Our Wheel Settings - Direct from the Car Handling Team

[DelDredd 19]

I agree with Tliivo  as well, Those settings have not been used in any good Driving Sim for years.

When I saw the Team recommend them I knew they would be useless without even trying them.

Maybe Car Handling Team but not a Force Feedback Team with those settings as they give no feel at all, may as well connect a big rubber band to your wheel and save power by switching it off.

[RealTberg 0]

Hi, 

Awesome stages and graphics, but fix the bucket ambient effect on the engine sounds.
But yes, the FFB is off and the devs recommended settings are just...not fun.

I use the Fanatec CSW v2, and for that I have found somewhat okay settings:

First, insert racedepartment mod already posted.
Next, recommended settings need change:
On wheel: 
SEN 540 (or pref, 270 is just ridicoulus). Forget that the wheel doesn´t match the virtual one for now.
DRI 003
SPR and DPR OFF, the DRI setting at 003 will have enough "natural" damping. Spring is useless.

In game settings:
Try cranking everything up in advanced FFB window to 100%, you can do that when you have DRI 003.

Still needed:
selfaligning torque!
more vertical forces
sense of weight transfer

With above settings, it´s much more fun and immersive than default. Not there yet, but alot better.

Codies: Awesome replays!

[rwb 0]

Can we expect to see caster adjustments to the cars, which would affect the aligning torque? 

[sgspenceley 0]

Please give your loyal & enthusiastic customers better force feedback and industry standard degrees of rotation.

Please work on a totally new codemasters wheel support. Come out of the dark ages of wheel support, focus on the hardware sim racers have been buying in the last 3 years. Every decent wheel has at least 900 degrees of rotation, they all support reasonable to excellent force feedback in every modern game. It's not a long endless list, Logitech, Fanatec, Thrustmaster.

The development team has put so much effort on improved rendering, improved modelling, improved lighting, improved sound, then the tactile device the driver touch to receive driving feed is so dramatically weak and old school!

As an ex rally driver I want and need to feel the road through the wheel, I want to feel the weight of the car through the wheel, I want to tell what the tires are doing through the wheel. The human machine interface is the wheel and force feedback!

As a human factors engineer and experience designer listen to your customers feedback and make the human machine interaction awesome!

[Duko 0]

Fix the FFB and FOV (more) settings and i will buy any DLC u make after relaase! 

[BenjaminJohnson 0]

I'm not sure if I just suck. But I've played DiRT Rally for over 4 hours now and I still find it difficult to get the car around the corners. When I play RBR, I have no trouble directing the car naturally around the corners. I automatically left foot brake and accelerate out of the corner to get the car around the corner as fast as possible. With DiRT rally I always seem to be under steering and I don't seem to get a sense of the grip of car as it goes around the corner so I can make those automatic adjustments.

This could be because I'm used to the handling in RBR. Though when I compared them, it was about 2 months since I last played RBR. RBR now feels like an acrade racing game compared to DiRT Rally. I just seem to find it so much easier to position the car correctly around corners than DiRT Rally. This also could be because the force feedback is better in RBR and provides more information than DiRT rally.
I'm not really sure.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues?

[sgspenceley 0]

If you have access to only 270 > 400 degrees of rotation then rally cars are twitchy and hard to drive smoothly for a non-professional driver. 

Remember most sim wheels are NOT the correct size for a rally car! So when you combine a typical small sim wheel with low degrees of rotation you have a driving feeling which is totally un-natural! Rally drivers don't drive like F1 drivers with straight arms and very limited wheel movement.

The average road car or sports car
900* or more 2.5 or more full turns lock to lock:

Drift cars. Multiple classes of Rally cars (WRC & Group N)
540 > 720* +(2.0 more or less turns lock to lock) 

GT1 and 3 spec race cars,
540* + or - (1.5 more or less turns lock to lock) 

Formula 1 cars.
270 > 360* + or - (1.0 more or less turns lock to lock)

SO why would codemaster developers recommend a wheel range from F1 rotation when Ford Focus WRC specs are high-ratio (12:1) steering, 2.0 turns lock to lock?

Dirt rally is NOT F1, so surely the development team should actively support 540 > 720 degrees as being the sweet spot because this is a Rally sim!

[MBK72 0]

Thanks for the wheel setting suggestions for the Thrustmaster onm page 2 they have helped a lot.  Before this I had good feedback on the Monte stages but almost nothing on Powys and Greece.  The cars still feel a little floaty on those 2 rallies to me, the car seems to move around rather than stay straight ahead.

[MBK72 0]

Probably posted already in this thread but wow this FFB tweak really does transform the game.  No more floaty weird feeling around the straight ahead.
http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/ffb-tweak-no-void.104688/
I hope the next official fix makes these changes.

[RealTberg 0]

RealTberg said:

Hi, 

Awesome stages and graphics, but fix the bucket ambient effect on the engine sounds.
But yes, the FFB is off and the devs recommended settings are just...not fun.

I use the Fanatec CSW v2, and for that I have found somewhat okay settings:

First, insert racedepartment mod already posted.
Next, recommended settings need change:
On wheel: 
SEN 540 (or pref, 270 is just ridicoulus). Forget that the wheel doesn´t match the virtual one for now.
DRI 003
SPR and DPR OFF, the DRI setting at 003 will have enough "natural" damping. Spring is useless.

In game settings:
Try cranking everything up in advanced FFB window to 100%, you can do that when you have DRI 003.

Still needed:
selfaligning torque!
more vertical forces
sense of weight transfer

With above settings, it´s much more fun and immersive than default. Not there yet, but alot better.

Codies: Awesome replays!

Correction to this:
Been testing with DRI 004, it´s actually sometimes better than 003. Try it out.

[zeroundersteer 2]

Now something really complicated:
A sim in 2015 must have a "min force" option! It's essential to get a good amount of feeling in your wheel.
Basically any wheel currently on sale has an initial FFB deadzone. FFB wheels suffer from an initial ffb deadzone issue simply because the initial low end forces are not able to overcome the internal resistance of the wheel due to friction. Some more (G27-16,5%) some less (T500-9%) This means any forces lower than 16,5% will simply not be executed by my wheel. This means a huge amount of detail is lost and the wheel feels dead around the center. To overcome this I need to set the overall forces to 120% in my Profiler. This raises all forces sent to my wheel, giving me better feel around the center, but sacrifices detail at the top end. Any Sim currently on the market has included this min-force option at a certain point in their development on demand of the community. 

I highly recommend reading this thread on this certain subject. http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/19034-Guide-Optimal-FFB-settings-for-rFactor-2-The-key-to-being-in-the-Zone-D
There's an app called wheelcheck you can test your own wheel's deadzone with. if you want I'll give you instructions on that as well.

[beyondtool 0]

I have a Fanatec GT2 and I have tried 3 different driver versions and two firmware revisions, and using the Codemaster suggested settings . I am getting no FFB on-center, no self aligning torque at all, and the feedback only kicks in halfway around a bend. Most obvious when the cockpit view shows the onscreen wheel jittering around down a straight, but all I'm getting is a limp wheel. It seems to be an easily reproduced error with all Fanatec wheels..I'm happy to do a video if it helps.

[ECCI7000 0]

Hi code master,

Pls do add ECCI7000 wheel in your official wheel support list.

Tks !!!

[Silverz 0]

Do I have something set up wrong? I use the FFB settings listed here and I get almost no ffb.
I use the settings from that 3rd party site and it feels a LOT better to me so even though they are not recommended, I will use them for now.
I am no expert on what settings to use or what they do but that xml file actually seems to work great.

I also had trouble steering until I lowered rotation from 900 to 540 and now I can slide around corners much easier but trying to stay in a straight line can be difficult, it feels like small movements of the wheel are over sensitive. But that may just be me..... I cant tell.

[ilborga70 0]

However I with these settings I am much better, now I'm just going to change the recommended values in the game, though many complain of dead steering, must also understand that in the rally are few times that the wheels are always touching the ground .. ......

[Nomac55 0]

Ok so I think you guys should work on things like:
- the wheel being pulled around by the ruts in the road and also;
-the caster of the car turning the wheel while drifting (auto countersteer) like a real car does
-wheel gets light when sliding so u know u lost grip.

Thoughs are the kinda of things i want to feel more in the FFB for sure.

right now all surfaces feel the same ruts dont seem to pull the car around at all. 

Thanks so far great game. I will try to explain it better after i play a bit more.

[NoOneNBA 0]

I played DiRT Rally back-to-back with DiRT 3 and DiRT 2 tonight, and the amount of "feedback" given by DiRT 2 conveys much more information about what the car is doing than the other two, with DiRT Rally being the worst of  the bunch.

In DiRT 2, I can feel when the car has grip on gravel, even right at the center of steering travel.
I can feel when it loses that grip, and begins to slide, as well as when it starts to regrip, even with my eyes closed.
Force feedback shouldn't be about "relaying the most realistic forces acting on the steering rack".
It should be about transferring as much data as possible, about the overall driving platform, through the steering wheel to the player.

The majority of "feedback" in real life driving is received through your equilibrium.
Since the game can't send you that data through the seat of your pants, and the imbalances in ear pressures, it has to convey that extra information through the steering wheel.
DiRT 2 does that well.
DiRT Rally doesn't.

With the amount of extra "terrain" inherent with the DiRT Rally stages, as compared to the relative smoothness of the stages in DiRT 2 & 3, there should be a lot more "feedback" going on with the wheel, and I'm getting...nothing in the center, and very little anywhere else.

[beyondtool 0]

ilborga70 said:

However I with these settings I am much better, now I'm just going to change the recommended values in the game, though many complain of dead steering, must also understand that in the rally are few times that the wheels are always touching the ground .. ......

I've played Richard Burns rally, owned a rally car and used 3 different wheel setups. The force feedback in this game is most assuredly broken. Unless you are suggesting that somehow a rally car manages to literally fly around the track without touching the ground? 

[TURBODEVIN19 19]

NoOneNBA said:

... the amount of "feedback" given by DiRT 2 conveys much more information about what the car is doing than the other two, ...

Yea I still enjoy driving in DiRT 2 the most, just because the FFB feels the best. And because I still suck at DiRT Rally for now. 

[PaulBlythe 0]

IMHO, it does look like the FFB is just a modified version of the game pads rumble effects with added weight effect ... There's nothing to reflect where your front wheels are pointing, or how they are reacting to the track [camber, grip levels]. The "weight" appears to give a general felling of traction, sliding, bogging down. However, there is no left or right pull of the wheel when we wander off towards the edge of the tracks, or get a puncture, power slide etc.

If you induce a  [power] slide and a car's back end steps out to 30°, the front wheels will naturally track that movement [with little or no input] giving you 30° of opposite lock, obviously the steering wheel will move to reflect this... This kind of steering wheel movement is what's missing, and is an integral part of just about every other race sim. 

The car on screen looks to be doing everything right, its just not being communicated through the game wheel.

The game wheels rotation is another area that needs looking at... should allow full wheel rotation [900°, 1080° etc] then apply a soft lock specific to each car.

[Monticelli 0]

Tliivo said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNPfBmLWxx0

This is how basic FFB is supposed to work. 



Vibration strength just creates FFB from impacts. You don't feel anything from your steering wheel when you hit a deer head on IRL (I've tried).

Wheel weight is only OK when you're stationary, as soon as you start moving, all "weight" disappears IRL and you're only left with forces coming from the steering rack. Right now, when enabling wheel weight, it feels like you never get moving and all the forces happen to the car while it's stationary.

Same goes to these settings:



No real car has a centering spring in the steering rack...

Get the basic FFB right, the self aligning torque! And then we can actually see if this actually tries to be a simulation or is it just DiRT 3 in disguise.

Quote your settings for Logitech Driving Force gt (that will be very similar to those also G25 / 27).

I also set degees of rotation to 540 °.

If you put everything 100% as advised the FF is covered by all the other effects.

Now the FF you start to feel, is a good starting point, but it seems that there are still hidden effects that are not fully feel the car's behavior.

Good base to work on

[inanc91 0]

Hey! Good. Well, i bought the game via steam for like 2hours ago. Downloaded the game and everything, got in to settings to adjust the deadzones etc etc and seems like i cant see the advanced wheel setting sections there. I applied t500rs where it says keyboard etc, but still cant go in to advanced settings. Have downloaded new drivers to the wheel, shutting pc off everything. I need some help from the devs! Help a norwegian man in need! 
And ask me about what i think about the feeling and car reactions on this game! Its like a shit. sorry guys, im a bit frustrated and paying so much and still cant play it. 


Sincerely, tony ( national league rallycross driver)

[inanc91 0]

Really?!?! Isnt the thrustmaster t500rs a supported wheel? Im starting to get angry. I cant see advanced wheel settings at the control menu! I preset and apply the wheel at the controls but only that! I can only adjust ffb and strenght at the ffb! I need help or REFUND money back! Or CODEMASTERS will loose a huge amount of customers.

[YoMrWhite 0]

I'm using an old Logitech Momo Racing Force Feedback and had the same Problem - it was detected and showed up, but no advanced settings. Then I installed the logitech profiler - didn't race for quite some time obviously - and voilà, the settings were there. Maybe you should do the same for your thrustmaster?

[mesa 129]

Use FFB patch (google it) and set Wheel weight to zero. This is the most important thing.
Tha car handling will be different, close to be good as in case of RBR.