Still screaming while on my wheel

Forza Horizon Legacy Horizon FH4 Discussion
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I have posted before and went the route through support. There have been updates. Now after screaming at my monitor until I completed the main part of the game, resetting races, and flashing back over and over, it is now time to play in 15 minute increments on Treasure Island before I have to turn the game off. The offroad physics are the worst of any game I have ever played with a wheel, and that is a long list. RWD cars on the asphalt are absolutely horrendous. I am a long time consumer/gamer of the Forza franchise and I am completely done with Horizon at this point. Wheel racers have been begging for a fix since release and have been largely ignored. A supposed wheel patch came out and did very little to correct the issues. I am extremely tired of my cars sliding out uncontrollably. You can’t power drift, let off, or anything else except let the car come to almost a complete stop before you can continue on. I have friends who went from their wheels to controllers just to complete the game. I refuse to go back in technology because you can’t get your game figured out. Don’t bother sending me the bs links to “wheel setup tuning”. It is trash. Tried that. To have any bit of responsive or life-like physics, I must go to other games. I love Turn 10 and will continue to buy the Forza Motorsport series until they adopt this Mickey Mouse physics model. Thanks for wasting my time and money for me. Ultimate Edition was a waste. I miss the physics model of the previous Horizons.

Playing on Xbox One X with a Thrustmaster TX, Leather GT wheel, TH8A shifter, T3PA-Pro pedals with Ricmotec brake mod on a RaceRoom simulator. I race on/off road games including Forza Motorsport, WRC, Dirt, Project Cars, Assetto Corsa, F1, Gravel, etc. I play with all assists off. Raced on the Xbox 360 on Microsoft race wheels on games such as Forza Motorsport/Horizon, PGR, F1, Dirt, etc. I think I kinda know how to race by now and can tell you without a doubt the physics on this game are completely broken. I will leave this here so it will potentially get ignored by T10 and anyone else in development. If development would like me to test any settings or updates and give feedback, please let me know. I would be extremely interested in giving trial and feedback quietly and free of charge if it will make this and future Horizons enjoyable. It is a beautiful game and great concept. Just wish I could play.

Xbox/Microsoft GamerTag: XSR VIBROMASTER
Leader: XSR (Xtreme Street Racing)
[Mod Edit - email addresses are not allowed on the forums - MM]

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I use a Thrustmaster TMX Pro with T3PA-Pro Pedals. I agree, I have to use my controller on off road races, and sometimes on road races. It seams at times the developers haven’t driven a car before. I understand real life is a lot more complicated than programming a computer sim, however sometimes programing less, is better. Especially if less works.

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Lmao “free of charge”

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Hell, If it helps all of the wheel racers and makes it to where I can enjoy playing this “almost masterpiece”, I will volunteer my time and knowledge of wheel racing.

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The physics problem is the countersteering doesnt behave properly with wheel. What it seems to be is biasing towards full lock to account for controllers and keyboard.

To make wheels fun, you need to arcade it up a bit. I dont have my settings on me so I can only generalize.

  1. Turn your hardware setting lock to lock to something less than 720. I run it at 400 abouts.
  2. Turn up sensitivity. This will make it crisper for fine steering adjustments. Not too much or will get jumpy steering. I am about 70.
  3. Tweak linearity so that steering is responsive over half steering. Use the telemetry mode to view your steering.

Result will be you have the desired responsiveness on small adjustments and dealing with minor oversteer/understeer. Smooth midrange for cornering and control, but then responsiveness at extremes for countersteering in slides like offroad. Default wheel settings are not suited to countersteering.

Then you need to also play with forcefeedback. Turn it down, especially resistance.

Going away from neutral may seem arcadey, but in actuality, it makes it feel more realistic. You are matching controls to the physics issues.

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I did a lot of adjustments. It still has the crazy slide out and uncontrollable problems. I spent days trying to make it comfortable.

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Know the feeling, it was same for me. There is a final combination of my wheel settings, common car settings theme I use and then small adjustments.

I am at work, but home shortly. It also took me a long while to get my thrustmaster 150 setup. Spent a whole weekend at the drift circle messing with every single setting, almost ready to uninstall and considered it terrible and bugged physics with needing dumb and illogical tunes to even go anywhere.

So come back in an hour, I will have a new post with screenshots of my settings.

Until I tried keyboard to see if it was worth playing. A car I couldnt control was now a car I couldnt spin out without touching forcing. Just going from wheel to keyboard. Not even pausing. Hence the issue is a physics designed around a controller, not a wheel. So to make a wheel feel normal, your settings have to be not.

I love the wheel now that I got it figured out, you will too! Many tips and am here for all peeps wheel questions.

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The FFB/physics aren’t even the worst. That crown goes to camera shake/g-effects.

Edit: said camera shake when sliding, I assume, is to help hide the physics fighting themselves, because, effective design choices.

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Okies. Here we go. Of note, I am on PC, so if you have Xbox and wheel, I am not sure how to get to the setting. Also note that I am still tweaking them from time to time just to get it right. Start all testing with a moderate class AWD unmodified, like a subaru.

First part I recommend using with telemetry window. Tweak the steering settings for limit until you fine a spot where you are comfortable from your lock to lock. Due to issues with countersteer, I found this to be the limit of comfort for me before it felt odd.

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Next was the wheel advanced settings. At first glance, it seems odd. Sensitivity makes it turn faster in the low range, then drop off in top range, and linearity setting is to the opposite. However what I found is that the smoothness/etc almost seemed to change with speed as though the game is adjusting for the fact it is a game. I do not have any knowledge of how it works, only by what feels right. Sensitivity going up seems to make it more consistent at different speeds, then adjusting the linearity so it is a smooth swing from lock to lock.

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That helped my control, and especially countersteer a fair bit. But in addition, I had to change ffb so it felt comfortable as well. The big one is the steering resistance. If I remember right, that is the wheel damper scale. Just cause I couldn’t turn the wheel fast enough. Far too much resistance. Ditto with understeer and the minimum force which could kick the wheel out on your hand when doing any countersteering once it started to grip back up.

If you have that fixed up, next is suspension. Lots of pics, but one common theme. Front a bit stiffer than rear. Tweak according to your driving style. Essentially firming up front end so stable when under smooth cornering, but can be prone to understeer so keep it in mind. The following pics are from my S2 RWD SLR.

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Not shown is also tires. Tires can have a huge effect on handling. It seems like the game simulates contact patch, but unconfirmed. So I am going to use two terms even if not correct. Linear tires for when the shape of it is rectangular front to back across the car, and transversal for if the rectangular shape runs across width of car.

Now tire traction is a funny thing. Without details, changing width of tire doesnt change the contact patch area. It does change shape. So a narrow tire will tend to have a linear patch while a wide tire will have a transversal. Traction tends to be best perpendicular to direction of the patch (a transversal patch will have better linear (acceleration) traction and versa. Whereas a squareish shape will be good for both depending on your need.

So with that in mind, pressure and contact area. Friction is a co-efficient. So more area doesnt necessarily mean more traction. Since frictional force is a measure of the pressure (force over area) by the coefficient of friction. So lower pressure is a larger area, but less ground pressure so the per area friction is less. It does change the shape of the contact patch by making it more linear as the tire flattens more without sacrificing the transversal area. The tradeoff is a tire is suspension. It is a spring for unsprung weight. So a really soft tire will flex and roll and deform. Good on rough, but under high Gs will not grip as well. A higher pressure tire will grip better in G conditions, but roughness or breaking of traction will be more sudden and surprizing. If you find your car suddenly going from grip to spin out, lower tire pressure might help. Specially offroad.

Last, brakes.

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This one is more fun to tune. If you are using a wheel with pedals, brake lock can be a real issue. This also doubles for controllers. So the brake attributes are funny. The percentage is only percentage of power to rear it seems. So 40% is 40% rear braking and 60% at front. Using outside car view, watch to the side and hit the brakes applying more pressure specifically to see which locks first on the surface type your vehicle is mainly used for. This will help you find optimal braking to prevent sudden and unusual braking dynamics.

Next is to adjust pressure. As before test, and you want to just turn it down until you find that spot where your reaction brake pressure just about locks the brakes up. Again on your main surface usage.

This simple brake adjustment will help lots in control by keeping car from spinning out or driving off track in normal braking. Locked brakes also don’t stop you as fast normally nor can you turn.

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See, you are on the PC. It is a whole different thing. We don’t have the Thrustmaster setup app. I can change all of the settings when I plug in for firmware updates, but it doesn’t do anything for Xbox settings. I think our physics issues are Xbox specific.

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I know you cannot see my Tier 13, racing since 2008 on my tag, but I am not new to Forza. If you read my original post, I am super well versed in Forza. I am a tuner. I tune top 100 tunes on FM. I don’t bother on Horizon because it isn’t a sim. I just throw basics at the cars for comfort.

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I dont think is xbox specific. I couldnt do anything offroad, any drifting, nothing. Even on road I was swearing as I couldnt corner anywhere close to the ai.

Cross country was literally impossible for me. One bump in slightest turn and off I went. Even stock offroading had to swap in an adjustable rear and turn rear sway to nothing to have a hope.

Lots of rewind and swearing. Any slide, no matter how minor was unrecoverable. Since it runs through the windows store and uses controller, i do not think just cause xbox physics would vary from pc

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It’s a complete sack of…something…on a wheel. without going through and tuning every single car to be massively understeery and 4wd everything has godawful, unrecoverable snap oversteer.

Drift events in untunable cars? Forget it unless you want to set the wheel up with no resistance so you can just spin it around for drifting - may as well use a controller by that point - multiplayer racing? Someone taps on the first corner, massive snap oversteer into the scenery. Off road multiplayer? Gotta be joking, every single fence and wall will make the car try to spin out.

It’s godawful, there’s a 10 page thread running, it’s been an issue since day one, and we don’t even know whether they’re looking at it or just ignoring it because support gives zero feedback.

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Oh, and just to add insult to injury, the second challenge on the Fortune Island is a standard, high performance, RWD sportscar up the longest, trickiest drift zone we’ve yet seen. Where your uncontrollable spinout from adding 0.03% too much throttle means you fail, instantly. And you can’t get enough points to trigger it without getting the car properly sideways.

Thanks guys, nice to see nothing we’ve said has been taken onboard.

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I tried the support thing. I tried the twitter thing. I jacked with my wheel settings in game. I tried a lot of highly aggressive car tuning. At best, the driving physics are completely terrible. That is after hours of headache inducing effort that results in loss of voice from screaming. The demo for the game played perfectly like Horizon 3. I tried telling support that. I think when the devs worked on the physics models for the different wheel models, they completely ignored the Thrustmasters. I see vids of people playing on Logitecs and Fanatecs that look so effortless. All I want to do is enjoy the game without having to put in so much unnecessary effort. Project Cars 2 requires a crazy amount of wheel adjustments, but this is waaaaayyyy beyond, and you still end up with terrible results.

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Nah, my Logitech is the same, there’s people with all 3 wheels across both platforms all having the same issue. I have PC2 - it’s a dream compared to this.

The only people I’ve seen that have ‘fixed’ it are the people who only do drifting that have basically turned off almost everything FFB related so they can just spin the wheel one lock to the other with a finger through the spokes - which is frankly terrible for everything else and you may as well just be using a keyboard or controller at that point.

The cars behave completely differently if you play on a keyboard or controller compared to the wheels.

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Yup, and that is the problem. It is like being on a wheel keeps controller adjustments for biasing. I have said all I can and can go four hours now on my previously unplayable wheel in fh4 with even race rwd s2 on rainy grass. Tricky, but controllable. I offered my advice and nothing is radical on tuning. Outside of that… Shrug.

The sensitivity/linearity seems to solve most of it with ffb balance for feel the rest.

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My son and I have 2 full setups at home ( steering / pedals / shifter / handbrake ). 1 is the Thrustmaster TMX and the other is the Logitech g920. I spent a lot more time tweaking the g920 than the TMX. Yes, there was a HUGE difference between FH3 and FH4 but nothing a little tweaking couldn’t fix except the center deadzone on the g920, and even that is very minor right now. I must say I never used a controller so I can’t compare, but with that said, you get used to what you are using. For a while, I thought it was because I did some real life racing and know what a steering feels like, BUT, my son is 11, have been playing for years and has no issues at all. His first try at that long drift road on Fortune Island, he scored 385k in the Silverado. So maybe for those going from controller to steering back to controller and to steering, you don’t get a chance to get used to it or make the proper adjustments. Now I know it’s far from perfect, much better on FM7 and way better on Asseto Corssa, but with practice and persistence, it’s still a lot of fun.

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No, it’s not that, 99% of my hours in FH4 are on the wheel with all the driving aids off.
Pickup a controller and about 2 minutes in you’ll feel like you were suddenly turned into a drifting God.

Whatever they use to get the cars to slide easily on a controller, it feels like they also then have something that increases grip the more the car yaws, or just physically stops the car from going too far. Whereas it’s turned off on the wheel and it makes things a complete mess, it feels like the centre of gravity is 3 feet too far back.

You hit the nail on the head with the Silverado really - the cars that feel the most balanced on the wheel are ones with the engine up front and huge wheelbases with soft suspension and big tyres - the very cars that should be an understeering mess.
My sweetest handling rally car is a tossup between a front engine, 4wd, Corvette, and a 4wd stretched limo…

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I’m yet to try the limo, I guess I’ll have to buy one!