How to improve your steering inputs with a gamepad

Beamng.Drive is a simulation game and with that it can be quite a challenge to control a car. Even more if you expect handling like in other (more arcadish) games using a keyboard or gamepad.
Most games use clever tricks to improve controlability with those input devices. eg Forza Motorsport 3 locked the maximum steering angle of the car depending on the gear you were in. In lower gears the car could turn the wheels more than in the higher gears. First gear used the full range of the steering and in the last one only a fraction of it.

Whats the idea behind that?
The steeringwheel of a normal roadcar has normally ~1080° of rotation. Full lock is pretty much only used at very low speeds eg when parking in or when turning 180° around. When driving around the city you would already use only a fraction of the possible rotation. On the motorway were down to an absolut minimum of turning the wheel.
Compared to a wheel the travel of the analogstick on a gamepad is just tiny. 1080° of rotation compressed into a flick of your thumb.

With that in mind a linear steering axis lock to lock on your analog stick is bad. If you're doing mostly parallel parking ingame its perfect, though. But thats not what most of us do in driving/racing game.
At 50-100kmh the usuable travel of the stick before the car loses grip already shrinks significantly. Driving precisly as fast as possible on a highway gets almost impossible.

Luckily enough Beamng.Drive has options to counter that.
Steering axis:

Deadzone: As you see i added a bit of deadzone to the center. My pad is quite old and the analogstick got pretty wobbly in the center. This helps me keeping my car straight at high speeds. A bit of deadzone is IMHO always good to have. But maybe not as much as i do. Just try it out yourself what is working for you.
Linearity: This will give you more control around the center and less at the end. If you have the menu open yourself the interactive graph will give you much better idea what it does than my mediocre english. In my pic i set the linearity to "2" but thats just an example. IMHO the usable range is somewhere between "1.5"and "3". I cant give you the best settings because its entirely dependent on what you like.




Limiting steering at speed is something almost every racing game does.
Again i cant give you the best settings because it really depends on your drivingstyle and what cars you like. But its fair to say it should start at around 30-50kmh depending on what cars you drive. Also the graph should be pretty self-explanatory. It just needs a bit of tweaking. My settings here are pretty shit because limiting the steering to only 20% wont allow you to countersteer enough. If you're into drifting this setting should only be applied very softly or turned entirely off.


tl;dr with those settings you can get the gamepad feel much closer to something like Forza or GT. Some tweaking will be involved but in the end the cars should be much easier to control.

 

I often disliked using gamepads when I use to do RoR Monster Jam tours, because of how quick the steering was. It felt somewhat the same here, so I'm glad there are some settings to make it feel smoother (Or alteast that's what it sounds like)

I really like Rally so I bet this would help.

 

I don't use a gamepad anymore, but yes, increasing the linearity will make vehicles much more driveable.

 

Don't set limit steering at speed end to 180kph, try to keep it like 40kph maximum and start 30kph or so, then you will have that 1.5mm movement always resulting same effect when driving at speed and that is much easier when cornering fast.

Also use direct filtering for gamepad, because other ones are way too slow and you can't really countersteer.

Limit steering by speed percentage 40-50% when driving racing style, when drifting etc. you need to set lot less limit. Depends indeed from cars etc.

I think my deadzone is 2% that is minimum that keeps car going straight.

Also linearity I don't like to go too far with that as then it turns all of sudden near the end of range, but that is very personal how one wants to run it.

Well, something to test and try how you will feel from it, everyone prefers bit different kind settings after all.

 

I agree with everythingelse in your post but this one seems a bit odd to me.
I just tried it out and it just feels weird. Instead of having a nice progression which limits your angle according to your speeds its practically just a digital switch. 180kmh certainly is to high. Something around 100-130kmh is probably more sensible. If it works for you i respect that but i wouldnt call it a general rule.

 

Yeah, that is kinda idea, to have it like digital switch as when I'm going around a race track for example, I want to know that when I move thumbstick X mm I get precisely Y degrees of steering, when I did try higher values to end limit, I just could not hit apex at all as different turns had different steering angle from same thumbstick movement.

So when going slow, I get full range and then when going fast I get limited range, which I then change based on what kind of driving I do.

On race track I have it set to most limiting possible while still making tightest turns on track. I don't need any extra and that gives me maximum resolution possible from thumbstick.

If I do drifting, I set often whole limiter off, any limit seems to be just a bother when trying to catch some slides.