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Great MOD :D

ControllerSettings Folder in 3.0 Mod is Incorrect have to be in PC Subfolder ;)

I have tested your new Version and it’s extreme Amazing!!

I think Shift is better to drive than GTR 2 now !!

I like the FFB so much, unbelievable! The Ghost Steering is gone, nice! And FFB Effects while Escalating feels pure natural! Perfect work!

Tried this mod today, and either ea was way off or this is a little bit to much grip. Used the Ebisu west track and the stock Nissan Skyline Kgc10 and went from a laptim of 1.17 to 1.10. 7 seconds seems like a bit too much?
These are my initial results now gonna try some different cars.

Dont go through there thats way too subjective..

Even though I’m extremely cynical about these mods ever improving FFB I’ll keep trying every alliteration in hope that it eventually will. Still waiting for the NFS Realfeel plug-in with understeer though.

Thank you very much for this very magnificent mod, nailed it !!.

Now I can play! The cars feel like they’re driving on pavement, not on a road made of jelly.

damn, the way he keeps reworking his settings, i’m beginning to think that this guy is really serious about fixing shift.

“more precise steering”, “reduced brake pressure” and then “greatly reduced oscillation” … this reads like a wishlist. :D

… ok, i guess i’ll give shift one last try.

thanks for this mod, julien! shift with this modification is much better than out-of-the-box. still not as “near-perfect” like rfactor + realfeel/leoFFB (& co.), but maybe that could be the case one day.

keep up your fantastic job.

ok, i’ve tried it. i installed shift, patched to 1.02 and installed the mod right away. since it’s been quite some time that i’ve played shift i can’t directly compare the mod to the vanilla version of shift but the way i remember the controls this mod is a huge improvement, i’m almost able to drive a clean line now. sadly though it’s still an “alomst”. competitive, clean driving is not possible.

there is still a huge problem with the way the ffb simulates weigth transfer. i drive a straight line with the steering at 0°, now when i go through a corner and turn the wheel to, say 80° the wheel will try to pull back to its center position at 0° right? however in shift it wants to go back to a point beyond the center at something like -15°. and this is not because i have oversteer, it’s always happening, even when i’m driving very slow. i think this is the main reason for that weird oscillation behaviour.

another problem is that when i’m in a corner and i have the wheel at 90° and then i tighten the steering to 120° the force should become stronger. but in shift it stays the same. no matter how hard i turn it’s always the same steering force. how am i supposed to get a feeling for the tires’ grip?

and then there is still no understeer…

i’m not entirely sure these problems are due to the ffb or the physics. to find that out i tried to disable the “rumble”-effect in the controls menu and drive like i have a non-ffb wheel. however my G25 has that force dead zone around the center… with ffb effects enabled i can get rid of it by setting the overall force strength to more than 100% but with only the centering spring enabled this fix doesn’t work. so basically the g25 is useless for this testing method. maybe someone with a fanatec or an old pre-ffb microsoft wheel could give it a try.

Hi,

Wheels will always oscillate, this is natural. Sims do not take car of this problem. They send a force to the wheel and do not check if the wheel is moving faster than the wheels -> oscillations unless you set the right damper/friction/sensitivity/FFB force for your wheel. Only Leo FFB plugin works differently.
For less oscillations, enable damping in windows, decrease sensitivity and/or FFB strength, increase damper in controller preset. This is the same story with rFactor/GTR2.
In older wheels like momo the motor itself brakes the wheel when it is not pushed anymore and it reduces oscillations, this is not the case with G25.

Like in iRacing, LFS, you will not have the very convenient drop in FFB you can feel in ISI/Simbin titles when front grip is lost because it is very modest. In most cases on dry tarmac forces reach their max level and stay there while tyres slide progressively. The most important thing from driver point of view is that the force stops increasing when he turns the wheel, that’s why the wheel is suddenly easier to move. But of course when rear grip is lost this is different as it turns the car. You feel it clearly and instantly. Front grip loss is more a seat of the pants feeling unfortunately.

If the FFB force does not increase from 90 to 120 degrees it may be because your ffb is already to strong…it reaches maximum value before 90, and further rise is clipped. Same thing happens with LFS. Hope it helps. :)

That is an excellent post Der_KHAN, it fits my response about this issue exactly.

so i take it you are Julien? first of all thank you for taking the time to work on this mess of a game.

.. now to the nagging:

juls:
Hi,
Wheels will always oscillate, this is natural. Sims do not take car of this problem. They send a force to the wheel and do not check if the wheel is moving faster than the wheels -> oscillations unless you set the right damper/friction/sensitivity/FFB force for your wheel. Only Leo FFB plugin works differently.
For less oscillations, enable damping in windows, decrease sensitivity and/or FFB strength, increase damper in controller preset. This is the same story with rFactor/GTR2.

i don’t know about gtr2 but if it’s rfactor, iracing, gtr evolution/race07, or even grid/dirt2 … all i have to do is turn off all additional damper and spring effects in the driver panel and i have a proper sense of weigth transfers. sure there’s always a little oscillation, but honestly, if i don’t let go of the wheel i don’t even realize it’s there. it should be possible to also make a one-setup-fits-all factory setting for shift, but i have this bad feeling that the ffb is not the root of the problem…

juls:

Like in iRacing, LFS, you will not have the very convenient drop in FFB you can feel in ISI/Simbin titles when front grip is lost because it is very modest. In most cases on dry tarmac forces reach their max level and stay there while tyres slide progressively. The most important thing from driver point of view is that the force stops increasing when he turns the wheel, that’s why the wheel is suddenly easier to move. But of course when rear grip is lost this is different as it turns the car. You feel it clearly and instantly. Front grip loss is more a seat of the pants feeling unfortunately.

i’m sorry but i’ll have to disagree on this one. i have not driven a lot of cars on the edge as much as i do in simracing but from what i have experienced the loss of force with sudden understeer is definitely there. it depends very much on the tires however. compared to wide sports tires most slim road tires i have driven will start to sqeal and slide earlier but from that point on it takes a while until they loose all of their grip. just like you describe it, it’s a smooth transition. and that’s also what you feel in the steering wheel. a wide and grippy tire will start to slide later but then the complete loss of grip comes more suddenly and when you slide and get to the point where the grip comes back it kicks back in and that can really get you into trouble. like that classic mistake when you keep on turning the wheel to the inside of the corner and nothing happens until suddenly the car jumps to the inside and ultimately off the road. but i have the feeling that the heavier the car gets even a sporty tire will tend to handle smoother again. i have driven a 1.7t sports sedan with 255/35r19 dunlops that behaved like an old volkswagen in this regard, on the other hand a 0.3t lighter hatchback with 225/45r17 tires kicked like a donkey. i can only assume that a 1.1t race car with racing slicks will kick like a horse and that’s also what i have observed in simracing. …makes perfect sense to me. and that same characteristic also applies to the rear wheels. and i must say i have never seen a long smooth drift in the GT1 or F1 series. when these cars loose it you have to be very awake or very lucky not to fly off the track. then again some road cars can be drifted smoothly easy as pie. so i think everything is possible it just depends on the car and the weather conditions. but the way it is in shift… i mean i felt no understeer at all. it’s not that it’s smooth or subtle, it’s just not there.

in contrast to that, i have to say that the effect is quite noticeable in iracing. driving this sim actually made me work on my ffb settings for rfactor to get the same level of understeer feedback, because the stock ffb of rfactor doesn’t really have this. but even if understeer is more noticeable than in the real car, i think that ffb is about delivering information to the driver and a little exaggeration might just even out the odds between simracers and real drivers, because the latter get so much more feedback altogether.

juls:

If the FFB force does not increase from 90 to 120 degrees it may be because your ffb is already to strong…it reaches maximum value before 90, and further rise is clipped. Same thing happens with LFS. Hope it helps.:)

yeah, that must be it. i had to turn the ffb up to 125% in the driver panel because i barely felt a thing in shift and as so often the g25 was completely numb around the center.
i’m using a 12.5″ inch wheel, so with some games it’s really difficult to get enough force.

just like you describe it, it’s a smooth transition. and that’s also what you feel in the steering wheel.

Yes that’s what I tried to say nothing more (english problems here). It is a progressive and modest force drop. When you get understeering during cornering, tyres do not vanish. They still give as much as they can but it is not enough to turn the car. Forces are still very big.

In GTL/rFactor/GTR2/GTR Evo/Race 07, when front and/or rear wheels lose grip, the FFB is suddenly reduced 60%-100% like if tyres simply disappear. Unfortunately many simracers got used to that exageration. With NFSS, if you don’t put FFB too strong, then it is not clipped before you reach the understeering zone…and you can feel what happens.
We have two evolutions here…sims are now giving up the artificial 60% or more ffb drop when grip is lost, and at the same time tyres are changing. I see you think the opposite, but tyres in this mod are lot more sensitive to mass transfer than tyres used in ISI/Simbin titles (10 times, this is not random I try to use realistic figures for the load sensitivity). That is why you can feel the car turning on bumps, following road slopes. Car momentum and roll are very important too. Maybe that’s why it feels strange at first…because we don’t feel much what is the current car attitude and road slopes as we don’t have G-forces, but the tyres react to it.

For example, scandinavian flick works in NFSS. Not useful for racing, but it shows this dynamic…the way suspension and tyre loading interfere with steering…is not so bad. Another thing…most cars in NFSS have road setups and roll a lot more than everything you get in other sims.

You should try enabling spring and damper in windows. I don’t know why people say it is wrong, but for me it is a vital part of FFB. Damper effect is requested by the sims, not by windows (I traced the directInput requests to be sure of that). In a FFB wheel you need to have a proper balance between the forces and the dampening….because you feel the forces when you turn, and only the damper/friction in the center. The sim is supposed to simulate the steering, forces when turning and proper steering column friction and damper in the middle. Without damper/friction you can’t expect to reduce oscillations, as this is the only thing braking the wheel when it comes back to center.

On momo friction/damper can be disabled as mechanism already has a lot of friction, but G25 needs damper/friction to feel right.

juls: In GTL/rFactor/GTR2/GTR Evo/Race 07, when front and/or rear wheels lose grip, the FFB is suddenly reduced 60%-100% like if tyres simply disappear.

ok don’t mix that up. when the rear wheels lose grip to the point where you get oversteer the ffb is not reduced, instead it pulls outward, which is exactly what happens in the real world too. just go to a skidpad or parking lot, drive in a circle and pull the handbrake. the centering force will instantly disappear and the wheel will pull to the outside of the corner. this is a very important effect in ffb and damping waters it down. that’s the reason why i like to keep damping as low as possible and also why the logitech momo is a horrible wheel.

now when the front wheels loose grip it’s another story. it is difficult to recreate this situation with a normal road car on tarmac but it’s very easy to get there while driving on snow these days. you have to find a long, wide corner and drive it at the max speed your car can handle, now when you accelerate just a little bit more you will feel a sudden loss of steering force. soft power steering might make the difference less noticeable but it’s definitely there. i’m not saying the steering force disappears completely but there is definitely a huge drop. the same happens when you lock up the brakes in a car with no ABS.

juls:

… but G25 needs damper/friction to feel right.

i never use dampers in the logitech control panel, i leave it to the ffb in the respective sim and it works just fine.

ok i think i got carried away a little. the point i was trying to make is that i don’t think the problem with shifts steering is just oscillation. it feels like the steering not only pulls to the center but to the outside of the corner in a way which i have not experienced before, esp. not in a real car. and as i said it’s always there, even when i drive so slow that there can’t possibly be any oversteer causing this effect.

i just go in game 8 or 9 ffb 56% percent steering sensitivity the rest at default and my Logitech profiler settings are.

Overall Effects Strength – 100%
Spring Effect Strength – 100%
Damper Effect Strength – 100%
Centre Spring Strength Enabled at 0%
Report Combined Pedals – unchecked
Degrees of Rotation – 900 degrees

Pretty straight forward but it feels really good the damping isnt cheesy like the logitech momo piece of junk. a simple experiment you can do is play endurance series mod for rfactor drive a porka on nords then do it in shift with these exact settings i said and this mod. as for der_KHAN competitive, clean driving is not possible. Yes it is!.

Der_KHAN: now when the front wheels loose grip it’s another story. it is difficult to recreate this situation with a normal road car on tarmac but it’s very easy to get there while driving on snow these days. you have to find a long, wide corner and drive it at the max speed your car can handle, now when you accelerate just a little bit more you will feel a sudden loss of steering force. soft power steering might make the difference less noticeable but it’s definitely there. i’m not saying the steering force disappears completely but there is definitely a huge drop. the same happens when you lock up the brakes in a car with no ABS.

The thing is driving on snow and driving on tarmac are not the same thing. On snow you literally lose grip, on tarmac you don’t. You may start to slide but the tyres are still providing a lot of grip.

David Wright: The thing is driving on snow and driving on tarmac are not the same thing.On snow you literally lose grip, on tarmac you don’t.You may start to slide but the tyres are still providing a lot of grip.

from my experience the only difference is that tarmac offers much more grip and you have to go a lot faster and need a lot more hp to eventually experience the same behavior as on loose surfaces.

a race driving instructor will tell you that when you lock up the brakes and the rolling friction between the rubber and the road turns into sliding friction, you instantly loose at least 30% of grip depending on the type of tire. now sliding sideways might be a little more complicated because i think in that situation the tires are kinda both rolling and sliding at the same time… but now were really getting carried away with our discussion here.

it makes no sense to go into such detail when the ffb still has much more urgent issues with weigth transfers.

Sorry but I have never experienced what you talk about. I try to understand but it is difficult. NFSS gives a lot of relevant information about weight transfer through FFB. The only way I can understand what you feel is when I imagine you set FFB and steering sensitivity too strong.
If you set FFB strength too strong these mass transfer forces(supposed to make the wheel firmer or lighter) are way too strong and can give the impression the wheel is pulled. But which car? Which track?
With proper FFB strength and steering sensitivity, my wheel does not even oscillate at low speed. It comes back in line on flat ground.

Did you follow precisely the readme? Because there are two signals mixed together in the default FFB. One is cornering force, and the other is called “grip” but looks more like a mix between front/rear grip and lateral acceleration. Both signals interfere. The controller presets included in the mod remove the “grip” signal and leave only front cornering forces. Steering sensitivity is very important too and should be adapted to your wheel lock.

Another thing is clipping. The mod already increases game FFB… with 125% FFB I bet everything is clipped. If this is the case clipping prevent you from feeling any tiny grip loss, and when your wheel come back to center, as long as you are still in the clipping zone you feel the force is not decreasing…maye this gives the impression the wheel is going to continue the other side.

im just loving this cheers and thanks again . my girl friend is blatting around in the little bimmer, wont let me play :( .

juls:
Sorry but I have never experienced what you talk about. I try to understand but it is difficult.

i gave it another shot and did some laps at brands hatch. i wanted to drive the elise but for some reason shift insisted on

giving me a challenger. but it doesn’t really matter because it’s the same with every car i have driven in shift so far.

i have tried the setup mattabater recommended combined with the ingame settings from your readme. i did the reset

pressing “2″, like you recommended. since the g25 has that huge ffb deadzone around the center i prefer to set the

“overall force strength” to 107% but i have also tried 100%. it feels very different with 107% but after looking very careful

i found that essentially what happens is the same. the only difference is that at 100% the forces seem much weaker

overall and theres no ffb at the center. you have to turn the wheel to like 5° to feel something but the effects are the

same. it did’t seem like there is more clipping with 107%.

what i’m describing is most obvious on the long straight after the fourth corner leading up to hawthorn bend. i’ve made a

screenshot so you can be sure what i mean:

yfrog.com/enshiftbrandsj

in the screenie you can see the small kink in the road where you have to slightly turn right. so when you turn the wheel

just a tiny little bit to the right you get a huge impulse of force pulling the wheel to the left and it will not stop when you

center the wheel again. instead it tries to pull to that -15° position i mentioned in an earlier post. so what the driver has to

do is drive though that small bend and when the car is back on the straight again you have to hold the wheel in the center

position for a while until the force in the wheel will finally go away after half a second or so. but at that point it should be

long gone.

the worst part about it though is that that “impulse” is so strong. when i go through a corner it feels like the initial

resistance in the wheel when i start to turn it, remains the same when i keep turning it further as the corner tightens. so

that is basically what i have described before with my 90° to 120° talk. this is what you call clipping right? but i have used

your recommended values so it shouldn’t occur. and even at only 100% overall effects strength in the drivel panel it is no

different.

i have also tried to lower in-game ffb to 5 and the sensivity to 30%. all that does i weaken the effect and moving it further

away from the center position of the wheel. basically it remains the same though.

now that i think about it this all seems very familiar, i believe i have experienced this behavior before with another game.

so it’s not exclusive to shift. but i don’t remember which game it was and if there was a fix.

omg what just happened with my text blocks?

we definitely need an edit button here!

Der_KHAN did you? – redefine steer left, steer right, throttle, brake and clutch axis. This is very important it avoids over sensitivity to do so, select each axis until it is highlighted, and move corresponding axis on your controller.
And those settings i said just above got rid of that dead zone for me no clipping, because i know what dead zone you’re talking about.

yes, i tried the presets 7, 8 and 27. loaded the preset pressed “2″ and redefined the axis’

OK I see better what you mean. When you turn the wheel, and then bring it back to center, the car is not back in line and wants to continue turning a fraction of a second. Therefore it pushes on the wheel and you have to maintain it centered until car really comes in line.

For me this is 100% natural, and it should be in all other sims. I will try to explain with my poor english. When you turn the wheel right you launched the car in a rotating movement (yaw rate). As car has a lot of inertia along yaw axis, this rotation is not synchronous with the wheel angle…it builds up later.

Because of that, what you feel when you bring back the wheel to center is not symetrical. When you start bringing back the wheel to center car is still turning right and the yaw rate is still increasing (intertia) even if you stopped turning the wheel and start turning it the other direction.

So, the FFB is now pushin stronger toward the left than when you started turning, and when the wheel comes back in center position, car is still turning -> wheel is still pulling a little toward the left. You have to wait a fraction of a second with the wheel centered until the yaw rotation stops, or you can turn the wheel a little left.

I know that seems crazy but this is exactly what happens in real life. Here is an illustration.
This graph shows real measure of a slalom (Stanford university):
http://img171.yfrog.com/i/slalome.png/

Look at the first turn…the driver start turning at 1s, and brings back the steering wheel at 2s. Now look at the yaw rate of the car and lateral acceleration of the car (ie turning). It lags the steering wheel. At 2s when the steering wheel is back to center, car is still rotating at 20 degrees per second almost the maximum! No doubt this is still pulling the steering wheel and driver has to hold the wheel half a second or steer to the other side to stop it.

Maybe this phenomenon is exagerated in Shift, but it is realistic.
That’s why scandinavian flick is possible in reality and in NFSS but not in many other sims. That’s why when you look at your hands on a road/track, you make many more steering movements to control car yaw momentum. I would even dare to say that if you turn strong, bring back the wheel centered and do not feel car yaw momentum…there is some arcade there. Tyres should not magically absorb the car yaw momentum when coming back in line. That’s the secret for quick slalom and many tricky turns…use car momentum.

I suppose what makes it feel weird is that we miss the g-forces. IRL you bring the wheel centered, wheel is still pulling a bit, but you feel the car is still turning with the g-forces and these two things together feel connected.

For the steering torque decreasing after peak grip you are absolutely right. Tyre lateral forces almost don’t decrease after the peak, but what we feel through the wheel is torque tyre lateral forces*trail and this is decreasing.

It’s not exactly related to grip loss…but car suspension is set to have this peak and decrease in steering torque match peak grip of tyre.

Found where is the problem…I will make a version of the mod which restores this steering torque drop. It exists in the game.

juls:
OK I see better what you mean. When you turn the wheel, and then bring it back to center, the car is not back in line and wants to continue turning a fraction of a second. Therefore it pushes on the wheel and you have to maintain it centered until car really comes in line.
For me this is 100% natural, and it should be in all other sims.

but it is. when you drive a slalom and the car starts fishtailing this is exactly what happens in all those sims. in shift, however, the force is beyond exaggerated. even when you make just small corrections to your line on a straight road the force in the wheel is overproportionally strong and lasts too long. it suggests the weigth transfers to be much larger than they really are, to a degree that it it’s not only exaggerating but misinforming. i think this is also what many people mean when they talk about laggy ffb in shift.

i don’t know what exaclty has to be done to get it right but i think the pontiac solstice in iracing gives a pretty good example of what ffb should feel like with a normal road car. so that would be a good tool for you to get a comparison.

juls:
That’s why scandinavian flick is possible in reality and in NFSS but not in many other sims.

i don’t know which other sims you mean but the scandinavian flick is definitely possible in rfactor, iracing, Race07 and GTR Evo.

juls:
Found where is the problem…I will make a version of the mod which restores this steering torque drop. It exists in the game. niiice :D