About the force feedback.
I did some laps at AS5R with FORMULA RC6 https://www.lfs.net/files/vehmods/850339
The force feedback is saturated most of the time. My driver (for the wheel) is at like 20% force my lfs force value is at around 15%. Max force would be dangerous.
What I mean is that I would rather not clip LFS input ever except for crashes or glitches. We would need either some extra factor or percentage for the max FFB to a car. Either set by the moder or manually by the player. I would really prefer to use higher force settings on my side and have the game not clipping all the time.
All the cars with big tires high aero and horsepower are concerned.
Clipped input just give a direction input, no more info.
i'm sure you're aware, but you can adjust it on the fly with ,/. or in preferences
i can see an option to set it to a certain percentage relative to your global ffb setting be useful, but speaking for myself, just adjusting global force has always been enough.
Rane, Johney, if you don't understand what clipping is don't put me as crazy.
Let's say high down force can put 30Nm on the ffb. Then If LFS clips that at 10Nm. And I put 10% force in LFS I will have have the following:
Real force 1 2 3 4 5 10 20 30
Wanted force .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 1 2 3
LFS calculated 1 2 3 4 5 10 10c 10c
Force on my wheel .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 1 1 1
Force I would love to have .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 1 2 3
You're the one who fails to understand how ffb in lfs works. Lfs can't send certain torque in units of Nm to a wheel, because it has no idea what a wheel can reproduce. It only sends a value between -10000 to +10000 and that's it. What wheel does with that is up to each wheel and its firmware.
In this situation you mentioned, you just have to lower lfs ffb below 10% to a desired value where there is little to no clipping.
What you probably are asking is for Scawen to re-scale the ffb strenght such that optimal value for most cars is about 100% and not 10%. For me personaly I don't care at this point, it's just a relative number.
Also, another point, for me personaly, I like that cars in lfs have different strenghts of ffb relative to each other. For a noob player, this may be a hassle because he needs to readjust ffb strenght in lfs for each car and I can understand that. With an addition of ffb bar graph in latest patch this comes down to spending some time at observing the bar and using keys on a keyboard to set it live while driving. Then remember those values for each car roughly, which isn't really so hard.
Once you have set ffb in lfs such that it sends close to max ffb but still below clipping, you should go in your wheel driver/firmware settings and set what ever you want. Say wheel can do max 10Nm, if you set there 10%, you will get 1Nm as a result as a max force.
You can also save per-car FFB strength e.g. /ffb 10 into the car script file in data/script. For vanilla cars it’s e.g. XFG.lfs, for mods you have to use the 6-character Skin ID, e.g. 172CB8.lfs.
Well explain me where I fail then as I do understand that LFS and force feedback work with a limited amount of possible values. So ffb is integer between -10000 and 10000 yes cool.
On one side I do like to feel some differences between a truck, a high downforce powerful car or an old school 700kg low power stuff, small wheels.
Let's say the laterwill range around -2000 to 2000 no problem.
The truck -8000 to 8000 no problem.
The formula -25000 to 25000 will be clipped to -10000 to 10000 whatever I multiply that gain to my wheel.
When the engine sound clipped too much a quick correction was made.
Imagine you like music like acoustic stuff to make the baby sleep. OK no problem. That sound will be recorded and normalised. It doesn't matter if the original recording was made at 70db or 90db, you will be able to play it on your sound system adjusting the output to your liking.
Now you want to record a live Slayer show, well you will choose different settings because it will blast around 105db at the mixing table on a day they refrain from turning up too much. But if you have the same settings you will have a huge clipping mess. The idea is to be able to put some volume slider before the sound is clipped. That the basic of numerical signal treatment. That the same for force feedback.
Currently we have
A- Physic calculation
B- FFB -10000 to 10000
C- FFB settings in game 0 to 100%
D -FFB settings drivers side
If B is clipped there will be no miracle in C and D even if C is car specific it is too late to do something. Pros: perfect physical difference of non clipping cars independant of C and D.
What we could have without changing the physic, just the ffb rendering:
Currently we have
A- Physic calculation
A'- Normalization factor for high FFB cars
B- FFB -10000 to 10000
C- FFB settings in game 0 to 100%
D -FFB settings drivers side
A' could be either set in stone by developer or modder manually or through random test calculation (I mean putting AI on some tracks and measure force output for a variety of cases, crashes values being not relevant or interesting to me)
It could also be a user slider. Like FFB Norm slider it could even replace C
Anyway if you don't care having some multipliers to 1 would not bother you.
Please test AS5R with FORMULA RC6 at various force settings and tell me how much clipping do you have. I think you did not test.
Not quite. What you have to do in this case as I already wrote 2 times, now's the 3rd time - lower LFS ffb slider until you no longer see clipping. In LFS B depends on C, it is a prescaler - this is your volume slider. Game uses a floating point number for physics cals, so it's highly unlikely that it will be so large that it overflows.
I'll test the combo you suggested and give you the LFS FFB slider value optimal for me.
edit. about 11% seems not to be clipping FFB when you push the car to the limit.
example. about 34% goes for XFG+BL1
Your reasoning was good, there is just one slight modification that needs to be done:
Currently, we have:
A- Physics calculation (float, maybe in Nm)
B- FFB settings in game 0 to 100%, or pre-scaler (float, 0-1)
C- FFB resolution or post-scaler (float, depends on FFB step settings)
D- FFB -10000 to 10000 (16bit signed integer, -32768, 32767)
E- FFB settings wheel driver side
Adding one more slider between B and C would just complicate things so much to the point, that no one would be able to set FFB correctly, so I'm against it.
What I agree with is that there could be some option to automatically scale FFB to max value before clipping for given driving conditions. A driver would drive a few laps in FFB recording mode where a game would evaluate values and from there find the optimal FFB slider setting which ensures max FFB without clipping on a per-car basis. This is equivalent to iRacing's auto FFB strength setting.
Do not let LFS ffb slider % misslead you, it's just a relative number. It does have a low value like 10% or less, but FFB is close to max for certain cars. The only relevant value is what you see in FFB bar graph, as this is the acutal FFB signal which LFS outputs.