rec.autos.simulators

I am interested in buying a force feedback wheel, but I would like to hear what
your thoughts of specific wheel models and force feedback technology are (i.e.
is it worth the money, does it feel that realistic). Any thoughts no matter how
small or biased are welcome. Feel free to use hi-tech racing jargon because I
will understand it (like understeer and loose). Any response is greatly
appreciated.

See you at the races,
Eric

Eric,

I've had the Ultimate Per4mer FF wheel for about a week now and have tried
it in a few games. I really wanted a USB wheel (Force RS) but the UP wheel
is the only FF wheel I've seen for sale in England and I don't believe that
the USB Force RS will be available for a while yet. The following are only
initial impressions.

Build Quality

The wheel unit and pedals appear to be well built, the pedal unit doesn't
slip around on carpet and there is no play in the steering. The drive to the
motor is via gears and these make a quiet but obtrusive whining noise, they
also make the wheel quite heavy to turn (the inertia of the motor is geared
up to allow a (cheaper) lower torque motor to be used).

The gearing also makes the steering notchy and this effectively makes the
motion a series of small steps rather than a smooth sweep.

The clamps supplied to hold the wheel to a table are flimsy plastic and are
quite inadequate, *** suckers are also supplied but I haven't tested
them.

The software drivers supplied are not particularly good (you have to move
all the controls to their extremities at the start of each game before the
wheel works properly). I downloaded the V1.1 drivers from the site which
improved things quite alot. I also tried the beta drivers from the I-Force
site which worked OK in the test panel but didn't really do much in F1RS
(crash effects only) so I haven't persisted with them.

Ergonomics

The wheel at first appears to be mounted too high which is true but is not
all that much of a problem The switches are fiddly to use while driving
unless you hold the wheel very high up (which is a problem). The major
difficulty is the lack of a gear change paddle. The base has a connector for
a stick shift so maybe some enterprising person will market an add on gear
paddle kit.

Force Feedback

The reason I managed to justify (to myself) the purchase of a FF wheel is
that my sound card joystick port is fried and I cannot get the thrustmaster
card to work reliably in Win95, so It's either buy a new sound card and a
cheap wheel or a wheel that doesn't use the joystick port (similar cost).

I am glad I bought the wheel on economic grounds, The FF performance varies
quite alot between different games but non really deliver what I'd hoped.

Non FF games

Where a game does not support FF the wheel acts as a standard analogue
controller, unfortunately in this mode there is no self centering of the
wheel and there appears to be a significant time lag between the wheel being
turned and the signal reaching the game. This effect is so marked that while
I can win TOCA races with a joystick, I struggle to finish mid field with
the wheel. This effect is also apparent in the GPL demo where I can get the
drivers arms pointing right while the wheel is pointing left though this may
be partly due to me having to run without hardware acceleration (the effect
reduces - but does not disappear - if I reduce the level of detail and run
at minimum resolution).

I tried to impose self centering by using the I-Force Studio software in the
background whle running TOCA. This worked fine but killed the frame rate
(I'm running a 333mhz pentium 128MB ram and a 8MB accel graphics 3d
accelerator).

F1RS (Patch 1.09)

This exhibits some strange effects, if I run over a rumble strip there is no
effect until I leave the strip and then the rumble effect starts and lasts
until I run over some grass! Apart from this the FF seems to be a small
improvement. There is not much evidence of the steering going light at the
limits of adhesion (which is what I really hoped the FF wheel would
deliver). I have informed UBISoft UK of the rumble strip problem (via their
web site) but have had no reply from them as yet.

Sega Rally (Supplied with wheel)

The FF effects in sega rally are a bit strange but generally useful, the
steering goes light on slippery surfaces. It seems reasonably close to the
arcade version if I remember correctly.

MS Cart Precision Racing

This has the best rumble strip effect (you can feel each seperate edge) but
there is still no real feedback on how much grip is left.

Conclusion.

FF technology is still in it's infancy. From playing with the I-Force
studio, I'd say that the hardware is pretty close - especially if the USB
bus is used (some effects are not very good over a serial port - see the
developers section at http://www.racesimcentral.net/), However the games I've
tried do not really show it off all that well.

Happy Racing

Mark

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