Thanks a lot RasmusP!!! I started from the first LUTs and I finally tried the stronger one! It’s incredible the level of control you can get with this LUT! Could you explain the steps you followed to produce these LUTs or is a secret?
Thank you so much.
Glad that I could make another person happy with it
No secret at all! I'm glad to share everything to as many people as possible so more games include something similar!
Important first info is that I'm studying Mechatronical Engineering (Electronics, coding, mechanics, construction, physics and maths ; everything a little, nothing really well
).
So I could imagine how the AC ffb output, the Logitech-driver and the wheelbase are working together, in which way they add/subtract/pass things through and also I could imagine what would be needed to achieve a different feeling.
Now to understand it visually I'll show some graphs
There are
three crucial situations where you feel if the FFB is hitting the nail and feels real or not:
- High-Speed 90° turn like
Pouhon at Spa [progressive buildup]
- Bumpy straight like
Döttinger Höhe at the Nordschleife [wheel should shake but stay straight]
- Fast chicane like
Biondetti at Mugello [Smooth center transition without a notch or anything in the middle]
Now the progressive buildup is quite easily achieved and highly depends on personal liking. The force just need to go up in a way you like to the maximum and should still keep some headroom for details (no clipping). The amount of headroom for details depends on the general bend of the LUT curve. The Gamma-Like LUT
(there's a gamma setting you can use instead of a LUT and from my experience it does the same as my "Gamma-Like LUT"),
compresses the FFB so you will have a higher force in your hands when AC would normally output a lower level. This is cool for road cars or when you are drifting a lot as it feels like more "weight in the wheel" and the wheel spins faster due to higher forces. You lose quite some amount of detail though as little spikes won't really make a big difference when you're already at let's say 80% ffb output.
Now first:
Default FFB:
Strongly bent LUT curve, less Headroom but higher overall force at lower AC-Output:
Now that was a little about the shape of the bend. For maximum feel of detail I like the default FFB shape, meaning a straight line after you exceed the dead-zone of the G27.
I'll show you how the default FFB with 15% minimum force from the menu looks like in a graph:
15% Min-Force:
As you see this is
not smooth. It feels good for a single turn but when you look at a chicane and imagine you go left and right and the ffb goes from 0% to 60% on one side and then moves to 60% on the other side while passing 0% again (center transition), or just mirror the graph to visualize it:
You see that you will have a
notch at center transition and you will feel it!
The main problem with the dead-zone is that
the "fall off" is progressive and not just a "cut off". You need to go to 0% in a curve that smoothly reduces the force.
I tried to come up with the
"counter-curve" for the G27. Gladly the shape of the dead-zone-falloff is more or less the same across G25/G27/G29 and just a little different for DFGT so I only needed to come up with it ONCE. I did that by try and error and a lot of "imagination"
This would look like this:
As you can now see the transition for a chicane looks a lot smoother but you will still feel the force going to
full zero at the very center. I then just put a value in for 0% that looked good in Excel to be honest and it felt great!
It's the little "noise" you hear and feel when you're standing still or are in the pits with my LUTs. It somehow applies some
resistance for the center position but is so soft that the wheel doesn't actually move. It's comparable to "dampening" but only applies at 0% ffb.
Now enough words, look at the final curve (I scaled it down to 1/1 for better comparison):
You can ignore the little waves. You don't feel them and they are basically "rounding errors". Now one side is boring. Let's have a look for a "chicane" like above:
As you can see now when you are at full force in a left turn and then pass the center position and go to full force for the right turn, it will look like this, basically!
The force goes down in a nice shape, does a little curve at 0% and goes back up smoothly.
This curve counters the deadzone-fall-off of the Logitech wheels quite nicely and is what makes my LUTs as awesome as they are (sorry, don't wanna brag haha)!
And again for drifting, the Gamma-Like-LUT mirrored:
So the last questions should be:
1. Why 100% in the profiler?
2. Why 50% in AC and 1.5 instead of 1.0 in the LUT?!
1.
To test what the profiler exactly does I did two things:
- Deactivating the LUT and use 80% ffb so definitely NO clipping. Then I raised, while driving a circle on the skidpad mod-track, the profiler slider until I couldn't feel the force getting higher. It was at around 130%. So I knew that the profiler can "clip" too. Force just doesn't get higher and details got cut off more and more.
I then put the ffb back to 100% so ffb-clip showed a bit of clipping. Did the same and the maximum in the profiler was at around 105%.
Then the control-test: threw in a LUT that scaled the default FFB to 500%. Now even 101% didn't increase the FFB!
Conclusion: above 100% are not needed if the game has enough output!
Now the question was what would happen at 90% in the profiler? Would the clipping go away? Would the force stay the same?
I applied a LUT that scales the FFB to 200%, so massive clipping but at 50% in the profiler I should be back to 100%, right?
No, that didn't work. Instead I got the same amount of details (none) but the maximum force got less. So at 10% in the profiler I had NO details and only a little bit of force in my hands.
Conclusion: below 100% in the profiler just takes the FFB (clipping or not) and reduces the maximum output to your hands.
Final conclusion: always put the profiler to 100%!
2. I then tested a little with the in car FFB (numpad + and -) and found out that although AC would show clipping, the force still got higher.
Conclusion: AC cuts off details in it's own before reaching the input-limit of the profiler. I need to boost the FFB between them!
I then put AC to 80% (no clipping shown) and applied a LUT that scaled the FFB a little bit higher. It felt better. At the same time my "fall-off-curve" felt like I could optimize it a bit too...
Played around in Excel and it resulted in some ugly numbers.
I thought "screw that" and made it 50% AC and 1.5x in the LUT. Curve felt nice and I stick with it
To fine tune the FFB I just raise or lower the In-Car-FFB via numpad to my liking.
The goal is always to have an as tight as possible wheel when going straight (wheel should shake a little but not start to "shake more and more on it's own) while still having a perfectly smooth center transition through chicanes.
Some cars need 80% In-Car-Gain and some cars need up to 125%.
Yes, it means that
all cars will be similar "strong" and a 50's F1 will be as strong as a Porsche Panamera. To simulate the difference of FFB strength you will need a way more expensive wheel.
The Logitech wheels only have one "Sweetspot" and that's it...
But hey, the physics are still very different so I got that going for me!
I hope the little anecdote was good to read and understandable. If you have any questions just ask. I spent so many hours on this... Happy to share the knowledge and explain everything
PS: I like big block to highlight "key words and sentences" so if you forgot 90% of it after reading it (like I always do) you can just read the big block parts and make sense of it again. Hope you don't mind!