I’m an old LFS S2 user making a comeback to the show. I used to race with a MS Sidewinder FFB usb steering wheel. The pedals were weak but the FFB was strong and the realism/feel was through the roof. However because I couldn’t find any suitable drivers for it, the game sometimes had problems recognising the throttle/brake axis’s separately. The wheel was loud and crude but the “feel” of the car was spot on.

I recently took delivery of the G25 steering wheel with an intended comeback to LFS and occasional ps3 GT5p fun however I was soon disappointed. I followed various settings posted on the internet/forums and have not found settings that even remotely get close to the Sidewinder. The quality of the G25 is awesome, leagues ahead of the Sidewinder but the following are my complaints:

In LFS:

1. When the car rides over kerbs there is no rumble feedback through the steering wheel (when you have some steering lock on) When the wheel is straight ahead I feel mild kerb rumble, but this does not vary much with the strength adjustment in options. (I set it at 200 and I was disappointed my wrists weren’t broken!)

2. It seems no settings enable the wheel to transmit the grip of the front wheels. The sidewinder seemed excellent at varying the force on the wheel depending on how much grip the front tyres had. So, high grip the steering would be heavy but as soon as you lose grip and start understeering the wheel would progressively go lighter, communicating the available grip. Also underbraking when the rear of the car begins to step out this is not quickly or clearly communicated as was the case with the sidewinder. This may be because of the cars setup but I recall the sidewinder being informative with a default setup and got better once the car was properly set up.


3. The force feedback strength is just about okay..but for the cost of the wheel I would expect it to be adjustable from Zero FF to hand braking levels of FFB! , okay maybe not that high but the sidewinder seems more powerful.

Points 1 and 2 especially detract from my LFS experience but I’m struggling to understand why given the cost of the wheel, the rave reviews and correct settings the wheel feels lifeless!


Not for this place, but in GT5p the feel is slightly better, and no end improvement over the control pad, but it still falls far short of the LFS + Sidewinder experience.

The pedals/paddles are all top notch, but unless I can find a solution to the above I may have to put the G25 up for auction with near 12 months warranty!

I was trying to find my pedals/power adaptor to the sidewinder so I could make a direct comparison as maybe something was lost in the numerous updates issued since I last played, but they still remain hidden.

Any suggestions will be most welcome.

are you running profiler? how do you have it set up?

Since you haven't specified what settings you've tried, have you given the LFS Manual recommended setup a shot?

The FF strength in the Logitech profiler should be at least 100%, and you can try to put it higher (to 110-115%) because that will exaggerate small forces more. That said, I do know what you're talking about - as soon as the wheel is turned (= a constant FF pull from cornering is applied), the FF from rumble strips, etc. is completely drowned out. However, I'm not sure if this is really the fault of the wheel or of LFS' non-perfect FF implementation, that seems to greatly dampen some frequencies before they even get to the wheel.

Hi,

Bunder9999:
I have tried with and without the profiler on. The profiler settings are exactly as per the link (strength 101). From the ingame control options I have varied these all over the shop, still no joy.

AndriodXP:

I will try over the weekend increasing the FF force up to 115 (from 101) and see if that makes any improvements.

I will definitely now try my old sidewinder again, atleast this way I can verify if LSF is at fault with the rumble effects being lost when a constant force is applied or if the G25 cannot handle a constant force and rumble. I hope it’s not the latter as the old sidewinder with 1 motor could! And it’d be a shame if the G25 can’t.

Quote from khush :

AndriodNX [...] LSF

lol

Something is definitely wrong with the drivers. I lose a lot of FF when losing grip in FWD car, and riding over curbs usually rumbles pretty well.

Try uninstalling all logitech drivers and downloading fresh g25 ones from their site.

http://www.logitech.com/index. ... mp;WT.ac=sc|downloads||dd

Thanks, I was my plan to get it a reinstall this evening. Ill report on progress!

So, I reinstalled LFS, and downloaded the latest drivers from logitech and still no joy.

As previously mentioned, I don't think this steering wheel (or drivers) can handle multiple FF effects simultaneously. Riding kerbs with some steering lock and you don't feel the kerbs make the wheel rumble. This happens fine when the wheel is straight ahead.

Nor have I managed to create the understeer/weight feel from the wheel. The force applied seems to be constant all the way around a corner which makes the game massively unsatisfying.

This is either a drivers issue or a technical issue with the steering wheel (design quirk?) the old Sidewinder FF handled LFS FFB x100 better.

Warning, wall of text inbound!

Quote from khush :

As previously mentioned, I don't think this steering wheel (or drivers) can handle multiple FF effects simultaneously. Riding kerbs with some steering lock and you don't feel the kerbs make the wheel rumble. This happens fine when the wheel is straight ahead.

Ehm, technically LFS doesn't use any effects, or only one, depending on what you call an effect. FF wheels usually have some built in effects, like "oscillate at 10Hz" or so, prominently used at rumble strips in other games, but in LFS the only command sent to the wheel is "rotate to [direction] with X torque." Any FF generated is a direct result of the virtual front wheels exerting this force on the virtual steering rack. If the physical interaction in the game world doesn't result in a certain force, you won't get it in your FF wheel either.

Quote :

Nor have I managed to create the understeer/weight feel from the wheel. The force applied seems to be constant all the way around a corner which makes the game massively unsatisfying.

Again, as said above, if it doesn't happen in the simulation, you won't get the FF. Lots of (wannabe) sims apply tons of canned/fabricated effects, like making the steering go extremely light on understeer. If this happens it is often a sign of either a bad physics model or of force feedback that has nothing to do with the forces actually generated ingame.

That said, LFS is going to get overhauled tyre physics with the next major release, and just from how LFS' FF works in principle I can safely say that this will affect the force feedback, too.

Quote :

This is either a drivers issue or a technical issue with the steering wheel (design quirk?) the old Sidewinder FF handled LFS FFB x100 better.

It might as well be. I also had a MS Sidewinder FF wheel before acquiring a G25, and I too recall some "effects" working better with it, though I'm not 100% how much of that was just the novelty of having FF to begin with.

Anyway, the Logitech driver is known to dampen the effects if using a FF strength below 100% in the profiler. The torques LFS sends also seem to be filtered for certain frequencies (according to what I read on the forum), but most important we must not forget that the wheels are hardware and contain all the quirks that physical devices come with, such as motor response time, etc. It could simply be that the FF motors are not able to create a rumbling effect when they already pull in one direction, or at least not without exaggerating the input to overcome hardware shortcomings. Just think about it, when driving straight ahead you say you can feel the rumble fine, and that is because when doing that there is no other torque applied by the motors, allowing the small rumble forces to come through fully. It's like the motors have no problems going from -15 to +15 torque (arbitrary numbers) for a rumble when driving straight ahead, but applying the same amount of rumble at +335 to +365 just won't work as well due to how the motors respond. Same goes for short FF spikes that are over so fast that the motors can't even dream to react.

A different problem occurs if you put the ingame FF strength too high, resulting in FF clipping. Basically LFS then tells the wheel to rumble at +550 to +600, but the wheel may only be capable to produce +500 to begin with, so you don't feel anything at all. With the G25 you also have to consider that Logitech deliberately made the motors weaker than they could be (by not giving them enough power) for liability reasons. The wheel could rotate 3x as fast as it does, but by that point it does become quite dangerous to your fingers. IIRC someone already managed to break his thumb even with an unmodded wheel. Now that I said it, maybe the motor response time is also negatively affected by this. The single "high powered" motor of the Sidewinder might just react faster than two "low powered" (but in sum stronger) motors of the G25.

Looking at it that way, it might even be better for LFS to actually use the built-in effects, because then the drivers can actually compensate for the hardware quirks. The hard part would however be to apply the effects in such a way that they still only produce the forces that actually happen ingame, and that might work differently from wheel to wheel.