Driving & setup tips?

Now that I'm up & running, I'm trying to get to grips with the unforgiving physics so I can record videos of my driving and put them on YouTube.

-Non-ABS brakes seem extremely grabby and lock at the slightest touch which makes proper downshifting even more difficult than it usually is in games; is there a non-crutchy way to work around this? My real car doesn't have ABS and doesn't seem this touchy.

-Slide recovery? For whatever reason the ETK i-series seems rather difficult for me to gather back up once the back goes, which happens frequently in turbo RWD versions. Tires don't seem to make much sound until you're already hosed.

-Some cars have rather heavy steering especially at low speeds; is there a non-crutch way to reduce that while preserving some steering feel? Is the strange FFB from FWD and AWD cars normal?

 

I'll try to answer your questions as well as I can

1. Brakes in BeamNG tend to be much stronger than they really should be. If using race brakes, decrease the braking torque until standing on the brakes just barely locks them up. Take a look at some of my or Fufsgfen's vehicles for reference on a good brake balance.
2. I'm not quite sure how to help there, I haven't had too many problems, although the ETK I does seem a bit violent when oversteering. Usually your wheel should turn itself into the countersteer, and then you'll have to fight it to center it before the car bounces back. It also probably doesn't help that the ETK I has tires that are far too small for it's weight and power output.
3. I've never really driven a car without power steering, but steering is generally stiffer when you're moving slowly, and anything that puts power through the front wheels will have a heavier steering feel, as well as torque steer.

 

You can manipulate sensitivity curve of brake pedal or use race brakes and set brake torque to much lower.

For heavy steering, you can choose power steering.

FWD and AWD tends to have numb feel like real things when compared to RWD models.

I don't use much street tires, only race tires, there is no seat of pants feeling and it is easy to loose grip with street tires. Press CTRL-W to open parts menu and select better tires.

Put pedals app on screen, you can see from there that you are using too much brake travel, like 50% brake travel is when you push your real car's brake pedal with 50% of maximum force that you can press brake pedal. Same for throttle pedal, but also amount of rubber for amount of hp is probably bit on low side with more powerful cars in BeamNG.

Also it is easy to go faster than one thinks or corner harder than one thinks, because no seat of pants feeling.

Force feedback settings are something you might need to tune a lot, defaults might not work. Check at least option that did say something about lower strength at low speeds.

Turbo cars are annoying, because you can't really tell when turbo kicks in, at least in current version it is bit hard, so you kinda have to learn to know how long you can keep throttle down, then you lift a little as turbo wakes up, skinny tires don't exactly help with the issue.

 

That option about low-speed steering is already checked. Installing power steering might help for practice but the series I'm planning will require cars to be driven dead stock, straight from the selector, with no alterations so that's why I was wondering if there was a non-crutchy setting somewhere which might make it a little easier to change direction quickly (half the reason slide recovery is so hard is that, when you need to really whip the wheel, there seems to be much more resistance to overcome than in real life, which is where wobbly desk becomes a problem). Ditto for racing tires. I will try that with the pedals app, though my braking with the G27 is usually rather gingerfooted anyway thanks to its stiff brake pedal. ETK 2400i TTsport has a giant glowing red boost meter in the middle of the panel which should make it somewhat easier to figure out when the turbo kicks up, but throttle control is difficult anyway, plus it has some trailing-throttle oversteer, and like I said that car in particular seems to have very "quiet" tires. Even NA models have surprisingly evil handling, which seems to have carried forward to the 800 series as well since the 854td I drove afterward was rather tail-happy too.

For FWD/AWD FFB, it's not necessarily that it's numb, it's that the feel changes abruptly at the slightest touch of the throttle, as if a switch was being flipped. Maybe I was just overdriving the fronts (Sunburst Sport S, Covet Track) but I doubt it. Is that a bad setting somewhere?

 

BeamNG is only game that simulates some of the FWD forces to steering arm, forgot what it actually was.

 

Yeah, FWD cars will spin the front tires very easily if pushed, which feels a lot like understeering, even if you really aren't. That one I can confirm is true to real life (260 HP is too much for an early 2000s minivan). Also, torque steer is caused by the engine/transmission not being mounted quite centered, causing engine torque to twist one side of your suspension slightly more than the other, which becomes particularly noticeable in high power FWD (Legran Sport) or heavily front biased AWD (Sunburst). For the sunburst, drift mode ESC shifts torque bias to the rear, so that might make a difference.