What is the difference between Road Impacts and Road Vibration?
The description impacts says "localized feedback for bumps and other wheels impact on road" and for vibration it says "localized road vibration based on suspension telemetry."
It isn't clear to me how these are different. For road racing games (iracing, automobilista, rf2) I use both, plus Road Rumble, and the effects aren't overwhelming. However, today I tried Dirt 4 and the impact and vibration effects were fun, but a bit excessive. So I looked at the outputs for Impacts and Vibrations and saw that they were mostly matching up. Which led me to question what is unique about each of them.
Ideally I'd just look at the code for the shaker effects was public like the arduino code, but I didn't find anything in the install directory.
Hi ! Both are based on the same input, so they will follow the same "shape", but impact will be focused on higher values with an higher automatic threshold. That said if you try to redirect both effects on the same shakers it's clearly overkill even more on rally games where the full suspension range is used much more often. To be transparent I've hesitated to remove the particular effect a couple of time because it can be felt as redundant (it can be reproduced if needed by putting an additional road vibrations effect with a high threshold).but offering these two effects as separate allows to redirect them more easily to a specific set of shakers/motors and that's why it "survived" until now 😀
Thank you, that really clears things up. I see how having both makes it easier to setup without digging deeper into layering effects.
So would I be correct in thinking that setting Road Vibration Auto-threshold sensitivity up to say 75%, I'd get almost the same output as Road Impacts?
I'll have to rethink how to best use this with my setup (Dayton BST-2: front chair legs; doubled up Dayton TT25-8 Pucks: rear legs of chair; Dayton BST-1: pedals, left, and right legs of chair).
Here's how I've been using those effects so far:
I used a mishmash of ideas from the RaceDepartment thread to use layers/duplicate effects at different frequencies + white noise to add weight to the feeling.
For the Road Impacts I'm using gamma to make the threshold even higher, although I also just noticed that my Auto-calibration sensitivity is rather low which based on your explanation at RD is probably giving me a lot less resolution/detail. Definitely looking into this over the weekend.