Am I the only one thinking that cars generally handle like they are a bit too floaty? They just seem to run on icy ground, esp the ones with engines above 2l. The solution I have found is to change gravity up to -14 at least. They seem to behave quite naturally in this situation.
This might be because you're using a keyboard. If you are, your only controls are full throttle, full brakes, full left and full right, which you almost never use in a real life application. If not, you may simply not be used to the physics. I play this game with a Logitech G27 and it feels just fine for me, at regular gravity. Another thing to note: a keyboard or an xbox controller won't give you any feedback, so you feel disconnected from the vehicle, making the driving feel harder to control and more unreallistic.
Even on an xbox controller, the deadzone is that large that it destroys the on centre steering response and covers up most of the usable steering range at any reasonable speeds. Filtering helps, a little, could still be better.
I'm using a no name controller basically. But what I mean mostly is that they drive as if they are almost on ice.
What 6677 said, also you don't get any Force Feedback (like you would in most good racing wheels) so you have no idea what the car is really doing, making it harder to control. I played this with a keyboard and got the same sensation. I recommend buying a racing wheel with good FFB to play this.
i have made a test so far. I wasnt sure about the brakes. the etk800 is a good example for my mercedes i have so i drove ~50 kmh on tarmac and used the brake very strong while steering. In BeamNG the etk800 with 50kmh is sliding a lot and i cant turn left or right while i do so. i tried it in many kind of ways in BeamNG (only once in real) and it just didnt felt right. The cars are always sliding much more straight ahead.
this is probably because in game the wheels become locked from heavy braking becuase you can only use full brakes not just half. Id doubt when you did the test IRL you locked up the wheels and tried to steer becuase that is incredibly stupid
BeamNG is fairly accurate for what it is. The reason cars feel weird is because you don't drive a car IRL with a controller with 2cm of steering movement. Driving IRL requires smooth input that we are all used to, but that is hard to do on a controller or even a wheel with poor FFB. When I drive with very smooth controller inputs, the cars behave like I would expect them to IRL. And by that I mean I use the thumbstick and pull it 1mm from center to get my steering input. My advice to you if you want the game to feel better is to invest into a good wheel and pedal setup or practice minor adjustments with your thumbstick until you can steer a car more smoothly.
Another thing on handling that others haven't mentioned is that in a real car you can feel the vehicle turning or accelerating before you can see it. A driver is very sensitive to changes in velocity and minute vibrations that even a good wheel simply cannot fake. That's why you will find yourself veering around the road, locking up the brakes easily, loosing traction, and hitting corners way too hard even with a good wheel. You would never do those things with that frequency in real life because you can feel the weight of the vehicle and make (often subconscious) adjustments to your driving.
I have a G29 I know it isn't the best wheel on the market but it isn't too bad and has force feedback and the cars still feel floaty and it feels like there's almost no ffb most of the time.
It's taken me forever to learn to make my analogue stick inputs incredibly slight, and the cars do behave realistically if you try not to go full lock. the most you'll see me move the analogue stick on my ps3 controller is about half way either side while attempting to rally something. And the cars behave realistically. You need to re-learn how to use the controller basically and make millimetre adjustments. Also, because you can't feel the feedback do be conservative with the throttle. I always try to underestimate what the car can do to give myself a bit of an error margin. Rethink how you use the controller, it's not like other games. but this game is realistic enough.
Well, it is still a bit floaty, but they have certainly been going in the right direction for this matter, in past versions it was much worse (remember when the Bolide was pretty much undriveable?).