Been struggling with my wheel and would be grateful for any advice. Sorry this is a bit of a brain dump but grateful for any answers on any specific tips that would help me enjoy my equipment - I love the wheel and driving with it but my performance with it isn’t great.
Im on a thurstmaster TX
What settings do you generally use? Normal/sim steering, degrees of rotation, FFB etc
How do you tell if you’ve lost grip? Im having real trouble compared to the controller. With a controller its quite easy to feel the car go and correct with brakes/accelerator/countersteering, but Im really struggling with the wheel. Im not sure whether its because pedal inputs are harder to do as quickly as you can with your fingers, or that Im nervous about being too aggressive with the wheel, or its because I just cant tell that grip has been lost until its too late with the wheel.
With a controller I have all assists off but with a wheel ive turned ABS and traction control back on because there is no force feedback from the pedals and so very hard to tell where the traction points are on the pedals. I don’t mind this from an immersion POV because most of these cars would have these features anyway. But I am concerned its blunting the feedback further and so Im not learning anything.
I find it harder to position the car in the road on the wheel than with a controller. eg with a wheel I find it much harder to take a racing line through corners hitting the apex and exiting wide with repeatable accuracy. I have to go slower throughout with the wheel just to get round. Is that just me?
Horizon 2 with the wheel feels different to FM5 - if anything FM5 felt harder. Why?
There is a huge learning curve with the wheel,keep at it,it will come to you. I use 330 DOR, 60 FFB, all dead zones at 0-100 and normal steering.
Great thanks. I guess I don’t want to practice failure. Any specific tips how to judge grip and position accurately?
Sim steering, 540 DOR, default for most other wheel/pedal settings, 60 FFB. The sensitivity of wheel set to “2 green light flash” on TX wheel. Press and hold MODE button and then pull on right paddle shifter, keep doing until you see green light flash twice on bottom left side of wheel housing. Look at TX latest manual from thrustmaster website to do this. It works perfect for me. The response is super quick that I’m FINALLY able to catch the car when it oversteers and keep the thing on the road. With 900 DOR and normal wheel sensitivity (1 green flash) is was near impossible. Hope this helps.
heh 95% of the reason I’m still on the 360 is because of the Fanatic pedals with brake force pressure and fully adjustable brake/clutch travel and spring rates makes the entire wheel experience. I’d rather play 360 indefinitely until XBONE gets the equivalent. Even that aside, it takes a LONG time to get used to a wheel, especially if the pedals are not up to snuff.
If I had to give it up, I’d almost rather go back with wheels to an ingenious old thrustmaster I had back in the day of original driving games(on a Pentium 90 computer no less). It had spring-loaded variable paddle shifters that could be used to brake/throttle just like triggers. It was the only thing I would use until the Fanatic stuff came out, and was much more natural then a simple spring loaded brake pedal. You could shift with the thumb buttons and naturally proportion the brake force right on the edge of lockup, like a controller. I used controllers for most of the time 360 was out until the FM4 Fanatic was released, after trying dozens of wheels. It was the pedals that killed it for me.
My settings are a rather quick ratio 220-270 degrees, with linear increase rates, ffb and spring(return to center) settings all depending on the particular game. Most of the game items I leave at defaults in FM series(except F1 20xx requires a LOT of tweaking, but is sheer perfection when set right). It’s a bit difficult to figure out what your preferred ‘feel’ is in the Horizon games without spending more time in more simulation-based setups for a while first. Playing F1 for years is a matter of millimeters lap after lap, so I personally don’t do so well with too much steering range. It also takes practice to get a rather deft touch on a wheel and not overreact versus throwing everything at it like a Chuck E Cheeses arcade game.
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Thanks chaps
Does anybody have a foolproof way of telling when your losing grip in a corner with a wheel? Should it go loose, or pull against you?
How aggressive are people with their wheels? I think I may be way too gentle and slow on it
On mine you can feel the loss of grip on the wheel, just like a real car, it gets light on ffb with less return-to-center spring as well, and vibration depending on the surface. I think you need to reduce the overall travel, IRL, it’s rare to go beyond 9 or 3 o’clock unless you’re turning at an intersection or steep turn under 20mph under normal or sporty driving. At high speeds even less likely unless you’ve hung the tail out and are counter steering. Personally I use a lower travel to more imitate naturally fast video game driving(220-270 degrees max). The few times I make a non skidding slow U-turn, or should I decide to parallel park in a video game, I will loose the ‘realisim’ of having to rotate through a full rotation of a wheel to go to full lock, but 99.9% of the time, the additional travel works against you. I also set some linear steering into the wheel, making the ratio go up as the wheel is turned more. So at 100mph, it drives exactly as a real car at 100mph. 540 degree steering is really goofy in game with just too much range available. In a normal car at highway speeds, more then 10 degrees of turn will be a rather dangerously quick lane change. Some of the larger range settings have you chasing the wheel too much.
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