Question Seeking some tuning advice

Ah here I need to correct my own use of words. Lag is not the right word. What I meant I don't really know a good word for, but I'll try to compare it to something else you might have experienced. When I drive a car in the rain on the motorway and drive through a patch of rain water I get this feeling of slow down. Perhaps the word drag is the right one or feeling like the car is suddenly draging a parachute. I've gotten this with my own earlier tunings and then I put it down to wrong pitch or surge values. I usually felt it when driving into a steep upwards climb or compression zones. Not that I believe that the motion is wrong because that will cause a change in G's, but if it is not tuned to my taste it feels like driving into a bubble of denser air if that makes sense. I will say that your tuning felt balanced between the forces and I'm going to try them again, but with higher main level % and less speed and acceleration. I'll take your thoughts regarding to mechanical and clinical motion in the mix as I believe you are right.

Nearing the summer I will go to a trackday on the track near me and do a "drive a performance car" event. Never driven on a track ever so I mostly tune to my own idea of what it should feel like. Its going to be wicked fun and hopefully a bit enlightening for tuning a sim as well. I as well don't expect one to one movement, I want to prioritize to get the relation between the different dofs correct inside the limitations of the sim after my bull riding days are over. Seems to me that the evolution of a first time sim owner goes from "POWAAAAAHHHH" to "less is more" in time. I can get pretty obsessive on maximizing the last 20 % of performance even though there is plenty enjoyment in the 80% I've already figured out. Be it tuning or when I bought a camera a few years ago. I read page up and page down about different cameras and was not able to decide for a long time. Then when I finally did decide I found that all the things I was obsessing about was not relevant as I didn't use those functions on the camera. Or that the difference in performance between cameras did have very little practical impact. Well its a journey and it keeps me occupied at least hehe.

My two cents guys is that Go Karts and C55 AMG felt like driving on a wooden board IRL, so I prefer no smoothing as it removes the details (and I do not drive street cars in games). However, some per-DOF smoothing will definitely be needed, because games may not necessarily send nice data. In case you weren't aware there's this tool:
https://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/application-to-compare-axis-filters-etc.10695/

I am planing to analyze output of rFactor 2 to see what values might need smoothing.

Currently I’m tuning pcars2. I’ve also tuned iracing. Between the two iracing has a softer, less defined feeling. Different sims and different plugins I assume. I have not tuned assetto corsa as I have problems alt tabbing in that game making tuning time consuming. I guess I know enough now to give it a shot. In the AC plugin thread someone said it was very direct in feel so I’m curious. About some types of cars being stiff as wooden bords. That is my understanding as well, but I find it difficult to get the microbumps crisp enough. A couple of observations: increasing acceleration and speed in interface settings helps this. I can get close to a crisp feeling when I tune the different DOFs by them selves, but when I activate all DOFs it softens the motion. I’ve been thinking about not using heave in cars with stiff suspensions as I believe heave is the culprit for softening the motion. Alternatively using a very small tc value with low axis value might help.

I’m wondering If this is because some DOFs cancel each other out. Perhaps that tool you posted to might reveal what DOFs need some smoothing to avoid this.

Removed because original post was a brain fart.

Brain fart

@PetroVitallini
The "one leg lift off" is correct/expected behavor because you use 4 actuators.
To avoid such..., you shall use 3 instead of 4.

BTW, your Sway set to -20 that messed you up too.

Regards,

Hello Joe,

So you are saying it is because of the geometry of the rig. Care to elaborate on the problem? Could be usefull as I want to mitigate the problem. I’ve tried to understand the problem, but can’t quite grasp it. Was watching stadium super trucks cornering.

Is this is what is happening approximately?

On "one leg lift off", besides the case as shown in video, you will have one leg life off regardless such cases. This is due to the fact of that you use 4 actuators (motors) to move 3DoF rigid body. 3 actuators (motors) are sufficient to move 3DoF of rigid body (there is no extra one DoF let your 4th actuator to work on). Think of the Turntable player (record player), there are only three legs under the bottom let you to level the player (3dof). What if there were 4 legs, then you will have a problem that one leg could be lifted off.
You can fix four actuators on the ground, but if so I believe you will loss resolution.

On the tuning Sway, I don't understand why you set to: 2.0/-20. It seems that you want to the rig to sway one direction only, is this your thinking to solve the "lift off" problem? For NASCAR, maybe OK, since the car makes left turn only.... TuningCenter is more or less like the "dynamic range compression" in music ...

On details, you can compress the dynamic range of Heave, but you will never get realistic feel on vertical details like what you feel on the DD wheel. This is because Simtool does not feed the vertical spatial data, it feeds only vertical g data.

I understand what you are saying about the turn table. Good example.

Yeah I messed up with the settings. Don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll edit the post as to not confuse anyone.

Hey guys, just wanted to say thanks. I am awaiting my ProSimu P5MP (5 actuator model) and have been looking for exactly this info so I can jump right in. Just curious if any new revelations were had since you were all testing various settings in SimTools. Regardless, thanks again.

Because of space limitations I've decided to put my actuators on a self-designed 80/20 rig. I've had to loose the rear traction loss, but have considered using the actuator for that as a harness tensioners instead perhaps. Because of changes in geometry I've had to adjust my settings a bit. Not sure if my current settings will work as well on the p5mp rig. It's just minor adjustments though.

For me it took a while and alot of experimentation to get a good understanding of simtools (with many misunderstandings on the way). If you have questions I'll answer them to the best of my knowledge.

Also my preference for settings changed over time. It's a process.

I'm interested to see what settings you decide on so please share.

Now buy yourself a couple of six-packs of beer, put on some good music and enjoy the build! It took me some time, but it was enjoyable ,

Thanks very much for the response. I found this thread super helpful. As soon as I get it all set up I'll certainly post my settings.

And finally thanks for the offer of help!

So after months of testing, I came to a solid conclusion that my min/max scaling gives the best results, because it leaves headroom for extraordinary events, like crash, off track etc. I thought I'd share a spreadsheet I use to calculate scaled min/max values. Enter the desired scale in the H2 field.

Thank you for sharing @The Iron Wolf ! So if I understand correctly you put the values given by capturing from the sim and your modifier preference is 2,3?

I did this manually and it takes a while when you want to experiment with different values. This is very useful. Thanks again!

You understood correctly. I am changing multiplier between 2.0 and 2.5, because unfortunately variation in forces is too great between say F1 and Karts. But the idea is that normal race forces get small range to just give your brain a hint, but scaled up range allows for big forces, crash, kurb, off track to have headroom, so they really feel impactful.

I also had to reduce axis allocation for "surge" force, because otherwise gear shifting punch is too much for my body. The downside is that I lose acceleration/breaking forces, but they are not great with my rig anyway.

Lastly, for some car classes I have to drop Main% couple of percent, but mostly it is captured Min/Max (averaged across multiple cars) and this scaling math.

Glad you found it useful.