PC Sim Racing

[hpiguy]

VR is NOT for anyone that gets motion sickness. Luckily I don't suffer from any of that. And yes, if you're playing room scale games with touch controllers, then yes, it can get very physically taxing in a hurry as you actually have to perform any of the moves that you want your character to do, including diving into the floor, taking cover, etc. For me though, I filled my room scale space with other items, so all I do is seated VR gaming, and 99.9% of that is sim racing these days. And for that, it's incredible, albeit with some graphical limitations.

[HumboldtEF]

Anyone who has a Fanatec account needs to check for a recent email from them, I got one this morning. I apologize but they advised that i should not divulge what it is.

[hpiguy]

LMAO! Yep, got the same email. This is their third network security eff up this year. Maybe I should apply for a job there. And I'll happily divulge the issue since I'm in the industry and stuff like this always needs public attention. Basically, they didn't secure your account credentials properly, and you account credentials were hacked, again.

[STANG KILLA SS]

[JatoTheRipper]

ACC is getting an Intercontinental GT Pack DLC.

https://www.facebook.com/Assetto.Cor...type=3&theater

[STANG KILLA SS]

was just reading that this morning!

just bummed that it appears ACC will never get triples support due to the real engine its on. :(

[hpiguy]

The Fakebook link just takes me to a pic of the Mount Panorama track.

[JatoTheRipper]

Originally Posted by hpiguy

The Fakebook link just takes me to a pic of the Mount Panorama track.

They don't make it easy to link outside of Facebook. Just go to AC's page and look for the story.

https://www.facebook.com/Assetto.Corsa/

[STANG KILLA SS]

ive never seen graphics this real

[STANG KILLA SS]

has your name all over it Randy

[STANG KILLA SS]

[JatoTheRipper]

ThrustMaster TMX for XBox and Windows is on sale on scAmazon right now for $120! It's amazon so this deal may not last more than 5 minutes.

https://www.amazon.com/Thrustmaster-...8a4a86d54f0INT

[Sneetches]

I'll have to check out what's new on BeamNG tonight after seeing Harley's post about them updating it.

[JatoTheRipper]

Originally Posted by Sneetches

I'll have to check out what's new on BeamNG tonight after seeing Harley's post about them updating it.

I saw that too. Looks awesome!

I have to try the new BeamNG, new AC (which may never happen because I uninstalled it), and the new R3E.

[Sneetches]

The new BeamNG update is pretty cool. It's a quick update and the new crawler is a bit more KOH in nature.

[Tommy R]

This'll be a two part post regarding my efforts to set up a butt shaker on my sim rig.

Part 1:

What to get? Fortunately for me, Randy had gone through this procedure and steered me to some good component choices. So what you'll need for a basic setup like I'm running is a shaker or two or four or whatever. In my case, I wanted one shaker under my seat and one under my pedals....so two shakers in all. I'd need an amp to power them and a simple 2 channel amp would do the trick. The RCA inputs on the amp would need to be fed from a sound card. The software I'd be using (SimVibe) provides some info. and requirements for the sound card: 1) It has to be a dedicated sound card, separate from your PC's current sound card. 2) If you're using a USB headset you can use your MB's sound outputs to power the amp. 3) If you use a dedicated sound card in your PC, you'll need one of a different brand to power the amp or you could have driver issues. 4) You can't use a USB sound card for the amp because of latency issues.

Here's the stuff I bought:

Shakers:
Aura AST-2B-4 Pro Bass Shaker Transducer

https://www.parts-express.com/aura-a...ducer--299-028

Amp:
SMSL FBA_SA-98E

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Software:
SimVibe downloaded from SimXperience
https://simxperience.com/en-us/produ...esoftware.aspx

Sound card:
For reasons explained in the next post, I'm currently using my MB's onboard sound outputs and my headset is fed by a USB output. This means I currently have no external speakers, but I'll get into that in my next post.

Mounting everything:
I've got a Fanatec ClubSport V3 pedal set and I just had to drill two holes and utilize slots that were already in the pedal base to mount one shaker. That was easy. I don't have pics to share, but it was very straightforward. To mount the shaker under the seat I decided to make a bracket to mount the shaker as close as I could do the underside of my seat. I decided to make a mount that would attach to the aluminum profile of my Sim Labs GT1 cockpit. I opted for aluminum brackets in hopes of it transmitting the vibrations as efficiently as possible. Here's some pics of what I came up with.




The pedal mount is perfect. The seat mount, however, has an issue. The vibration does transmit very well, but you hear the "tinny" sound of the aluminum under certain conditions where the frequency of the shaker input is very low.....such as when the motor is at low RPM under a heavy load. Otherwise, it's not so bad, but I had to turn up my volume when driving or I could hear the tinny sound and it was distracting. After talking with Cory and Randy, I should've mounted the shaker to maybe some wood or MDF. My concern was that would absorb too much vibration, but it wouldn't have that tinny sound. Before I do that I'll experiment with some other ideas I've got. Perhaps thicker aluminum would've worked better. For the 24 Hour Daytona race we did this weekend, I tossed some clothing around the shaker and that seemed to do the trick, but that's not exactly a permanent solution. I'll post a follow-up when I come up with a final solution that works.

Thoughts:
I love it! I don't think it will make me faster, but the level of immersion is dramatically improved! And with SimVibe you can choose so many different vibrations based on feedback from the car. So my front shaker is geared more towards front suspension movements and the rear is set up similarly. I *feel* the gearshifts now. Same with impacts, rumble strips, etc. Maybe a 4 shaker setup with a 4 channel amp could make you faster if you could feel lockup sooner or something? I'm not sure, but regardless I'm sold on the butt shaker stuff and I'm really glad I went for it. Thanks again for all the help, Randy!!

[Tommy R]

Butt Shaker Part 2:

I do not have a dedicated sound card for my PC. What I've been doing is using a USB to power and send audio signal to my wireless headset. My motherboard has outputs that send audio to a pair of small desktop speakers. If I plug my USB in for the headset, it disables output to my external speakers. Since most of my racing is online where I use a mic, this has worked out fine for me: I have a pair of dinky desktop speakers for watching youtube and I just plug in my headset's USB unit when I'm racing online.

The shaker setup requires its own sound card. For reasons SimVibe explains, it cannot use a USB add-on sound card due to potential latency issues. I wanted to keep my external speakers that are powered by my MB so I picked up a new Sound Blaster sound card.

Here's the card. It's a PCIE card. I believe you can tell by the two small connectors at the bottom that will plug into the MB:


Here's my MB. You can see the correctly sized slot for the sound card (circled in yellow), but it's completely covered up by my large video card and is not accessible. The slot circled in red is the only one available. It appears that's a PCI slot, not PCIE so the card above doesn't look to be able to work.


So I need a PCI sound card, right? Well, I called around town and finally found a store that had one last PCI sound card in stock so I picked it up. It's a SoundWave 5.1 card. I got it installed and it wouldn't get recognized by Windows. In my search to figure out what's wrong I found out it's not compatible with Windows 10, which is what I run. Now I've got a 2nd sound card that I can't use!!

In order to get my shakers operational, I made the decision to remove the new card and connect the shakers/amp to my MB's internal sound card, leaving my external speakers with no signal. My USB output feeds my headset. The downside to this is my external speakers do nothing now. So if I want to watch any videos or anything with sound on my PC, I've got to wear my headset. That sucks and I'm not happy about it so I want to come up with a better solution and I'd really appreciate some input from those who are more PC savvy than me!

Here's my options as I see it:

1) Get an adpater to put my PCIE sound card into a PCI slot. I see that these adapters exist, but no idea how good they are. They look like they would also raise the card and I'm not sure how that would affect the location of the card at the back of the case. Not sure if these would also cause a compatibility issue with Win10?


2) Get a USB sound card expander (or whatever it's called) and use it for my external speakers. I would just have to hope that it doesn't cause any kind of compatibility issues with SimVibe. If this works, I'd ultimately like to get one that has 5.1 surround so I could add 4 speakers and a sub.

Any other suggestions?

[hpiguy]

Tommy you could probably keep the two side ears from your rear shaker mount, and just run by Lowes or the like and grab a couple of 1x4" strips to replace the two pieces of profile that span across your rig and do it that way. And you're welcome buddy, and I'm glad you like it!

[Tommy R]

Hmm....looking at my current video card I'm guessing I should be able to move it from the light blue slot to the green slot without any issue? Does proximity of the card make a difference regarding performance? If I can do this, it would cover up my PCI slot, but free up my PCIE slot (in yellow).

[hpiguy]

Yes, that should work Tommy.