Hello.
When discussing torque steering in the locked diff thread I remembered an issue I came up months ago with:
Right now the only way for the player to notice wether FFB clipping occurs is a lot of concentration, testing and research, something the average LFS user is unlikely to do. If my understanding of the way FFB works is correct I think it would be a very good improvement to notify the player when the simulation maxes out the FFB strenght so the user can change his FFB-setup to improve the feedback.
As far as I understand the matter LFS breaks down the FFB into e.g. 256 steps of strenght with 0 being full force to the left, 127 no force and 255 full force to the right.
Using the ingame FFB strenght-variable LFS calculates the scaled FFB value and hands it over to DirectPlay, which hands it to the logitech driver which makes the wheel exert a force.
So when the ingame FFB strenght is set too high an average force will already reach a value of 0 or 255 (read: maximum) so a higher force can't be expressed anymore in this scale. That means any higher forces are filtered out (similarly to audio-clipping) and the player loses a lot of the FFB-effects.
If it works like that the player should be informed about FFB-clipping in some way because it significantly reduces the feedback the player gets from the car.
That is of course under the assumption that my understanding of FFB is correct. I didn't read any documentation on the inner workings of FFB so I may just as well be completely wrong.
Vain
When discussing torque steering in the locked diff thread I remembered an issue I came up months ago with:
Right now the only way for the player to notice wether FFB clipping occurs is a lot of concentration, testing and research, something the average LFS user is unlikely to do. If my understanding of the way FFB works is correct I think it would be a very good improvement to notify the player when the simulation maxes out the FFB strenght so the user can change his FFB-setup to improve the feedback.
As far as I understand the matter LFS breaks down the FFB into e.g. 256 steps of strenght with 0 being full force to the left, 127 no force and 255 full force to the right.
Using the ingame FFB strenght-variable LFS calculates the scaled FFB value and hands it over to DirectPlay, which hands it to the logitech driver which makes the wheel exert a force.
So when the ingame FFB strenght is set too high an average force will already reach a value of 0 or 255 (read: maximum) so a higher force can't be expressed anymore in this scale. That means any higher forces are filtered out (similarly to audio-clipping) and the player loses a lot of the FFB-effects.
If it works like that the player should be informed about FFB-clipping in some way because it significantly reduces the feedback the player gets from the car.
That is of course under the assumption that my understanding of FFB is correct. I didn't read any documentation on the inner workings of FFB so I may just as well be completely wrong.
Vain