Countersteering into a drift feels too sluggish, and it often ends up crashing my car

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH4 Discussion
1

Heya,

I play with a Logitech F310 and all difficulty settings on as hard as possible.

Very often when I snap steer into a corner and end up drifting a lot, countersteering into the drift feels slugglish, as if it’s lagging behind your actual input. Then, by the time your wheels are fully turned into the drift and you try and steer the other direction to cancel it out, the wheels will still be pointing into the drift, and take too long get back straight again. The result of this is your car very often careening off the side of the course.

I tried messing with steering linearity but this had no effect. So to investigate I opened the telemetry panel and watched the game’s steering input.

The issue seems to me in the fact that steering input is dampened. When you steer full left or right, your wheels in game will take its time to get to the desired steering angle. This results in smoother steering, but also sluggish steering. And especially when driving nimble rally cars like the Escort of the Subaru, this is quite a bit of an issue.

It also doesn’t help that when you’re drifting, the direction in which you’re drifting reacts much more strongly to steering input than the other side. For example, when you’re drifting around a left hand turn (and the right side of your car is facing the direction you’re going), turning left will yield a far smaller steering angle than you get from steering right (into the drift). During normal driving the steering sensitivity is rather low, so your muscle memory expects your wheels to react slow to any steering you do. However then when you’re drifting, turning into a drift causes a far greater steering angle than you would expect. Couple this effect with the sluggish steering dampening, and you end up with wheels that are locked into a path that will send you off the track.

Where you would normally figure “okay let’s steer back the right way”, the game takes another couple of moments to react to your decision, and by that time it’s often too late.

My suggestion would be two advanced control settings: Enable Snap Steering (default off) and Disable Adaptive Steering Angles (default off). The first one would greatly decrease the time your cars wheels take to react to steering inputs from the controller, and the second would disable (or reduce, or change) your wheels turning further when you’re drifting than when they would normally.

Thank you!

PS: Some background: I’m a hobbyist game developer and I work on cars and car physics a lot. (Blacktop /r/GamePhysics Demo by Bobstudios) The solution I used for drifting was to bind the steering angle to velocity and drift angle. Higher the drift angle, higher the steering angle. Higher the velocity, lower the steering angle. I had barely any steering dampening/smoothing which allowed you to accurately catch your car when coming out of a drift, thus circumventing the issue I’m having with Forza.

1 Like
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Have you tried it on both Normal and Simulation steering?

3

Yup, normal seems to make it slightly easier to catch a countersteer, but as per the menu that’s likely because they’ve reduced some physical tire effects.

However, the same sluggishness applies as you have in simulation steering.

I actually made a video to investigate it further. Excuse the poor editing, it’s only for demonstration.

I’ve slowed down the video at two points, once during normal and once during simulation steering, to measure how many frames it takes for the wheels to turn the way I want them to.
In both cases it takes 27 frames (at 30 frames per second) to completely turn the tires the other way.

In order to properly catch a countersteer, you’d have to anticipate an entire second in advance.

In either cases, it doesn’t even properly reflect what the telemetry says, because the telemetry was pointing the other way when the tires were only actually halfway into their turn. Also my analog stick was pointing the other way immediately from the first frame. It appears that the steering indicator in the telemetry shows neither the actual steering angle nor the actual analog input, which is weird.

Now I understand why this is done, taking a long time to turn the wheels means that most steering people do will be very smooth and reduces many possible instances of skidding, understeer, or oversteer.

I’m beginning to suspect that an even better solution would be to tie steer smoothing to skid angle of the entire car.
Higher skid angle (bigger drift) > snappier steering
Lower skid angle (driving normally) > smooth steering

Again it’d be best if that was a setting you could change: more power to the user.

I wish I had a wheel to try on Forza, because I highly suspect that with a racing wheel your car’s wheels are directly tied to the amount of steering input you give.

1 Like
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Correct, a wheel removes those tricks that are used for gamepad. Have you tried going to the wheel input options and seeing if you can map your gamepad as a wheel custom mapping?

5

I noticed this last night as well, perhaps it is xbox only but the steering inputs for me are delayed and also being reduced at high speeds (full lock is interpreted as half lock) like the game is trying to baby the inputs to prevent me from spinning out but in reality its preventing me from catching oversteer…

6

Not xbox only. I play PC.

That’s actually pretty bad. Looks more like a mistake than a conscious design at this point.

It’d be cool if a dev could weigh in on this. It’s my one big issue with this game that’s got me hesitant to purchase it.

7

Have had none of these issues on my wheel on PC.

8

I just tried to replicate it again and as far as I could tell it wasn’t showing up in the telemetry as it was originally for me. I’m still dealing with a slight sluggishness on the entrance and exit of the corner while drifting and straitening out or transitioning, basically as I’m straitening out or steering back to center there is a moment where I end up having too much counter-steering and the front end ends up snapping without any warning through the wheel. But that could just be due to my settings and not so much the games fault.

9

I doubt it’s your settings.

It’s all about the time it takes for the wheels to respond to a change in input. At the moment this is a full second. There’s no setting for this.

This means that by the time you feel you should start straightening out your car, you’re essentially already too late, because your wheels will take a full second to get to the desired position. That full second often means crashing into a wall/tree/lake/bush somewhere.

I really hope we get some sort of setting for this.

10

The same issue that was shown in the video above is also present on the wheel regardless of simulation steering, normal steering, or degree of rotation used.

11

I’m having this problem as well, It’s really hard to drift as the wheels turn very sluggish when counter steering. I cant even turn them fully in the counter steer direction, this makes control really hard. What is the point of the Simulation setting when the game still babies you. Now drifting is mostly a chore unless I get a physical wheel but I want to play lazily from my couch with my pad.

12

Turn up sensitivity, and turn down linearity to match. Use telemetry to ensure it doesnt have any stallpoints in the turning. This seems to cut down the “dampening effect”

Then adjust forcefeedback so it feels comfortable.

Lastly, you might need to go into your controllers settings (not in game settings) and reduce the lock to lock distance. Countersteer seems to not be as effective as it should, needing more turning than normal to smoothly counter.

13

I tried my T500RS once last month. Had a Silvia with drift steering in a roundabout, throttle pinned in 4th gear, drifting. The steering never settles. I was able to sit and saw it back and forth, looking for some indication of a car moving through space, made a few awkward sideways laps around the roundie before calling it quits and unplugging my wheel. Senseless. Plus, the camera shake and g-effects are insane.

14

I plugged my wheel in again after the above post. Thrustmaster software at 100-0-0-0, Forza effects all at 0 except understeer, you can feel the alignment torque, it is there. This can also highlight the pseudo-physical and often violent forces from the tires. I believe I settled on 100-0-60-30 in Thrustmaster software and 100 understeer/50 minimum in Forza. Everything else in Forza at 0 except linearity and sensitivity at 50. 1080 degrees. Didn’t have any major issues until trying team adventure. Spun a few times, snapped back at least once. When I tried to freeroam rush in my CLKGTR, the wheel shake on dirt was probably heard 3 apartments away, I called it quits at that point.

15

As of June 19, 2019 issue still present
Will a dev please give this some attention?
I use my G27 for FH4 and BeamNG.drive and, for the first month of my wheel, had this sluggish feeling. I later figured out it was display latency of about 1 whole second. I solved the issue and now Beam reacts fine, and so did Forza at first…over time the sluggish feeling that never quite left Forza just became more and more noticeable. I’m a driver irl and expected some differences in oversteer characteristics when I began practicing on Sims, but in comparison to beam, Forza is completely undrivable

You know it’s bad when someone says your game is less driveable than BeamNG.drivd

16

As of June 19, 2019 issue still present
Will a dev please give this some attention?
I use my G27 for FH4 and BeamNG.drive and, for the first month of my wheel, had this sluggish feeling. I later figured out it was display latency of about 1 whole second. I solved the issue and now Beam reacts fine, and so did Forza at first…over time the sluggish feeling that never quite left Forza just became more and more noticeable. I’m a driver irl and expected some differences in oversteer characteristics when I began practicing on Sims, but in comparison to beam, Forza is completely undrivable

You know it’s bad when someone says your game is less driveable than BeamNG.drive

17

Submit a ticket. The devs don’t come here, I believe.