Lift off oversteer FWD

[HBR-Roadhog]

I just tried a FWD car for the first time on FM6 and was pretty shocked at the amount of lift off oversteer it had.

The car is a Focus, upgraded to B class with racing tires and a bit over 300 HP. It has the racing suspension and diff installed as well. All at stock settings for the moment.

I tried it on Rio mountain reverse and I was barely able to get round the track. Every time I tried to steer without being in the throttle the rear came out quickly and badly. I know some liftoff oversteer is a trait of FWD cars in general but this seems way over the top even at speeds as low as 45 MPH the rear was popping out even when not turning much.

Any ideas on how to somewhat tune this out?

 

[Jay_B_II]

I experienced that as well with the Focus, no tuning knowledge here though.

 

[ImaRobot]

I just tried a FWD car for the first time on FM6 and was pretty shocked at the amount of lift off oversteer it had.

The car is a Focus, upgraded to B class with racing tires and a bit over 300 HP. It has the racing suspension and diff installed as well. All at stock settings for the moment.

I tried it on Rio mountain reverse and I was barely able to get round the track. Every time I tried to steer without being in the throttle the rear came out quickly and badly. I know some liftoff oversteer is a trait of FWD cars in general but this seems way over the top even at speeds as low as 45 MPH the rear was popping out even when not turning much.

Any ideas on how to somewhat tune this out?

The problem I found is that you need to raise the decel setting on the LSD. on FWD I usually stick it at about 60-80%. It's probably stock at 0%

 

[HBR-Roadhog]

The problem I found is that you need to raise the decel setting on the LSD. on FWD I usually stick it at about 60-80%. It's probably stock at 0%

Thanks,
I'll give that a try and see what happens. I did take a peak at it and it was 0%. I was going to try some settings but was a bit dizzy after driving it and had to go to something else

 

[ImaRobot]

Thanks,
I'll give that a try and see what happens. I did take a peak at it and it was 0%. I was going to try some settings but was a bit dizzy after driving it and had to go to something else

I remember when I first experienced it in FM5, I was dumbfounded. I read through all the info on each individual setting on the Tuning menu and found the LSD to be the culprit. Let me know how it goes.

 

[Jay_B_II]

Thanks ImaRobot I'll give this a try as well. And thanks HBR-Roadhog for posting this question.

 

[HBR-Roadhog]

I remember when I first experienced it in FM5, I was dumbfounded. I read through all the info on each individual setting on the Tuning menu and found the LSD to be the culprit. Let me know how it goes.

Well as it turns out there were two issues, the decel was one but somehow I had gotten assisted braking turned on and that was adding to the problem.

Just did 10 laps on the same track in test drive mode with ABS off and decel at 50%, much much better.

 

[Bo]

A someone who's sick of understeering FWDs in racing games, this:

Every time I tried to steer without being in the throttle the rear came out quickly and badly.

Is very encouraging. I don't know of any console game that has simulated this trait well, if at all - very excited about giving it a try.

 

[ImaRobot]

A someone who's sick of understeering FWDs in racing games, this:

Is very encouraging. I don't know of any console game that has simulated this trait well, if at all - very excited about giving it a try.

When FM5 first came out, the feel of FWD was greatly improved. So much so, that it was a shock. Couldn't stand the drivetrain in the 4th iteration, and it wasn't even competitive. Now, if you don't over do it, you can get some pretty wild cars out of it.


Although what he's talking about is it being over exaggerated. For some reason when you modify a car, it gives you some ridiculous settings to work with.

 

[HBR-Roadhog]

I think that the assisted braking was causing a lot of the problem I was experiencing along with the diff setting. What had happened was that I had picked up a cheap set of pedals and had been trying to drive with ABS on due to the fact my brakes kept locking up. I had modded the pedals and went out to test them so I turned ABS off or so I thought but apparently I went the wrong way and did not notice because afterwards I noticed braking was set to assisted and then sure enough when i looked at the leaderboard it had the full circle on braking.

SO what was happening is the diff was causing the rear of the car to kick out and then when I was getting into the throttle to try and maintain control the assisted braking was over riding my throttle input and not allowing me to give the required amount of throttle to correct the oversteer so round I go, turn after turn. I guess I was driving faster than the game felt safe.

Anyway after my last post I went back out with ABS off and diff at 50% decel then ran about 20 laps or so without any issues at all or at least none related to lift off oversteer. The rear did step out a little here and there but it was much more predictable and no problem to control.

I'll have to try and remember to raise the diff setting on future FWD cars.


On another note my pedal mod seems to have worked out quite well, Having been reduced to the cheap set of pedals from my club sports slowing down properly was very difficult with or without ABS. I had read on a thread here about people having used a tennis ball or something like that to help with the braking so I looked around the house and found something that looked like it might work. As it now stands a gentle push on the brake pedal gives me up to 10-15% braking, a firm push is 25-30% and a hard push hits around 50%. It takes a really hard push to get it to go to 75% and all I can muster to get it to go over 90.

I may need to soften it a little but as is it is at least 100 times better than it was before the mod and driving without ABS is much easier than driving with ABS was before the mod.

 

[GravityWon]

I think that the assisted braking was causing a lot of the problem I was experiencing along with the diff setting. What had happened was that I had picked up a cheap set of pedals and had been trying to drive with ABS on due to the fact my brakes kept locking up. I had modded the pedals and went out to test them so I turned ABS off or so I thought but apparently I went the wrong way and did not notice because afterwards I noticed braking was set to assisted and then sure enough when i looked at the leaderboard it had the full circle on braking.

SO what was happening is the diff was causing the rear of the car to kick out and then when I was getting into the throttle to try and maintain control the assisted braking was over riding my throttle input and not allowing me to give the required amount of throttle to correct the oversteer so round I go, turn after turn. I guess I was driving faster than the game felt safe.

Anyway after my last post I went back out with ABS off and diff at 50% decel then ran about 20 laps or so without any issues at all or at least none related to lift off oversteer. The rear did step out a little here and there but it was much more predictable and no problem to control.

I'll have to try and remember to raise the diff setting on future FWD cars.


On another note my pedal mod seems to have worked out quite well, Having been reduced to the cheap set of pedals from my club sports slowing down properly was very difficult with or without ABS. I had read on a thread here about people having used a tennis ball or something like that to help with the braking so I looked around the house and found something that looked like it might work. As it now stands a gentle push on the brake pedal gives me up to 10-15% braking, a firm push is 25-30% and a hard push hits around 50%. It takes a really hard push to get it to go to 75% and all I can muster to get it to go over 90.

I may need to soften it a little but as is it is at least 100 times better than it was before the mod and driving without ABS is much easier than driving with ABS was before the mod.

If you go into Forza 6 controller options and press "X" once inside it will open up the advanced controller settings menu. From here you can adjust both the inside and outside deadzones for every input parameter in the game.

A Deadzone is a section of a controls range of motion that will not respond to input. If you've ever driven an old truck with a bunch of slack or free play near the center of the striking wheels range of motion, causing you to need to turn the wheel a significant amount before the vehicle actually responds - this is the equivalent of an inside deadzone. Imagine now that you now have an accelerator pedal that goes to full throttle when the pedal is only 80% depressed- this would be a 80% outside deadzone since the range of motion nearest full input is completely unresponsive.

The higher the percentage of inside deadzone you have the larger the unresponsive section you will have near the beginning of the range of motion. The lower the percentage of outside deadzone you have the larger the unresponsive section you will have near the end of the range of motion. In order to make use of 100% of a controllers range of motion you would set your inside deadzone to 0% and your outside to 100% thereby completely eliminating all deadzones.

By reducing or eliminating inside deadzones completely you get a much tighter feel out of the vehicle with drastically improved responsiveness. In the case of your modded brake pedal let's assume for example that you can only depress your pedal down 80% before the resistance from the tennis ball becomes so great that the effort needed to go any further exceeds that of what you would need to lock up the brakes in your normal car. In this case you would want to adjust the outside deadzone to a lower percentage (80% in this case) which will force the in game brake to apply 100% of its force by the time you depress your controllers pedal down 80%, which in this example is as far as we can comfortably depress the pedal. By creating a deadzone near the outside we have just forced the game to give 100% brake output while only using 80% of our controllers input. This will make your brakes in game noticeably more responsive as you can imagine so in order to get them really feeling top notch you may need to lower the brake pressure on your in game tune down from what it currently is. This should give you a level of brake feel and responsiveness that is much more in line with what you would expect to experience while driving a real car with high end race brakes. I hope I was able to explain this properly and that the information ends up helping you get the most out of your race wheel/pedals.

One last important thing to take note of-
Once you finish adjusting the deadzones in the advanced controller options menu, be sure to hit "A" to apply the settings before you back out. If you simply hit "B" without first applying the settings you will exit the advanced controller options without any changes being finalized and the game won't bother to inform you that this was the case.

Drive fast and clean and best of luck to you!

 

[HBR-Roadhog]

Thanks for the detailed response, though I am very much aware of the deadzone settings and how they work already and have adjusted those as one of my first steps.

After playing around with my pedals a bit more I found that I can re-calibrate them with ease and with the mod in place they are better than I ever expected. The amount of pressure required to lock up is similar to what it would be in a real car now. I can run with the brakes at 100% and even at 200% and no ABS without an issue.