SimXperience G-Belt review

[Clover11]

I'm not sure they are "wrong" but I have no actual experience with this. It is true that when you accelerate, you are pushed into the back of the seat and when you brake, your weight moves forward. They seem to be focused on giving your body the same sensations you would feel while driving. They are moving your body the same way your body will move in real life. However, I think most people going for an active belt system want to feel squeezed as they squeeze the brake which makes it easier to feel your braking instead of just feeling the weight shift of the car. If you want your body to move just how it would move in a car, their system makes sense, but I think most people would actually use the active belt system to feel the braking, which really is different and not "real". While these are both active belt systems, they are trying to do different things. I personally would love to play with both but I think I would be more drawn to the G-belt, especially considering the price of the Richmotech.

 

[blekenbleu]

when you accelerate, you are pushed into the back of the seat and when you brake, your weight moves forward.

In real driving, the seat back pushes you forward during acceleration and belts pull you backward during deceleration. Both of those forces are to overcome inertia of your body. In sim driving, inertial events (jerks) are possible only for much briefer intervals than simulated car accelerations and decelerations.

 

[Clover11]

In real driving, the seat back pushes you forward during acceleration and belts pull you backward during deceleration. Both of those forces are to overcome inertia of your body. In sim driving, inertial events (jerks) are possible only for much briefer intervals than simulated car accelerations and decelerations.

Semantics or vantage points, whatever. We both are referring to the same thing and we both make technical errors in our descriptions of the weight shifts and how you feel them. You are of course correct, the back of the seat pushes you forward when you accelerate. You will feel this as pressure on your back during acceleration. When you decelerate, you will feel pressure on your hands, feet, and chest etc. I think we all understand the concept. Richmotech is trying to simulate your own bodies weight shift in the car. The G-belt is not trying to simulate those same forces, but instead is giving you brake feel. I would guess that the lateral forces are the same where if you go around a turn to the right, you will feel pulled to the left. Personally, I am happy to see both options as I think different racers will want different things. Personally, I prefer the G-belts system in theory. I am looking for extra feel on the brake, loosening the belts is not going to give you a ton of information. I just can't see that providing much info beyond that you are on the brakes. With the g-belt system, you should be able to feel the pressure of change as you decelerate, which seems to be what most are going for.

 

[anton_Chez]

Picture this: In a real GT car, or whatever race bred car, take it out for a few laps, without a harness on. Now, which feelings are you going to notice the most, without a harness holding you back. You're going to be slung side to side, in corners, definitely, even with a bucket racing seat. You're definitely going to be slung forward under heavy braking, absolutely. But are you really going to notice anything throwing you into the back of the seat under accerlation? With or without a harness on, you're generally going to feel the same effect of the inertia of your body under acceleration. If your belts are done right, you are going to feel a very slight slackening once you're pushing into the seat under throttle application, but you're going to feel magnitudes more force once the brakes are applied. They are easily the most g force intense feelings in a race car, both under brakes and during fast hard cornering at high speeds.

Thus, in theory and in application, the G-belt system should offer the most authentic experience from a drivers point of view, taking away the pedantic arguments of what happens during every moment the car is moving. Is there any way to reverse the way the G-belt works, to at least try the Ricmotech concept? I'd suggest I at the very least would try it and change it straight back.

This reminds me of the gear change effect when using the SFX-100 system. In theory everyone wants to feel these massive gear shifts when changing up through the gears. BUT, and this is the massive key, the telemetry keys required to feel this sensation ALSO AFFECT OTHER EFFECTS. So braking becomes very awkward feeling, nothing at all like a real car and it ruins the whole experience. The upshifts also become incredibly annoying after a while depending how hard you have them set. So in theory, things are normally great. But in practice there are many other intervening factors that make the experience much less desirable.

I will say, that the way I have my G-Belt tuned, there is ABSOLUTELY NO effect that I dislike and nothing that feels off or wrong. AT ALL. So a massive credit to them for that. I really do love it now. More now that I have replaced the lap belts with the solo 5th belt and have solved the drop outs. It's basically equal to tactile now in the effectiveness it delivers in immersion with pretty much no side effects or tradeoffs.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I agree, argue semantics all day long, the G-Belt just feels right. I credit a lot of that to the software and the tuning that SimXperience has done.

Between my SC2 Pro with cloud profiles and the G-Belt, I'm feeling a lot more involved while I'm driving. I feel like the tactile is reinforcing both. I get a combination of the seat belts loosening and the rear wheel slide tactile effect under my seat when I'm losing traction in the rear. The G-Belt shift effect works in tandem with the tactile thunk. The wheel FFB and the front wheel slide work well together. The G-Belt cornering effect feels great too.

The NLRv3 has faded into the background partially because I've turned the effects down. It's subtle but it does blend into everything else. I'm not sure I want to discount it completely because sometimes when something is dialed in and syncs up with other effects it feels so natural that it no longer draws your attention. The exception is for Dirt Rally where the NLRv3 makes the game an experience.

 

[NeoGrotesk]

I agree, argue semantics all day long, the G-Belt just feels right. I credit a lot of that to the software and the tuning that SimXperience has done.

Between my SC2 Pro with cloud profiles and the G-Belt, I'm feeling a lot more involved while I'm driving. I feel like the tactile is reinforcing both. I get a combination of the seat belts loosening and the rear wheel slide tactile effect under my seat when I'm losing traction in the rear. The G-Belt shift effect works in tandem with the tactile thunk. The wheel FFB and the front wheel slide work well together. The G-Belt cornering effect feels great too.

The NLRv3 has faded into the background partially because I've turned the effects down. It's subtle but it does blend into everything else. I'm not sure I want to discount it completely because sometimes when something is dialed in and syncs up with other effects it feels so natural that it no longer draws your attention. The exception is for Dirt Rally where the NLRv3 makes the game an experience.

I agree with this entirely. My only frustration with the cloud profile in sim commander is you can't set a fallback profile for if it can't find a match. Not an issue for many sims but I've fallen in love with AMS2 and sometimes think I'm the only one playing it I guess over time the database will increase, I just have to be patient!

 

[RCHeliguy]

You may be the only one playing AMS2

 

[NeoGrotesk]

I guess it'll be a one man mission to populate the SC database then!

 

[anton_Chez]

You may be the only one playing AMS2

Which is a shame because it's grown into a fantastic sim. It's hard to break people out of the AC/ACC/rF2 meta. Probably more so AC/ACC. People tend to not want to try new things, for whatever reason, if they're not totally perfect from the get go. I recommend everyone give AMS2 a go when you get a chance.

I agree with this entirely. My only frustration with the cloud profile in sim commander is you can't set a fallback profile for if it can't find a match. Not an issue for many sims but I've fallen in love with AMS2 and sometimes think I'm the only one playing it I guess over time the database will increase, I just have to be patient!

I've not ran into this yet, I don't think. I'll have to play around with SC more and see what can be done about it.

I have to say, the gear shift effect is absolutely AWESOME in the G-Belt. It adds SO MUCH life to the drive. It absolutely destroys anything a motion platform or even tactile can deliver, because it's nuanced and feels absolutely believable. I'd like to see other people settings for the profiles they are using. The gear shift effect needs to be manually tuned and while I feel like mine doesn't need to be touched from how it is currently, I always think that someone else might have done it better.

 

[anton_Chez]

The NLRv3 has faded into the background partially because I've turned the effects down.

I feel like the V3 is great on its own, but as soon as you add something like a G-belt system to it, it really gets shown up for what it is. Nothing about the platform when combined with the G-Belt feels (or would feel, it's been a while since I owned mine) authentic because of the limitation of the 2DOF. The pitch and acceleration are done by the belts now, as is the lateral cornering force. None of the movements in the platform actually correlate to a car movement, except for a slight brake dive and squat on the longitudinal axis. A TINY bit would be fine.

The only thing I would want to add back into my system now, is heave. A VERY SMALL amount of heave. If I had the SFX still, I would turn literally EVERY EFFECT OFF and just run a small amount of heave, for suspension and road feel. That's it. One effect, very subtly. Even at the DIY price it comes in at, what an enormous cost for such a small element. That's how much tactile and the G-Belt offer in tandem. In AUD, if you spend $3-3.5K, on tactile build and G-Belt, I think you're doing better than anything any motion platform system has to offer. I will not concede this sentiment to any motion platform owner.

 

[Dirtydub]

Hi All. Can anone who is running AMS2 share there in game telemetry ourput setings or any other tips. I have AMS2 launching from sim commander 4 but it seems I am not recieving any data.

I am ouputing to my 4 dof motion and simhub for dash but nothing to sim commander it seems.

Shared memory and upd protocol are set to PC2

UDP frequency, I have tried a couple of options. Does this have an impact?

Appreciate any help. I would love to get this up and running. Thanks.

 

[NeoGrotesk]

Hi All. Can anone who is running AMS2 share there in game telemetry ourput setings or any other tips. I have AMS2 launching from sim commander 4 but it seems I am not recieving any data.

I am ouputing to my 4 dof motion and simhub for dash but nothing to sim commander it seems.

Shared memory and upd protocol are set to PC2

UDP frequency, I have tried a couple of options. Does this have an impact?

Appreciate any help. I would love to get this up and running. Thanks.

Sure, I'll give you my settings this evening after work. Off the top of my head I think I set the port forwarding option in simhub, so simhub reads the telemetry from the game but also forwards it to another port which you set SC to listen for.

 

[Dirtydub]

Sure, I'll give you my settings this evening after work. Off the top of my head I think I set the port forwarding option in simhub, so simhub reads the telemetry from the game but also forwards it to another port which you set SC to listen for.

Thank you, that would be much appreciated.

 

[NeoGrotesk]

Thank you, that would be much appreciated.

So, in AMS2 my settings are:
Shared Memory: Project Cars 2
UDP Frequency: Off
UDP Protocol Version: Project Cars 1

In Simhub, in the UDP Relay section I have the following added:

Source UDP Port	Target IP Address	Target UDP Port
20780	127.0.0.1	20778
20780	127.0.0.1	20779
20780	127.0.0.1	20777

Your Target IP address will probably be different (see here). And unfortunately I can't for the life of me remember which port relates to Sim Commander or how you change it in SC itself.*

I have quite a few different UDP ports, for things like the NLR V3, Sim Racing Studios windsim, and Crew Chief. Trouble is I set this all up a while ago and once you've done it once you sort of forget what you did! Let me know if you still can't get it working and I'll try and help a bit more.

*The lack of clear instructions about the Sim Commander software is probably the most frustrating thing about owning the G-Belt... I feel like it needs a proper manual but on the website there are just a few pamphlets that just tell you how to plug it in and run the auto-profiles!

 

[anton_Chez]

I definitely agree with this and the same critisism of the software dates back to when I first bought a SimVibe license in 2016. You're very much left to your own devices and that really isn't good enough. It's the same as the 8020 chassis that we're buying. SimLab, for all the praise they got at the beginning of the aluminium profile craze, had me using the marketing pics on their website to assemble my over $2,000 AUD investment. Absolutely not good enough.

 

[Dirtydub]

So, in AMS2 my settings are:
Shared Memory: Project Cars 2
UDP Frequency: Off
UDP Protocol Version: Project Cars 1

In Simhub, in the UDP Relay section I have the following added:

Source UDP Port	Target IP Address	Target UDP Port
20780	127.0.0.1	20778
20780	127.0.0.1	20779
20780	127.0.0.1	20777

Your Target IP address will probably be different (see here). And unfortunately I can't for the life of me remember which port relates to Sim Commander or how you change it in SC itself.*

I have quite a few different UDP ports, for things like the NLR V3, Sim Racing Studios windsim, and Crew Chief. Trouble is I set this all up a while ago and once you've done it once you sort of forget what you did! Let me know if you still can't get it working and I'll try and help a bit more.

*The lack of clear instructions about the Sim Commander software is probably the most frustrating thing about owning the G-Belt... I feel like it needs a proper manual but on the website there are just a few pamphlets that just tell you how to plug it in and run the auto-profiles!

Cheers, thanks for that.

Yes this software is a pain. I have never experianced such complications before. Not an awful lot of info to be found online.

I am struggling to find the UDP port location in sim commander now.

You would think simxperiance would upload some decent videos on these topics or simplify there interface.

 

[Dirtydub]

I definitely agree with this and the same critisism of the software dates back to when I first bought a SimVibe license in 2016. You're very much left to your own devices and that really isn't good enough. It's the same as the 8020 chassis that we're buying. SimLab, for all the praise they got at the beginning of the aluminium profile craze, had me using the marketing pics on their website to assemble my over $2,000 AUD investment. Absolutely not good enough.

Agree, if some of these products are to become more adopted by the masses better support is needed.

 

[NeoGrotesk]

Cheers, thanks for that.

Yes this software is a pain. I have never experianced such complications before. Not an awful lot of info to be found online.

I am struggling to find the UDP port location in sim commander now.

You would think simxperiance would upload some decent videos on these topics or simplify there interface.

Yeah, I hunted for the UDP location in sim commander for you and couldn't find it at all!

 

[Dirtydub]

Yeah, I hunted for the UDP location in sim commander for you and couldn't find it at all!

Cheers, Thanks.

 

[Dirtydub]

It seems the UDP option may have been removed from sim commander.

As per the attached (diffucult to see captured off a you tube video) the UDP option seems to have once been under games advanced. This seems no longewr to be at that loacation.