course the downforce cars are a different story)
Last edited by Niels Heusinkveld, .
Actual Force Feedback directX percentage made visible like a sort of fps counter.
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Hiya,

It comes up often; people running their FF too strong so the DirectX code sends 100% force to the wheel even when the in game forces haven't maxed out yet. This can easily happen even when you set LFS's FF strength to 30%! It all depends on the grip and caster on the car...

So it would be most helpfull to add, much like a framerate counter, a ''Dx FF %'' counter, showing the actual percentage FF sent to the wheel. When this number maxes out at 100, we'd know we have to lower the in game FF strength, unless you like your FF to be sub optimal..

Simple enough and a handy tool it would be to make sure the FF is as accurate as it can be!

/Niels
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Pff I'm better, I sacrifice 1.5 seconds all for realism!

(and I might suck)
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
You do need a decent processor. Anything 2ghz or more should be fine. You don't need much of a 3D card, but of course you can't expect to run anything these days if you don't have a Geforce4 ti or Ati 9500 type card or faster.

512 meg ram is fine, and 128meg videocards are fine too.

Basically if your pc can't run LFS smoothly, it really can't do any gaming at all!
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Considering the LFS audience consists of anything between hardcore full blown cockpit and H shifter users to the casual keyboard/mouse player, I see no reason why LFS can't be made suitable for all.

I'm sure with the correct approach you could have, I dunno, a few game modes with some driving aids at the cost of some added weight or something.

I'm quite sure that this would be benificial from an economic point of view. As mentioned in another thread though; LFS is no democracy; the devs have their vision. I'm happy it involves more realism but I could see their need to sell copies eventually leading to a system where anyone from casual arcade players to hardcore simmers could have their way..
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
I haven't checked this with LFS but diff lock can be deceiving. It could well be that anything beyond 40% or 50% is basically resulting in a locked diff. Does anyone actually look at telemetry to find the rotational speed difference between the two driven tyres?
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
For now, I will simply blame the non perfect physics for being 1.5 seconds per minute off the pace. I try to make reasonably believable setups, and I'm a Driving God of course, yet I still loose time.

Then I see a WR and disagree with how those times are achieved, both looking at the setup and the driving style.

Once I have all the WRs, the physics are completed and I will instruct Scawen to stop working on them......



But seriously, yeah there are some oddities, not the least of which is the diffs. However I suspect the reason we get away with them is in the tyres.

The fastest laps look odd to me, almost like slow motion, the (road) car rarely being snappy or having trouble to accept the attitude desired by the driver.

I'm not sure LFS is advanced enough yet to call for the use of realistic diffs. Mind you its pretty advanced; but tyres are so tricky that the chances of a few fair flaws still being there are considerable.
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Thanks guys, the image is deceiving; its ''just'' a 20'' TFT screen, 1600x1200.. Thats pretty big but not huge.. It looks huge because I film it with 10x optical zoom from the other end of the room!
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
I put it at 16 for todays driving and it felt just the same as whatever it was out of the box..
BMW Sauber, South City Short 2, no TC..
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Here are 5 minutes of fun, no traction control, and you see my wheel too..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc1KYreDkxw

fun
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
rFactor is NOT improving Lococost! LFS is improving slowly, like the gearbox improvements we have now. rFactors base code has been the same for years, most of it comes from F1 2000 which came out in 1999..

The quality of the mods might improve a bit but the actual physics code has basically remained the same for years.

I play both LFS and rFactor and both have considerable flaws still. You'd be surprised that rFactors devs *ARE* aware of the tyre physics flaws; so lets hope they eventually pull off a rF 2.0. Until then however, we won't see changes.

With LFS its likely that there will be some changes to the physics as time goes on..
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
It should not make a difference, both 128 and 256 are far beyond what your wheel can actually make you feel. 16 is already more than the G25 delivers.

If you run the GTR cars with 65% strength in LFS, you're basically having binary FF, its on or off, unless you run 1 or 2 degrees caster. With 6 degrees caster you only need 20% in LFS in order to occasionally max out the force feedback!
Niels Heusinkveld
S2 licensed
Yeah few data points; the F3 data Tristan posted has more, and its not a very busy curve, just a slightly non straight line so even 3 points gives some clue ish.

Android, you should sell those as art; could make a fortune.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG