Force Feedback

Screenshot

Overview

This force feedback feature hooks into the telemetry data, which is broadcast by the iRacing simulator, reads the 360 Hz steering column torque signal, does some processing to it, and then sends the processed signal to your wheel.

When processing the signal, the app splits it into AC and DC components, and this is where the magic happens. The AC component (fine details) can be adjusted independently of the DC component (steady state force). The app does not add any latency to the force feedback signal that is sent to your wheel, beyond the latency that is already present within the iRacing simulator.

Setup

You must disable the iRacing simulator’s built-in force feedback feature. To do this, run the iRacing simulator and then go into the options screen, and into the drive tab, and disable force feedback by unchecking the enable force feedback checkbox.

Logitech wheel users must also disable the iRacing simulator’s support for TrueForce. To do this, edit the app.ini file which is located in the documents iRacing folder, and find and replace loadTrueForceAPI=1 with loadTrueForceAPI=0 and save.

It has also been reported that changing resetWhenFFBLost=1 to resetWhenFFBLost=0 helps prevent iRacing from taking control of force feedback away from MAIRA. Try this if you notice that you’re losing force feedback when while going in and out of sessions.

Enable and Disable

The force feedback tab has a checkbox in the tab header to turn on and off this feature. If this feature is turned on, then MAIRA will control the force feedback effects in your steering wheel. If this feature is turned off, then the steering effects and the LFE ⮕ FFB features will naturally also be turned off as well.

Device

You would indicate which force feedback device you want the app to use, by selecting it from this dropdown box. If there are no devices listed in this box, make sure that your force feedback wheel is plugged in, is turned on, and is not sleeping, and then restart the app.

Test

Pressing the test button will make the app send a short burst of force feedback signal to your wheel. If the app is able to control your wheel, you should feel it vibrate. If you do not feel anything, then something is wrong. Try closing and and then restarting the app.

Record

The app is capable of recording up to 10 minutes of raw force feedback telemetry from iRacing for later playback. To start recording, just press this record button. As soon as you press this button again, or press the playback button, the recording is saved to your drive.

The recording will loop around if you have been recording for more than 10 minutes.

Playback

If you have a saved recording, pressing the playback button will play the recording back. This can be useful if you want to try and tune the sliders in the app without needing to pay attention to your driving.

Pressing the playback button again stops the playback.

Wheel Max

The wheel max slider is how you tell the app how strong the motor in your wheel is – what its maximum torque output is in Newton-meters. For example, my Logitech G PRO racing wheel is rated at 11 Newton-meters, so that is what I have it set to in the app for my wheel.

Here are some wheel max values for common wheelbases – Wheel Max Settings

Overall Scale

The overall scale adjusts the strength of the force feedback that is sent to your wheel. The range of this slider is from 0% to 100%.

When you have this set to 100% this means that if iRacing says to apply 10 Newton-meters of force to the wheel, then that is exactly what happens.

If you set this to 50% then when iRacing says to apply 10 Newton-meters of force to the wheel, the app applies 5 Newton-meters to the wheel instead.

The overall scale defaults to 10% for safety. You will want to turn this up until your wheel force feedback reaches a comfortable level.

Auto Overall Scale Button

This is the process to use the auto button –

  1. Set the detail scale slider to where you want it to be
  2. Get on the track
  3. Right-click on the auto button to clear the peak torque value
  4. Drive around the track, without crashing, until the peak torque value doesn’t seem to increase any more
  5. Left-click on the auto button to have MAIRA auto-set the overall scale for you

While you are driving around, MAIRA will keep track of the peak steering column torque. You can see this number displayed inside the button. The button will light up with a green border when it has detected a peak steering column torque of at least 1 Nm, indicating that you can press it.

When you press this button, MAIRA will automatically set the overall scale for you. After MAIRA updates the overall scale slider, you can manually turn it down if you feel that the wheel is too strong. Or, you can turn it up some to make the wheel stronger, understanding that the force feedback signal will likely have some clipping. Some clipping is fine. Too much clipping can mask the oversteer and understeer feeling when taking high force corners.

You can also right-click on this button to clear the stored peak steering torque value. The reason you would want to do this, is because sometimes you’ll hit something, or drive over some intense kerbs, and this results in a really big number showing up in the auto button. In this situation, if you press the auto button, you will end up with an overall scale value that is probably too low.

Here is a video showing how to use this feature.

There is a related setting in Settings > Force Feedback where you can adjust a slider to control how much clipping to allow when doing these auto overall scale calculations.

Detail Scale

The detail scale adjusts the strength of things like road bumps, tire chatter, and things like that. The range of this slider is from 0% to 500%.

If you set this to 100% then basically the force feedback signal is passed from iRacing, through this app, and to your steering wheel virtually unchanged.

If you set it to 50% then the details are cut down in half, and if you set it to 200% the details are twice as strong.

Parked Scale

The parked scale adjusts how much to reduce the forces force you feel, while your car is parked and not moving. The reason that we might want to lower this below 100% is because some people will want to let go of the wheel while parked. If there are high enough forces present, that might cause the wheel to start oscillating out of control.

The parked scale fades out as the car approaches roughly 12 miles per hour (19 kph).

The default value is 25%.

Output Minimum

Very weak wheelbases (something like the Logitech G29 or G923) have trouble reproducing very low, near-zero, forces. This output minimum slider can help with that. Basically, any small force below this threshold that you set, will be bumped up. Try starting with small values such as 0.1 or 0.2 on these wheelbases, and work your way up until you are satisfied.

You will want to leave this at 0 N⋅m if you have a stronger wheelbase.

Output Maximum

If you have a very strong wheelbase, like the Simagic Alpha Ultimate, you might find that your wheelbase is just too strong (and too dangerous) for your liking. You can use this output maximum slider to limit how strong the wheel can be. In this situation, you would set the output maximum value to something lower than the wheel max value. For example, with the Simagic Alpha Ultimate 23 N⋅m wheelbase, the wheel max value would be 23 N⋅m and you could set the output maximum value to something lower than this, such as 15 N⋅m.

Most people should leave this at the default value of 50 N⋅m.

Output Curve

The output curve is an interesting slider. If this slider is set to 1.0 then no curve is applied (the force feedback signal is completely linear). Setting the slider to below 1.0 and above 1.0 have opposite effects.

Below 1.0

The force signal is pushed away from zero and compressed towards the wheel max value. What this means is that if you have a weaker wheelbase where it’s just feeling very weak, you can set this slider to something like 0.9 or 0.8, and the result will be that your wheelbase will feel stronger, at the expense of a bit of fidelity (because the signal is compressed).

Above 1.0

The force signal is pulled in and compressed towards zero. What this means is that if you have a strong wheelbase, you can set this slider to something like 1.1 or 1.2, and the result will be that the car feels smoother down straightaways, while maintaining strong force feedback driving through turns.

Button Mappings

There are several button mappings that can be set up to control MAIRA while you are driving. When you begin to set up a button mapping, you will see this screen –

You can map either a single button click, or you can map a button hold + button click. To map a single button click, just press any button or knob on any controller device, or your keyboard, and then click on update to save the button mapping.

To map a button hold + button click combo, first press and release the hold button, then press and release the click button, and then click on update to save the button mapping. If you mess up, you can always click on the clear button to start over. The result of mapping a button hold + button click combo looks something like this –

Reset [R]

When you press the reset button, this will cause the app to re-initialize the force feedback device. If your steering wheel has gone to sleep while waiting for a race to start, MAIRA might have lost the ability to control the force feedback in your wheel. To fix this, just press the reset button to tell MAIRA to gain control back of the force feedback device.

Set Auto Overall Scale

You can map the set auto overall scale button to a button on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can hit this button to tell MAIRA to automatically set the overall scale slider for you without needing to take your eyes off the road.

Clear Auto Overall Scale

You can map the clear auto overall scale button to a button on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can hit the button at any time, to tell MAIRA to clear the auto overall scale value and start over.

Overall Scale Increment / Decrement

I recommend that these buttons be mapped to a knob on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can increase or decrease the overall scale while driving around the track.

Detail Scale Increment / Decrement

These buttons can be mapped to a knob on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can increase or decrease the detail scale while driving around the track.

Pretty Graph

If you enable the pretty graph, you will see a drawing appear in the app. The drawing will show two lines; a red line and a blue line. If those two lines are drawn on top of each other, the color will change to white.

The red line is the original unaltered steering wheel torque signal coming directly from the iRacing simulator.

The blue line is the force feedback signal that is actually sent to your wheel.

If you have the detail scale set to 100%, then the blue line will always match the red line exactly.

There are a few differently colored horizontal lines in the graph:

  • Green line = center of the graph where force = 0
  • Black lines = where force is at 50% of wheel max
  • Red lines = where force is at 100% of wheel max

If the force feedback signal (blue line) ever crosses either one of the red lines, then that means the signal is getting clipped – you may want to avoid severe clipping by reducing the overall or detail scale sliders.

You may also see yellow and/or red & white marks near the top and bottom red lines. When you see those that means crash protection is on (yellow marks) or curb protection is on (red & white marks).

The iRacing simulator must be running, and you do need to be in your car and on the track for this graph to show anything. When you are playing back a recording, the iRacing simulator must be running, but you can be in the garage.

You can also click on the pretty graph to solo it – meaning to remove all other UI from the force feedback tab, leaving just the pretty graph in there. Useful for when you are making YouTube videos!

Next: Steering Effects