Quote :

No offence, but I think you need to go for a drive in a decent car, preferably without power steering

I actually race cars all the time and im talking from experiance, and none have power steering, when I understeer, steering goes light, and sometimes hops. LFS does not model this at all, simple as that.

If you are racing and it sometimes hops, try steering less. One of the best ways to cure understeer (as I'm sure you know) is to allow the front wheels the slip angle they want (by reducing lock), letting them bite, and considering having another go at the corner (if you need to).

Quote from tristancliffe :

Saying 'Our car is shit slow round a track, but at least you can park it, and you save £200 in the process'...

What are you on about? Who would buy a car that will be awful to drive and look at on the road but might go a couple of tenths quicker if they ever happened to take it to a track?

Power steering is simply about making the wheel easier to turn. Non-PAS cars are a pain in the arse to park, often have less feel and are more difficult to control.

Actually

Edit: Oops, this is rather OT now...

Quote from BWX232 :

Whether is should be or not is debatable.... whether is actually is necessary or not is another question. Just like the volume of the engines of the cars are on a scale too large.. (some too loud, some too soft compared to all the other sounds, making you constantly adjust it in-game for the sake of "realism")- so is the scale of the difference of the FF between the cars.

Imo it shouldn't be necessary and for me it isn't necessary. I have no problems whatsoever with oscillation in any car and I never change any of my ffb settings ever. Not in the CP or in LFS (well I did slightly adjust strength in LFS when S2 came out ) Imo oscillation is a sign you have the ffb set too strong.
Anyway it is pretty wheel specific it seems and down to personal preference but seeing as I have no problems doing so, not adjusting settings for cars gives me a nice feel for the difference in different cars. Jump from the XR GT or something similar into a GTR and I can feel the difference of the wide slicks on the front and the extra resistance they cause in the steering. Jump into the LX4 and it's all a lot looser, as I figure it's supposed to be (could be wrong here though).

Anyway, I'm pretty satisfied now that as I thought, the spring and damper settings are integral to the ffb supplied by a Logitech wheel and do not add any forces not generated by the game. They simply provide a means to balance the two main forces the wheel generates according to personal preference.
As an aside, my theory is that setting both spring and damper to 0% does little to change the nature of the ffb in LFS except to lower the overall strength of these forces. I figure this is why people who do so also tend to use quite high overall force in the CP and within LFS as they're simply compensating the lack of ffb strength overall.

btw, thanks AndroidXP for posting those comments from Scawen.

Quote from AndroidXP :

It is indeed a canned effect, a simple constant centering force, where the force is set by your spring strength. This force is added to the forces created by LFS, so it does alter them quite considerably. If you have a LFS generated force to the right, and you are currently steering left (from the wheel center), the centering spring will add to that force and make it stronger. On the contrary, if you steer to the right, the centering spring will counteract the intended force generated by LFS and make it weaker. So overall, depending on your current steering, it will alter the forces of LFS in a completely unrealistic way with a force that doesn't exist in real life.

Any centering forces in RL are generated by the front wheels alone and these forces are already in LFS with varying degrees of strength, depending on your setup.

The damper value shouldn't do anything, as it would only affect "spring" forces which aren't generated by LFS anyways.


Also try what Scawen said in the post quoted above. Set your ingame force to 0% - if your wheel generates any forces now your wheel alters the one generated and inteded by LFS. It's like you added a device to your real car that always tries to center the steering wheel no matter what.

As you don't have a Logitech wheel it seems you may be getting 'Spring' and 'Centering Spring' mixed up a bit. They bear no relation to one another, most people in this thread refering to their spring settings are not talking about the centering spring.

I don't suffer from any oscillations problems. High FFB is certainly one cause, but you need to remember FFB is a driving aid, you shouldn't be fighting it to turn the wheel.

On my old wheel (Thrustmaster F1) it used to oscilate like crazy, then I updated the drivers and it went away (better than my Momo which replaced it). However S2 seems to have removed the problem completely, I can let go of the wheel down the straights now without fear.

So it's certainly not LFS that's to blame.

Quote from durbster :

What are you on about? Who would buy a car that will be awful to drive and look at on the road but might go a couple of tenths quicker if they ever happened to take it to a track?

Power steering is simply about making the wheel easier to turn. Non-PAS cars are a pain in the arse to park, often have less feel and are more difficult to control.

Actually

Edit: Oops, this is rather OT now...

Take a good, engineering view at both a car designed to run without PAS, and one designed to run with, preferably of a similar age, and you'll notice the car with PAS has more castor, more offset on the wheels, a faster rack etc. Because the steering wheel is easier to turn they make the steering geometry much more 'aggressive'.

Next test. Take a car with and one without (each designed originally to have it or not), disconnect the power steering stuff, and you'll find the one that is designed not to need PAS will be easier to turn.

Quote from Bob Smith :

On my old wheel (Thrustmaster F1) it used to oscilate like crazy, then I updated the drivers and it went away

Blimey, I've not updated my wheel drivers in years!

Quote from tristancliffe :

Take a car with and one without (each designed originally to have it or not), disconnect the power steering stuff, and you'll find the one that is designed not to need PAS will be easier to turn.

I'm not sure what your point is. If the car has a different steering system, then the setup should be tweaked to make the most of that, obviously. Similarly, if it had a different braking system, then you would also tweak the setup to get the best out that.

In fact you could say that about any feature of the handling. To get optimum handling, you adjust a car to what it has not what it has not.

Anyway, to get back to the original point (whenever that was), power assisted cars make better race cars because they are easier to control, which is why most, if not all, of the cars in LFS would have PAS.

Quote from tailing :

Imo it shouldn't be necessary and for me it isn't necessary. I have no problems whatsoever with oscillation in any car and I never change any of my ffb settings ever.

What are your settings then?

Quote from tailing :

As an aside, my theory is that setting both spring and damper to 0% does little to change the nature of the ffb in LFS except to lower the overall strength of these forces.

It does more than just lessen the overall strength. It does more than raise overall strength when turning the spring setting up too.
You can tune the forces with it, not just raise or lower the overall strength.

I probably didn't word things very well and the thought process wasn't quite right. The point I was making is setting both spring and damper to 0% is removing these forces from play (whether they are completely removed is a little unclear). It will change the balance of things in regards to the forces that do remain but seems to largely result in people having to compensate and ramp up the overall strength.
If this is how you like it then there's nothing wrong with that from my pov.

My settings on my Momo Racing are basically the defaults apart from the centering spring fix. In LFS I have strength at 45%. It seems that most don't like these settings, maybe it's just what I'm used to but I feel I get all the feedback I need.

btw with regards to oscillation, I maybe should test it a bit as I virtually never drive without at least one hand on the wheel. So it is possible I do still get some oscillation but nothing that simply resting my hand on the wheel won't stop.

Yeah I have a momo and a DFP, the DFP responds quite a bit different due to it's higher rotation and I think it has stronger motors too. The higher rotation is the biggest difference though for sure.

After reading one of the post here I tried something for the heck of it..
I went on SO City- with the fox.. A slightly tuned Race1 set.


Set all the SAME in the DFP CP.. overall - damper- spring to 70.. Then went in game and set it to 70.. (with proper rotation or 450 set in DFP CP and in game)

Man.. very very realistic, you can catch slides because the FF is so strong, it ramps up just perfectly.. I also tries 100/100/100 in DFP CP and 100 in game.. Holy crap! Very strong but very realistic feeling too! You steer with pressure more than rotation of the wheel- like in RL. It oscillates, but so fast that it just kind of follows the track of the car. You really need to keep your hands on the wheel though, but in a real car I imagine you would too- especially driving like that..

Probably way to extreme for a momo- But it is something to experiment with - with a DFP.

yea, that oscillating is really weird. When I set all forces to max in windows as well as in LFS, the wheel oscillates heavily, even when standing still in the pits illepall
On a momo racing that is...

do you have wheel compensation on 1.0?

this should reduce oscillating.

RBR has the light weel on understear effect,if you want to feel it for your self.

Oh yes 'wheel turn compensation' !!
Ok if you dont know what it does;

It will match your pc weels movments with the cars in game stearing weel when set to 1.0
This is a good thing btw, as it makes sense to match the movements it also tends to make the cars less twitchy around the centre.

I not sure that it works correctly on all weels, but its fine for dfp owners.

Set your dfp to 900 deg in the cp, now when you drive a car with less lock than your dfp. The movments will still match but your pc weel won't stop rotating when you reach the cars lock limit you also lose ffb after the limit.

If you have to turn the weel so much that you pass the cars lock limit your weren't going to save it anyway.

Set all your sets to max lock.
Banger racing in a uf with max lock is hard work