r/simrally • u/admiral_whatever • 19h ago
Thanks to earlier post - Art of (Sim) Rally mod
tl;dr - thanks to a previous post for inspiration, I threw some Claude tokens at Art of Rally and managed to get FFB, telemetry, and drastic wheel improvements working in a couple hours. Release here: https://github.com/d-b-c-e/art-of-sim-rally
As it turns out, art of rally has force feedback the devs half-built and never shipped.
I finished it, and found two other things making wheels feel awful. It also made it easy to add telemetry for gauges and even Bass Shaker support.
Full disclosure: While I am a dev by trade, this was totally vibe coded in just a couple hours this afternoon but I wanted to share. Honestly otherwise I never would have taken the weeks to figure all this out the old way because my free time is slim. I'm also a filthy casual by most sim racing standards. I built a full rig to get into sim racing but honestly just still find my kicks mostly with arcade games, and lately adding FFB and telemetry to things that didn't have it.
First off - credit to op on this post for inspiring this today. I saw that post and thought "oh look I'd play that mod" but no link or mod to be found. Naturally being a dev familiar with AI, I threw some tokens at it for fun and it turned out better than I expected.
I had Claude Opus 5 run some analysis on my local Steam install of Art of Rally, and the findings were interesting.
Three things I (or rather Claude) found:
1. The force feedback exists, half-built. There's a complete ForceFeedback
class that reads a force value and pushes it to a wheel. There's also real
aligning-torque physics. The two were never joined — nothing ever assigns the
value connecting them, nothing ever attaches the component, and the native DLL it
calls into isn't in the shipped build at all. Someone built both ends and never
wired the middle.
2. There's a hidden 10% deadzone on wheels the game doesn't recognize. This is
the one worth knowing even if you never touch the mod. art of rally uses Rewired
for input, and Rewired applies a 10% deadzone to every axis of a controller that
isn't in its hardware database — a database that predates every modern
direct-drive base. The deadzone in the game's options is a *separate* one, so you
can set it to zero and still have a dead band. On my wheel at 270° that was 27° of
nothing at centre.
3. The game has a direct-steering mode you're probably not getting. Its
smoothing is disabled — but only for controllers with a Rewired racing-wheel
profile. Unrecognized wheel means you get the gamepad smoothing filter instead,
which works out around 1.6 seconds lock-to-lock at speed. That's the "vague, then
suddenly oversteers" feeling.
The mod fixes all three, and adds a bonnet camera (in the normal view rotation,
adjustable live on the numpad) and Forza-compatible UDP telemetry so SimHub,
dashboards and bass shakers work with no plugin to write.
Caveats:
- Tested on one wheel, a MOZA R12. The force feedback is plain DirectInput
constant force with nothing vendor-specific in it, so it should work on
anything — but "should" is doing work there. Strength needs tuning per wheel.
- It's a bonnet camera, not cockpit. The cars have no modeled interiors.
That's the game's art, not something a mod can fix. Or at least not without a lot of 3d modelling skills I don't have and can't AI my way out of.
- The steering fixes restore what a recognized wheel already gets, so they're
fair-play neutral. There's a separate switch for the game's steering assist that
genuinely does change how the car drives — off by default, and I'd leave it off
if you care about leaderboards.
MIT, source and full technical write-up:
https://github.com/d-b-c-e/art-of-sim-rally
P.S. I've never really shared a game mod before but I suppose if there's interest, I can try submitting this to NexusMods.