Feedback for Flight Simulation - 2020

I understand, that’s more or less how I play as well. Perhaps I often get shot down, but I rarely CFIT at 500 kts like I accidentally did last night.

You were right, it was apparently failure/damage. I thought it might be a combination of several, like ground bumps, but just turning down seemingly failures fixed it.

Regarding your issue, are you still feeding some game audio bass into your speakers? I’ve found that while I like the rumble and it works well for some things, it often enough gives weird audible artifacts that I’ve quit and only use sim shaker.

Not sure. I seem to have it narrowed down to both “Gear Up/Down” and flaps: when these are UN-checked I don’t get that audible ‘banging’ sound. When checked I do. Has been last several weeks. But there’s only 1 output sound source in SSA (I have that directed to the sound port for my amp as always); it works fine for all other Fx. Curious.

For some reason I thought you were using Voicemeeter Banana to also mix some in-game sound in, I must have been confused. I toyed with that and really liked it on some modules (the Viggen’s afterburner feels amazing with it on!) because it adds some random rumble to the effects. It also lets you feel other aircraft starting on the ramp beside you and things like that that may not necessarily trigger simshaker to give you feedback. However for now I’ve got it turned off as in some modules it’s annoying.

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It is DEFINITELY a good incentive not to crash. And not to over-G your aircraft. The G-forces have really changed how I fly, and help me a lot in managing energy in a way that I’m not eloquent enough to explain. There’s a tactile difference between positive and negative G; You can feel as you ‘unload’ to 0G, any significant negative G is rewarded with a buzz that’s nearly intolerable, which encourages you to roll inverted to pull for positive G’s, much like a real fighter pilot would IRL.

3Gs are okay, but more than 5Gs and the buzz begins to ‘hurt’ (not really, but they are uncomfortable). When I do pull for 7G or 9G in an F-16, it’s very uncomfortable, and the feedback tells me that I’m instantly spending all my available energy for that snap shot, I better make it brief!

Stall buffets you can actually feel the ‘hammers banging on the wing’ sensation, just like in a real stall in a high performance aircraft. It’s really great, and not that expensive to get started!

ETA:
Here are some of my settings for various aircraft, I’m extremely happy with most of them. I agree with others, as I’ve fine-tuned the effects I’ve actually turned them down significantly as it takes less powerful feedback to give me the sense of what’s happening. Plus I’m trying not to annoy my wife any more than absolutely necessary.


One more question:
I know nothing about audio. I’ve never messed with car stereos in my teens, never played in a rock band or run a sound board at church or anything, so this is all new to me. (For one, I don’t have the ear for it, being around jet engines all my life, frankly I’m pretty deaf now.)
Is it objectively better to run the volume of the output from the PC/software lower, and run the amps gain higher, or vice versa? Which is supposed to give a cleaner signal?

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Here is my audio setup. I have Voicemeeter Banana Virtual VAIO set as my primary audio device, which means all PC sounds come through that virtual input, then out to the physical devices, in this case A1 and A3. AUX is used as the dedicated audio device for SimShaker, and outputs to both sets of bass shakers, A1 and A2.

Summary

A1 is 4x Dayton TT25-16 bass shakers, connected in stereo configuration, and driven by two Nobsound 100W Amps. These amps are awesome, they’re very small but seem to put out more power than my Dayton DS70 (more on that in a minute), and never get hot. I’ve mounted one puck under each thigh of my seat, and one puck under each side console, directly under my throttle and sidestick. L/R channels drive two pucks each, giving me stereo that works very well.

A2 is 2x Dayton Audio BST-1, which are higher power transducers. One is mounted under the center of my seat bottom, and another at the lower back. I’m driving one with another 100W Nobsound Amp, but the other is driven by the Dayton DS70 amp, which was the first amp I bought.

(The DS70 is a huge panel-mount amp, but as large as it is it doesn’t put out near the power output that the cheaper, smaller Nobsounds do. Also, it gets very warm driving one 4 Ohm kicker, even though it’s rated for it. I would not recommend it, especially considering the price. Perhaps it’s the way I’m using it, as I’m pretty ignorant as far as audio goes.)

A3 is just my Rift-S headset, for audio output.

Eventually I want to figure out how to make SimShaker put out 5.1 sound, and separate A2 into Rear and Sub so that I get true ‘surround’ sound, but I’m not smart enough to figure out how to make that work, and haven’t found an ASIO driver that seems to do anything with my sound card, even though it has 5.1 output jacks and seems like I should be able to make it work. So for now, I drive A2 off of a USB sound card that was like $7 and seems to work well.

Under the Master Section, I’ve adjusted A1 & A2 levels so that they’re balanced okay, and set EQ to filter out anything but low bass, so that I can enable the VAIO input to also output to A1, and thus transform the bass in game sounds into tactile sensation. This means that in the Viggen Syria free flight, when the other Viggen stars up next to you, you feel his jet blast as it washes across your airplane until you get the canopy closed. It’s pretty cool. Also, if you pass closely at the merge, you can not only hear the other fighter, but also feel it as it goes by. The Viggen’s afterburner is incredible, as well as the thrust reverser, really makes the Viggen fun to fly! (Not that it wasn’t already, that is!)

Basically this just allows you to send effects to your shakers that SimShaker otherwise wouldn’t know to trigger or pick up. You feel more of the world around you.

The ‘problem’ lies in the fact that by doing so, your shakers are always putting out some level of effect. I had to adjust this so that it didn’t wash out the SimShaker effects too badly. Also, some effects overlap with simshaker (such as cannons firing), thus making them louder and sometimes messier feeling. So I turn it off (and then back on later) fairly regularly, depending on what I’m doing. This is also why I’m only outputting to one set of shakers, so that the effects from SimShaker still have a dedicated channel to output to and come through well-defined.

I need to make further adjustments to get to levels that I’m satisfied with. One thing I can do is turn the level of VAIO input down, and then turn A3 (headset volume) up, so that the game sounds don’t change but the signal going to A1 is lessened.

The tape player at the top right is how I test and balance the shakers, using a clip from the original Operation Flashpoint sound track that brings me right back to 2001, LOL!

Apologies in advance for the long winded droning post… Any advice from anyone that knows something about audio and has some further suggestions or tips for me is very much appreciated!

(Also, all credit to f4l0, who was where I got the original idea of using Voicemeeter in addition to just running Simshaker by itself.)

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Interesting stuff!
Thanks, @WarPig!

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Awesome, bookmarked!

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Agreed. I feel like I’m smoother on the controls due to the feedback.

Yes! I’d mentioned in the article that I started out with some G-feel at any positive G value, then nothing until, maybe, -1.5? (don’t recall exactly). As soon as you went ‘negative’ you felt - nothing. Was cool but it meant my transducer(s) were firing all the time and mine tend to freeze up when they get too warm. Someday I may replace them. Tis low on my list though.

I’m not much help here. I have the output to the amp at 100% and use the knobs on the amp to adjust to taste.

The stall fx is the best bit, overall, IMO. In the Hornet for example, since I fly it the most, I can tell by feel where I’m “at”, or more appropriately, when I’m close [to the energy state I think I want].

I only wish there was more ‘range’ in the G-feel; 1-4 I can kind of tell, beyond that it all feels similar. Think this is a function of the hardware - the transducers + mounts + seat, all wrapped up in how well the system is balanced.

It’s all pretty good in the Tomcat too.

Regarding G-forces, you’re right, everyone’s setup is different, and even with the same hardware the seat and padding might make a great difference.

On my sim, my seat pan and back are 5/16 plywood, which the pucks are mounted to the underside. My seat cushion is pretty thin.

I have my G-forces set very low (around 8-15 depending on the aircraft, based on my impression that 3G in one should ‘feel’ the same as 3G in any other, AOA effects aside), and I have the G onset sliders set to give me a null zone around -0.4 through 1.4.

With those settings, I’m able to begin to feel a little G’s at +2G, definitely more at +3G, and it ramps up nicely as it loads up. 6Gs is pretty attention-getting and 9G is super annoying!
Negative Gs ramp up to annoying much faster, with -1 being attention-getting, and an intentional push to -2G is just as ‘bad’ as +9G.

One thing I notice is that the smaller Dayton pucks (TT25) I have can output a wider range of frequencies than the more powerful BST-1. That may be some of the difference.

I’m pretty happy with the G-forces and they way Simshaker handles them. I should disclaim here that while I have a decent amount of experience in aerobatic aircraft, I’ve never flown anything rated for more than +6/-3, and never done anything involving significant intentional negative G (they’re not as fun as positive!). My point is my perception of G forces would (probably) be quite different than a fighter jock who pulls 6Gs every sortie.

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The answer, as with any mixed signal (mixed as in analog and digital signals) system is: It’s complicated. It depends on the signal to noise ratio of your devices (which usually gets better with price). As a rule of thumb the latter is better. Use high gain first, then use low gain in the power amplifier. By high gain i mean the highest level that still gives you enough headroom so you never run into distortion or clipping.

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As someone who has a large music collection, the issue of clipping, especially in classic album rereleases/remasters/remixes, is one I deal with all too often. :slight_smile:

Is there a way to append to the article?

I ask because recent events have steered me towards emphasizing the use of a separate sound card (USB); unless you are 100% certain you have 2 already built into your PC – and can configure them.

My audio drivers went Tango Uniform (ugly story) a while back and the process of getting all the bits sorted led me to the conclusion that, if you want to make it as straight forward as possible: just buy a separate sound card, USB being more simple and cheaper. Period.

Just not sure I covered this well enough. Thanks.

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Bumb.

Just buyed two of these: https://www.ljudia.fi/tuotteet/hifi/bass-shakerit/sinus-live-basspump-8ohm

And cheap digital china amp 2x50w rms also.

I think that i will mount these below my butt > left and right.

Maybe two more and second amp (do i need?) later ?? For seat back?

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Those shakers are interesting! Almost twice the power of the Dayton Audio tt25-8 shakers that I got, but better frequency range. About the same size and cost…

What’s the impedance of the amp?
The amp probably have stereo input and output, left and right. You can use two shakers in parallell per side, and then mount one shaker under you butt and the other behind your back, on either side.

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4-16 ohm , i may get two shakers more later.

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4-16 Ohm… You can pretty much attach the shakers any way you want then.

Here’s the part of my SimBox thread, where I mounted the shakers.

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Agree with everything @Troll says here.

As for number of transducers: depends on what you are mounting them to I guess. Troll’s setup is different than mine. Mine is a simple office chair and one would suffice. But, I have 2 of them; one is larger/beefier (more ‘mass’ - bigger), hooked up such that one is on the left and one on the right channel, with mono output (my amp is mono only).

The larger transducer I get more ‘thump’ from for G-Feel and Stall output. The smaller one I feel things like flap travel and such (lower frequency samples better for larger transducer, higher better with smaller one?).

The article Troll linked to has some info, with links embedded for further info on wiring if needed.

FWIW, it is a more ‘complete’ sim with this feedback; without it there is zero ‘feel’ - I can’t fly without it anymore.

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Let’s breathe some life into this old thread again…
I’ve been having problems with my haptic system.
It’s four bass shakers, two per channel, linked to an amplifier.
Sometimes one channel cuts out. I switched channels to rule out problems with the bass shaker wiring. I tried without the galvanic filter (that I needed to get rid of a groundloop problem) to rule that out. I also tried the onboard soundcard and external USB soundcard, but one channel keeps cutting out.
Must be the amp then…?

Went to the store and got this little thing…

It’s just 50W per channel, but that should be enough.

And, it’s got bluetooth! I thought that was a plus, in my SimBox.

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Curious to see what out of the box solutions could offer to flight sims as well.

Razer’s Enki Pro HyperSense can jig to the beat of your games - The Verge

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