I just bought ADAC 2014 last night and just gave the combo you mentioned a go. It does seem like a very smooth track but I don't know what the IRL track is like. We also don't know if S3 is finished tweaking their new tracks. But I surely don't feel "disconnected", it's a fun track for a GT car. With that said, based on your settings (yours were lower than mine) it may have less feedback than what I'm experiencing (TX). Also gave the other new track Sachsenring a go, this did have more bumps but a little too tight a track for my liking with these GT cars, definitely need some practice.
I don't understand giving up on a sim because you don't like a particular track/car or two. I would give up on every single sim I own if that was the case. But, to each their own, just a discussion.
Thank you for testing those combinations. Very helpful doublecheck. And no, I didn't mean to give up on the sim, just frustrated at hovercraft feel and what feels like endless FFB tweaking.
After writing that I decided to put more time in and comprehensively test the FFB to understand what is happening, which took a few hours. I found that the time trial with the Mustang GT3 around Laguna Seca is an excellent test, because it provides vertical, lateral loads on the tyres and the Mustang seems to communicate changes in the FFB very well. I tried basically zeroing each value except one and working through to see what everything does in that car+track combo: It's clear that Vertical Load is the key setting for feeling the road and car weight transfer, but you do need to fade in other forces to round out the experience (e.g. to get the steering to weight up during heavy cornering or lighten during understeer). The key is how much of each other force to mix in.
I discovered that the hovercraft feel creeps in when you set lateral forces too high, because it seems to damp everything and give mostly centering force. However no lateral forces feels very odd, for instance on the downhill left-hander after the corkscrew where the car is under heavy lateral forces and the steering should weight up dramatically.
In the end I settled on the following with the T300RS:
Force Feedback Intensity 55%
Smoothing 0%
Steering Force Intensity 100%
Understeer 85%
Vertical Load 200%
Lateral Force 35% (down from the 120% I was using before)
Steering Rack 0%
Engine vibrations 0%
Brake vibrations 0%
Kerb vibrations 25%
Shift effect 60%
The end result is quite light, especially on the DTM cars or that McLaren GT3, so probably FFB Intensity could go up a little. But now even on smooth tracks like Slovakia Ring I still feel the car weight shifting around all the time, it's not being damped by excessive Lateral Force.
It's not perfect, but like this I can enjoy the game and have fun racing.
![Luca [OT]](/data/avatars/s/3235/3235113.jpg?1697196734){kind=avatar}