The Crew PC Force Feedback Tuning and Tweaks

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pkNWFwcDgU[/youtube]

Want to enhance the force feedback for The Crew on the PC?  One of our forum community members, RHS posted this thread in our forums on how to do it. It was also posted in the Ubisoft Crew forums by one of the developers of the title.

Basically what you are doing is adding some extra parameters to the force feedback code to make it feel better and have more options to adjust. There’s lots to tweak and I’m not sure I quite understand it all but I thought I’d show you how to do it, make my file available and see if together we can come up with some killer settings.

In ‘my Documents/The Crew’ folder, edit or create  a file named ExtraConfig.xml. My system didn’t have the ExtraConfig.xml file so I had to create it. Heres how I did it. In that same folder, there’s a file called “Config.XML” right click on it and select “edit”. Remove all the text and then copy this text into the body of the file.

<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”
/>

Then save the file as ExtraConfig.XML and make sure to switch the file type at the bottom from .txt to “all files”. Make sure it;s saved int eh My Documents / The Crew folder.

Again if you don’t want to mess with that, just download the file I have posted and place it into “The Crew” folder in your documents

I have noticed a big difference in the force feedback after creating this file.

So what’s in this file and what can you tweak. In all honesty, I’m not 100% sure. Here’s what the devs have to say about it.

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 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. This is why they added the 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

Now to some of the lines you can edit and tweak. I suggest increasing or decreasing in small increments and just do one line at a time to see what it effects.

Global Parameters:

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. So.. I would first adjust the in game slider to say 50% to start with and leave this as is.

Tire Load Config
Tire load, is how much weight there is 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 beginning 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 stronger 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 understand, 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 alignment. 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 alignment and so the stronger the FFB. Camber is symmetrical 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 asymmetrical value in the torque alignment between left and right tire, which create a force in the FFB.

In summary with this parameter 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 these parameters 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 parameter.
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 which the damping is zero.

You can also configure the refresh rate with

FFB_WaitRate=”1”

The Tire physics are 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 higher refresh rates, if you experience frame rate issue with a FFB wheel, increase this value to reduce the Refresh Rate. The value in the file I am posting is 5

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 parameter. U.I. / Cinematics / Map spring effect.

FFB_SpringNoControl=”0.25f”

So I’m assuming this entry only effects non driving moments

So there you have it.. Use trial and error and don’t try to edit every line in this XML file at once. Do one at a time see how it effects the force feedback and go from there. I wish I had more to tell you about it, but I’m honestly a little lost but have a general understanding of it. Using the file I posted should make things feel better overall versus the default force feedback.

If one of you out there figures out the perfect configuration on this, please share with our community and anyone else that happens upon that thread to get a better feel out of The Crew on the PC. If I have it in time for my review, I will share it on You Tube as well.