I started playing this a bit over the weekend and while it seems pretty fun, I'm struggling to find a good setup for my CSR wheel. As I'm sure you know this game does not provide wheel specific profiles so I'm juggling the in game wheel setup against the on-wheel settings.

It seems like turning SEN off on the wheel or anything higher than 720 results in very unresponsive handling. My car seems to take the wheel input as a suggestion more than a command. It just feels too floaty. I've tinkered with 270 and 360 and it seems like once things get to high speed, these lower settings encourage loss of control and result in spectacular crashes.

I've tried playing with the in-game dead/middle/full options for steering and it seems to be largely unhelpful. With throttle, brake and clutch it seems to do what I want (i.e., pressing the brake a little doesn't lock up the tires at high speed).

Beyond sensitivity I'd like at least some resistance at the edge of traction. Usually I tinker with the SPR and DPR settings on the wheel to do this but the game's FFB cuts out enough that I never can tell if what I am doing is working or not. Restarting the game fixes this but that makes fine tuning the settings a real pain. Anyone have a work around for that or some SPR/DPR numbers I should go with?

I'm hoping someone else has gotten something more substantial that they could share beyond my trial and error that hasn't really resulted in a better feeling experience.

Hey man! I haven't figured out SEN yet but SPR and DPR I set to off otherwise the FFB is jerky and acts like an epileptic. You should check out the official forums of The Crew. There a dev posted some settings you can implement on PC:

"Hi everyone,

The Force FeedBack is mainly computed from the Torque Alignment from Physics.

This guide is meant for wheel users on PC that are looking for extra configuration settings.

The Crew Team

Editing

In ‘my Documents\The Crew’ folder, edit or create file ExtraConfig.xml.

Between the <ExtracConfig /> XML tag

add those lines

FFB_Factor="1.5f"

FFB_LoadFactor="1.0f"

FFB_LoadPower="1.5f"

FFB_LatFactor="1.0f"

FFB_SlipAngleFactor="2.0f"

FFB_CamberFactor="0.1f"

FFB_CamberOffset="2.5f"

FFB_DamperFactor="0.2f"

FFB_DamperMaxRoll="1.0f"

FFB_DamperMaxRollVal="0.1f"

FFB_DamperMaxSlipAngle="0.25f"

FFB_WaitRate="5"

FFB_SpringNoControl="0.25f"

If the file was empty it should look like this

<ExtraConfig

FFB_Factor="1.5f"

FFB_LoadFactor="1.0f"

FFB_LoadPower="1.5f"

FFB_LatFactor="1.0f"

FFB_SlipAngleFactor="2.0f"

FFB_CamberFactor="0.1f"

FFB_CamberOffset="2.5f"

FFB_DamperFactor="0.2f"

FFB_DamperMaxRoll="1.0f"

FFB_DamperMaxRollVal="0.1f"

FFB_DamperMaxSlipAngle="0.25f"

FFB_WaitRate="1"

FFB_SpringNoControl="0.25f"

/>

Explanations

FFB is computed from the tire physics, the tire physics compute 4 things,

Lateral Forces

Longitudinal Forces

Vertical Forces

Torque Alignment

The FFB is mainly computed from the Torque Alignment from Physics

Sadly most consumer FFB wheel on the market are not strong enough to have a decent feeling only from this.

That’s why I added extra configuration to “increase” some components of the FFB computation.

There’s 4 components in the FFB :

Tire Load

Tire Slip Angle

Tire Camber

Static Damping

Global Params

You can tune the global gain with

FFB_Factor="1.5f" // default value is 1.5

It’s working exactly like the in game FFB Gain slider

You can configure the refresh rate with

FFB_WaitRate=”1”

Tire physics is refreshed at 300hz, so a rate of 1 will update the FFB at 300hz too, a rate of 2 with refresh at 150hz. etc..

Some FFB driver can’t handle hight refresh rate, if you experience frame rate issue with FFB wheel, increase this value to reduce the Refresh Rate.

U.I. / Cinematics / Map spring effect.

FFB_SpringNoControl="0.25f"

When you don’t have control of the car, a basic spring effect is applied, it’s removed when you drive. You can control the Spring force with this param.

Tire Load Config

Tire load, is how much weight there’s on the tire, the weight of the car is pushing on the tire.

Front Tire load is increasing when the car is braking, when there’s bumps, or compression from the begining of a slope, it’s decreasing when car is accelerating, when there’s holes, and it’s zero when the car is in air.

The more load on the front tire the more stronger is the FFB.

FFB_LoadFactor="1.0f"

FFB_LoadPower="1.5f"

Load Factor is the gain apply to FFB from the Load.

With Load Power you can change the curve of the variation

Pseudo formula

FFBLoad = FrontTireLoad * LoadFactor ^ LoadPower

Load Power may be a bit complicated to undestand, so here to example of curves

Tire Slip Angle

When the car is moving and you turn the steering wheel, you change the front tire angle and so increase the tire slip angle, which create a lateral force , and a tire torque alignment. The more you turn the wheel the stronger the FFB.

FFB_LatFactor="1.0f"

FFB_SlipAngleFactor="2.0f"

LatFactor is the gain of the FFB part from the torque alignement.

SlipAngleFactor is the factor applied to the slip angle for the FFB computation, if you increase this value the FFB will increase faster for smaller slip angle, which will make the FFB feel “tighter”.

Tire Camber

When the car is moving, if the tire lean left or right, the angle with the surface is called the camber, the more camber , the more lateral force and torque alignement and so the stronger the FFB.

Camber is symetrical between the left and right tire, means that if the left tire is leaning to the right, the right tire is leaning to the left Otherwise the car would not drive straight. So on a flat straight line, FFB from camber of left and right tire are cancels each other.

When 1 tire drive on a bump/hole, it’s change the camber on this tire, which create an asymetric value in the torque alignment between left and right tire, which create a force in the FFB.

In summary with this params you can control how much you will feel bumps and holes.

FFB_CamberOffset="2.5f"

FFB_CamberFactor="0.1f"

Camber Offset is to add extra camber to the real value of front tire.

Camber Factor is the gain of this extra camber.

Tire Damper

The whole steering components from tire , steering rack , and steering shaft, have frictions and damping. With this params you can control that.

Damping is a force that acting against the motion on the steering wheel. So if you turn slowly the wheel to the left you will have a slow FFB force to the right, If you turn fast to the left, the FFB will give a stronger force to the right.

There’s 2 damping force, static damping, and rolling damping.

FFB_DamperFactor="0.2f"

FFB_DamperMaxRoll="1.0f"

FFB_DamperMaxRollVal="0.1f"

FFB_DamperMaxSlipAngle="0.25f"

Damper Factor is the gain of this params.

DamperMaxRoll is the max wheel rotatation in rad/s at which the static damping is minimum.

DamperMaxRollVal is the value of the damping when wheel is rolling.

DamperMaxSlipAngle is the slip angle value at wich the damping is zero.

Samples

High Torque Wheels

Default params give too much FFB on dirt because of the bumps.

Here a base for them ( I have a RFR High Torque Custom Wheel 14Nm )

LoadPower is set to 1 to have pure linear FFB

Camber effect is greatly reduced

LatFactor is increased.

<ExtraConfig

FFB_Factor="1.5f"

FFB_LoadFactor="1.0f"

FFB_LoadPower="1.0f"

FFB_CamberFactor="0.1f"

FFB_CamberOffset="0.5f"

FFB_SlipAngleFactor="2.0f"

FFB_LatFactor="2.0f"

FFB_DamperFactor="0.2f"

FFB_DamperMaxRoll="1.0f"

FFB_DamperMaxRollVal="0.1f"

FFB_DamperMaxSlipAngle="0.25f"

FFB_WaitRate="5"

FFB_SpringNoControl="0.25f"

/>

"

I haven't tried them out yet but some report it works quite well. But then again they could also have different settings in-game and on-wheel. I asked some of those dudes that claimed CSR wheel works like a charm, but haven't replied yet.

I hope this helps. I would appreciate it if you could post your experience with these settings.

Cheers

@sascha: Thanks for digging that up. I ran into that post during my searches before posting here but haven't tried it yet. I don't know that I'll need to. My problems are essentially gone after turning SEN to OFF on the wheel.

I tried SEN: OFF before and it seemed horrible. I think I know why: FFB must have cut out when I first tried that setting. Letting the game control the sensitivity with FFB working is markedly better. When FFB is not working nothing feels right because there is no feedback about where I'm going to lose control or not. It was super floaty (as previously noted) and impossible to control. FFB working makes all the difference, which shouldn't surprise anyone I guess.

My game experience is night and day with regard to controlling the vehicle. I'm actually having a lot of fun now. It even makes the takedown missions a little less painful too. I did the one in STL and it wasn't a frustrating disaster like a previous attempt ended up being. I haven't had to do an escape mission yet but I imagine those will be a little less infuriating because that seems all about breaking line of sight and that means lots of turns. Since I can now drift around corners with something approaching accuracy, I'm hopeful. All previous attempts at drifting were pretty much all high speed crashes into a turn.

I switched my car to that BMW you get as part of the pre-order (or maybe season pass). When I have more time I'm going to pop back into the Nissan I was using before and see if it also handles better.

On the wheel the important settings I've got are SEN: OFF, DRIFT: 1, SPr: 1 and DPr: 2. Honestly these last two come down to preference and how much you want your wheel to fight you. I highly recommend folks tailor those to their preferences. I think that SEN/DRIFT are more important and some people might want to go higher on drift. Since this is a more arcade like game, I think turning drift to off might work against you.

I actually have both of these set to 0 on the wheel, I checked last night to be sure. So SEN: off Drift: 1 are my settings on the wheel.

@thrustache: Sorry I haven't replied. I am not looking into my googleaccount as often I as might should. I am glad it works good for you know. I think I have to turn off SEN as well now because even with my settings and SEN at 540 it is sometimes jerky or floaty. You said you have SPr and DPr "Off" as well right?