How much could FFB add to a racing sim

What I think is hard to simulate in racing sims is race cars wish to go straight. If we let go off the steering wheel in a corner in a real race car the steering wheel would center, but this is not because there is a spring somewhere (as in our desktop steering wheels) it's because the wheels design forces them to be pointing straight forward. This is also the case on a straight. If your real race car pulls to one or the other side on the straight, you pit and tell the mechanics to fix it, cause you dont want to fight the wheel on the straight. What you would want is that if you let go off the wheel on a straight the car travels on a straight line. This is not the case with our desktop steering wheels, but could be so with force feedback. I dont believe going straight back in '67 was as hard as it is in GPL. If it was, noone would ever race the cars and especially not for 2 hours, at least that's what I think :o). /Christer, at 1:28.10 at Monza... well, I'm happy about it and I practice way too much :o))) -- [link lost in import: /~w-41236/] (Read all about the "Global online racing"-proposal under "For developers". Read it a couple of times, cause noone has understood it the first time they've read it yet :o)).

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> There is still hope for FFB in GPL after reading Matt Sentell's > interview on The Sports *** Network of which I lost the URL:((He states > that they have not completly written off FFB for GPL if the new USB wheels > reduce the latency past what the current FFB wheels are seeing.He says that > GPL already models the effects of the road on the steering and it would be > simple to make a patch to tap into this.We need to push Papy to make a simple > beta patch when the new USB wheels come out so we can tell if the latency is > any better:)))) Dan*/

I was able to spend a lot of time with the ACT Labs Force RS wheel this weekend. Most of that time was spent with a new game called Motorhead, from Gremlin Software. It's a "Gran Tourismo" type of game, with fairly realistic car physics. The FF effects are very well done, and I noticed _no_ latency in them. The ACT Labs wheel operates through a serial port, which isn't as fast as USB, but is a lot faster than a game port. In Motorhead, pushing the car too hard will result in a slide. The wheel would give you feedback that you were getting close to a slide by reducing tension. It was pretty effective. -- Pat Dotson IMPACT Motorsports http://www.impactmotorsports.com/pd.html