left888, did you adress your concerns at the WMD forums too, so that the devs can take something from it? Just complaining here wont help, I m afraid. Maybe look in the TS500 thread for help/wheel settings.
I tried iRacing last year with the 6 month Cadillac trial and I wasnt impressed with the FFB tbh. Actually much of the same critique you have for pCARS FFB describes my limited experience with iRacing rather well. I liked the general resistance and weight feel of the car, but other than that it seemed to be rather bland. Mind you, I was only using a DFGT at the time, but if it were so much better than pCARS FFB in general, shouldnt there be more and better feeling on every wheel?
My guess: It depends a lot on finding good settings for your wheel. In every game.
Actually I just did some testing on this using FEdit and a small amplitude sine wave with a small offset. Did it for Remco (over at WMD) actually.
What I found was that there are really multiple reasons why the small FFB effects don't come through.
1. Motor power related. You need a lot of power to make the quick left/right motion for vibrations to come through. However, the minimal operational voltage is important here as well. The lower the voltage of a motor (or its driver) can be before it is actuated, the smaller vibrations it can generate.
2. How free the driveshaft or axle of the motor can move is also important. Lateral forces of tensioned belts add extra drag to the motor as the axle is pushed against the wall of the bearing. The Fanatec wheels use motors which have sleeve bearings and they are by design not suited for applications where a lateral force is applied. Where as a ball bearing runs much smoother when a lateral force is applied. Hence they are used in applications as skateboards as well, where the weight of yourself is the lateral force.
3. A longer length and skewed shape of a motor armature (the magnets) results into less cogging from the motor. MrBasher noted this to me after he was lucky enough to try an ECCI. He said the motor was as big in diameter as the T500 but seemingly longer. He noticed the ECCI was a lot smoother, and thus he concluded that the length and possibly shape of the armature must be a reason to not feel any cogging at all.
4. Two motors on one belt and non or one tensioner (CSR E and CSW), results in slack and power/torque reduction due to slippage of one motor. This because the belt acts like an elastic band. When you put one side under tension between pulley and the first motor (and thus stretch it like an elastic band), the belt will become a little bit loose around the second motor and thus it will start to slip. Hence the loss of power necessary to make those small road effects come through.
5. Gear driven wheels (DFGT, G25/27) have some slack in between the gears. This either results in no small effects (like road effects) coming through or it feels like rattling.
6. V-Belt driven wheels (CSR E and CSW) have a natural tendency to slip a little (even in cars they do that). This natural tendency causes the effects to come through in a dampened form. Of course this also means that the little effects like road feel will become dampened and/or are (greatly) reduced. To the point some of it might disappear.
7. Toothed drivebelts (Porsche wheels and T500) have the best transfer feel of all, especially when used with a tensioner like on the T500 (which I know has one, dunno about the Porsche wheels). The reason is that they do not slip (as quickly) as V-belts, especially when used with a tensioner to reduce the elastic band effect. The teeth will just stay in place and due to the tension even the minimal movements of the motor come through, and thus can be felt. The downside to this is of course that the cogging of the motor and toothed belt could (doesn't have to be) cloud the other effects in the wheel. So picking a good motor is key with this system as well as a quality tension system.
8. The direct drive stepper motor, otherwise known as bodnar wheel, is one of the best ways to feel everything the car does as there is nothing lost in the transfer to the wheel. After all the wheel is directly attached to the axle of the motor itself. The downs of this system are first the costs, no normal consumer can afford one. Secondly is the fact that you still do not have the full torque as you have in a real car. Also the motor due to its power can be quite harsh, especially un sudden turn arounds from left to right. One way to dampen this and add even more torque where appropriate would be to add hydraulics. Though that would further drive the costs up.
Anyways, this is just my take on this all. But I conclude that due to the design of all the wheels, no single wheel can be the same unless the internal design is pretty much identical.
Until then, it makes no sense for the devs to work on FFB when the tire model changes every day and could completely mess with the FFB they've set up, so I'll stick with FFB tweakers from forum members.
pCars FFB sure has a long way to go, atm it's very important to set ingame FFB at 100% and tyre force at +/- 70% to avoid clipping. The second thing to know is that during the tyres development time, some effects have been disabled so that they do not interfere with the feedback about the tyre models.
