Software Wheel Rotation Explained

We have added the option to set the maximum rotation of the steering wheel “in software”, so we can adjust the rotation per car even for wheels that don’t support setting the rotation in their driver. This means that current owners of various OSW and SimSteering wheels can now finally enjoy the correct rotation without having to manually set it outside of rFactor 2. The system works as follows: In order to use this new system, you have to explicitly turn it on in your Controller.JSON file (which you can find in your UserData\player folder). The line you’re looking for is called “Steering Wheel Software Rotation,” and if you don’t see it yet, please make sure you have updated to build 1112, run the game once and exit it again. The line defaults to “false,” and you should change that to “true”.

The next step is to go into your wheel driver and set the rotation to the maximum value it supports, up to the maximum rotation of 1440 degrees that rFactor 2 supports. Then you go back to your Controller.JSON and set the “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation Default” to the same number of degrees you just configured. If your wheel actually does support us reading the maximum rotation, you can alternatively set “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver” to “true” so we will read whatever you set from the driver.

We do recommend setting it to the maximum value in the driver, as we can only make the rotation less in software, not more. Finally we have a value called “Steering Wheel Bump Stop Harshness,” which acts like a spring constant and defines how harsh the buildup of counter-torque will be when you go over the maximum rotation for a car. We recommend starting with a value of somewhere between 20 (soft) to 50 (harsh), but this really depends on your wheel and personal preference. For SimSteering and OSW, we added some profiles to our default set as well. You might want to give those a try as they are already setup for this new feature.

In summary, these are the new parameters in the Controller.JSON:

  • Steering Wheel Software Rotation – Defaults to false, but must be set to true to enable this feature. When it is set to false, this feature should be fully disabled.
  • Steering Wheel Bump Stop Harshness – A configurable value ranging from 1.0 to 100.0, which acts like a spring constant that determines how much counter-torque will be applied if you steer beyond the maximum range.
  • Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver – Whether we should attempt to fetch the maximum steering wheel range from the wheel driver, assuming the driver supports this.
  • Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation Default – The value of our maximum steering wheel range when there isn’t a wheel driver available that we can read this from or when “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver” is set to false. Values from 40 to 1440 are supported.