You all seem to making the common mistake of assuming LFS (or any other computer sim) is real. Set the lock to 36 in LFS. Get in the car and drive in the tightest possible circle (full lock one way or the other) from a dead stop. Now go do the same thing in your Honda Civic or whatever.

Notice that when you are in your real car you don't spin around like you were standing still and swinging a ballroom dancing partner at the end of your arm's reach? Notice that you are actually driving in a circle that is more than two car widths? I knew you would see the difference. All better now?

Quote from tristancliffe :

Driven a real car recently? Looked at the amount the wheels turn recently? An F3 car has over 20°, which is more than half your figure.

If you have even seen a real car, you'll know that they do not have turning circles anywhere near as small as you can accomplish at 30 or 36 degrees in LFS. This is a common feature of arcade driving/racing games so morons can extricate themselves from crashes without having to bother shifting into reverse.

Somewhere around 16 degrees seems to be the closest to reality, but it will be slightly different on one car versus another. Single digit settings are only used by oval racers in real life.

I have no problem with LFS allowing this extreme, unrealistic setting, but I just wish the default had not been set to that.

I was also curious as to whether settings could be changed globally--it appears they cannot.

You have contributed nothing to the conversation with your comments.

Quote from Woz :

Can't agree. Sorry to say but it sounds like much of what you ask for, like many others is the canned ISI vibrations.

I don't feel these IRL.

I have spent a LOT of time driving on uneven surfaces in different cars from old Minis to Subarus with just my fingertips on the steering wheel to see what comes through. There are many unsurfaced roads here in NZ to help with this.

Yes you feel vibrations through your body, NOT the wheeel.

LFS is so right in what it does. The fact that RBR does forces the same way and that there is an rTractor mod to change forces the same way says something.

As soon as I have FFB seat, I'll agree with you. The forces in ISI are not canned and until there is a FFB seat, you need to feel them through the FFB wheel as a proxy. Yes, it's fake, but so is every other aspect of a racing sim on a computer. I don't feel wind, either, so should the LFS devs get rid of the wind sound effect?

I love LFS and think it gets consistently better as we get each new patch. Can't wait for the long-awaited AI improvements, too.

There is one issue that I am surprised hasn't been addressed and that is the inconsistent or just plain missing FFB. It appears that road and curb bumps are inconsistently handled by the FFB. Sometimes you will feel them and sometimes you won't.

I think it may have to do with the FFB being oriented around steering torque only, instead of the full range of steering and tire imputs, but who knows?

The one aspect that sums it all up for me (to avoid rehashing the lengthy debates about LFS FFB vs. GTR2, etc.) is how on Earth can you not feel a thing through the wheel when the visual/graphical engine is vibrating the car like a sawtooth? Clearly one aspect of the sim thinks the car is driving over a surface (curb typically) that is causing the whole car and driver's head to vibrate severely, yet the FFB thinks you are driving on a glass-smooth surface.

Aside from the fact that this is just plain wrong, it spoils the otherwise terrific sense of immersion that the developers of LFS have obviously worked so hard to achieve. You can even feel the torque pull when shifting gears in a FWD car!

Avoiding the old debates, can people reply if:

a) you agree with me, or:

b) you do not experience the situation where FFB is missing some of the time you see the visual vibration effect.

For those answering "b," I'd love to know what your configuration is! I am using a G25 set-up according to the LFS manual.

Quote from Drunken Predator :

If there is, dont do it. Only thing adjusting "steering sensitivity" will do is cause the steering to be non linear effecting a poor feeling. So i would just adjust the steering lock separately with every setup, after all.. you might want it little different for different cars.

Agreed--I definitely do not want non-linear steering under any circumstance.

It's just too bad they picked an arcade 36 degrees as the default instead of something more realistic like half that.

This set-up related...sort of, but not really, so I thought I would ask here:

Is there any way to change the default steering ratio in the built-in set-ups? 36 degrees means you can spin around like a top. I know I can make a new saet-up for every car and just change this, but thought there may be a way to do it globally.

Thanks,

Marc

The other thing that I do find "fake" in LFS is the visual effect of running over some rumble strips (the quite effective shaking sensation of the entire screen image) while feeling nothing through the FFB wheel. The visual andf the FFB should go together 100% of the time, but this is just part of the inconsistency in FFB with an iForce-based (Logitech and others) wheel.

Wow, I think you just solved the big mystery for me. I am about to go test your scripts and hope they work. Thanks tons in advance...it would have taken me a month to figure this out otherwise.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Single seaters in LFS use sequential gears, so you have to setup paddles or the sequential shifter mode on the G25. You can't use H-shifting in them.

How do you set this up without changing settings every time you change form a sequential to an H-pattern car? My set-up was working seamlessly until I tried to get the sequential shift knob to work in parallel to the paddles and now I have a completely screwed-up mess.

Same scenario here: the H-pattern cars work fine, the sequential have no shifting at all. If you assign the paddles to up shift and down shift, it takes away 1st and 2nd gears from the H-pattern cars. Like there is not a separate "profile" for each configuration. It WAS working, but damned if I can figure out how to get it back!

Hmmm, I was just about to ask the same question about my G25.

Without me doing anything, I had H-gate shifter functionality for those cars and paddles for sequential shifting cars. I tried to get the shifter knob working in sequential mode both in-game and via the Logitech Profiler (so that paddles and/or sequential knob could be used) and now I have no support for sequential shifting cars without manually changing the settings as the poster above has said.

There has to be a better way! The paddles and sequential can map to each other presumably--you only need an upshift and downshift. But now I can't even figure out how to get the two types of cars to work seamlessly (as I had until half an hour ago)!!

Any prospect of the rest of the FFB being implemented?

Quote from Jakg :

LOD's should be maxed (Dynamic LOD should be 0),

Are these one and the same thing or is there LOD settings somewhere else I should set? The Dynamic LOD slider has no effect on draw distance.

Last edited by Marc Collins, Mon, 2 Jul 2007 16:58.

Quote from theblackrabbi :

HEY THERE BOyS AND GIrLs........anyways try this I have the same wheel and it is a cool setting to try if you haven't tried it already....

go to the cfg. file in your lfs folder and find the

FF Steps 128 and change that to 256 and see how you like it....Other then that just go to the control pannel and crack that bitch up to 150% overall forcefeed back if you are not a girlyman.....I'm sure you can't say it's hard to feel stuff from there

Hmmmm, too bad mine is already set at 256...?

Quote from AndroidXP :

Unlike many other games, the FF in LFS is 100% derived from the rotational forces acting on the steering column through the front tyres. That means, only if the front tyres are twisted either left or right due to the physics calculations - only then you will feel it in the FF. If you drive straight over a bump, the wheel is not twisted to the side, and thus no FF is generated.

In real life, you will feel that bump through the car body, and through the wheel because it moves with the rest of the car. What does not happen is a rotation of the wheel, but a quick up/down bump - the catch is, rotation is the ONLY thing a FF wheel can do. Many other games fake these bumps by doing a quick left/right jerk, but Scawen has made the decision that he will not implement any faked FF effects, and I'm glad he did.

But I see I've been beaten by Vain

This is most unfortunate. And some of you should get off your high horse about "faked" FFB. What's fake is missing half the forces you would normally feel through the wheel and that are necessary when you are sitting in front of a PC screen with zero G forces to guide you.

The FFB that is in LFS is nice...they just need to add the rest of the missing elements to make it wonderful.

If you have the FPS, how can one increase the draw distance in single player? I hate graphics popping up, but I can't find any settings to extend the draw distance.

Using the official settings, big surprise , works well, except that no matter whether I am using my current G25 or previous MOMO or previous Guillemot before that I have one persistent issue with LFS FFB:

The road surface, curbing, etc. FFB is inconsistent. The grip forces are smooth and well executed, but bumps and curb rumbles sometimes can be felt and sometimes not. The visual cues (cockpit vibration) are there every time, but it's like hit and miss whether the FFB is there. I find this very unrealistic and frustrating and it makes LFS pale in comparison to GTR2, for example, which connects you in a very visceral way to the car and track.

Are there any tweaks or settings I can employ to try to improve this? To confirm, I am using the settings from the official docs (linked above) right now.

Thanks in advance.