Caterham weirdness - scraping along ground

Hey there folks.

I haven't driven a heck of a lot in AMS2 but I recently tried a Caterham Supersport at Donington National and quickly noticed some deeply weird behaviour.

In short: the car often seems to scrape along the ground when it's stopped or travelling slowly, making it really hard to move off. I have no steering control either - it's almost as if the brakes are locked on (but the brake dead zone is plenty big enough). When it's doing this, I can often make it "unstick" if I can build up enough speed (20 - 30 kph perhaps). What's not clear to me is whether or not the car is behaving in a completely normal fashion when the scraping isn't evident, but my guess is that it's otherwise OK.

A potentially-related issue is that when I use the in-car cameras to view the car from outside the car I can see a weird strut-like thing (looking bent in half) sticking out from the front, slightly off the centreline of the car. This graphical/model glitch does NOT appear to be visible when I use any of the off-car cameras. (Btw, each time I move the in-car cameras using the "unlock" feature, I've been totally unable to persuade them to reset fully, so this has caused multiple removals of the AMS2 folder! Is there a way to reset them all?)

I have tried maybe a dozen other cars to see if I see the same issue, and a few other tracks as well. The track choice appears to make no difference, while all of the Caterhams appear to show the issue, and at least one other car (can't now recall which one(s) though), but most cars seemed unaffected.

I've tried all manner of resets to make this go away (removing the "Automobilista 2" folder from Documents, Steam validation, complete deletion and reinstallation of the game) to no avail.

See below for two short video clips which capture the basic issues.
Has anyone seen anything like this before?

System specs: 7700K, 32GB DDR4-3200, GTX 970, G27 wheel, Bodnar adapter for G27 pedals

 

Maybe do an integrity check of AMS2

 

Thanks, already tried that, no joy. (I used the wrong terminology above though - I called it a Steam validation - but I guess you mean the same thing.)

 

OK wow...
I had previously checked the dead zone and satisfied myself it was big enough. I also previously checked the behaviour with a larger dead zone (than the default 7) and saw the same issue, so I had given up on the dead zone being a potential factor in this. (See below though - it turns out that 7 does NOT mean 7% of pedal travel.)

But having written the text above, I decided to recheck with a much more aggressive dead zone. And indeed I can't reproduce the issue when I make the dead zone much larger (or indeed recalibrate the darn pedals entirely to put it way beyond doubt). I also see that even if you set the brake dead zone to 100 it actually starts to brake at around 38% pedal travel (huh??). Best guess right now: it has been the brakes veeeeryyy slightly dragging all along.

So... observations/questions arising from this:

1. why on earth is the dead zone behaviour configured like this - a setting of 100 == 38% of travel to begin braking...? (and are there any docs for this, btw?)
   
2. I found no way at all to visualise my pedal inputs while tweaking the dead zone - but surely there must be one? Almost every driving game permits this, and setting the dead zone without it is hit and miss (leaving me with the nuclear option which I just took, of using the Bodnar calibration app to take over the entire process with generous margins).
   
3. I was able to reproduce the original problem ("scraping along the ground with front wheels locked") even when not a *single* pixel of the red braking pedal bar was showing on the HUD, and this was certainly a factor in my having been "certain" that the dead zone wasn't the issue - how can anyone know that the brakes are dragging if the brake bar is empty?
   
4. is it a known physics idiosyncracy in this game engine that a tiny amount of braking (like 1%) can be enough to totally lock the front wheels when at rest or moving slowly? (I am aware that AC has some "different" physics for slow-moving cars, and am now suspecting that AMS2 does the same.) [edit: just to be clear, this behaviour is unphysical; I'd imagine that even 40% of braking action probably shouldn't be enough to cause the fronts to lock like this]
   
5. I now assume that the 3D model weirdness/breakage seen in one of the video clips is present in the Caterham for everyone - anyone able to confirm? (NB: in-car cameras only)

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I had a look and found that "extra brake" is mapped to "joy button 17" and "right shift" on the keyboard. Button #17 isn't present on the wheel, so I guess it's on the G27 shifter which I haven't got hooked up.

Given my inability to reproduce it since "totally" sorting out the pedal calibration (I hope) it really does just seem to have been a mostly-invisible braking action caused by pedal flicker. I run at 1080p and found some problem-affected video footage where a single pixel of the pedal action was visible in the HUD mode where the bar is about 36 pixels high (the video above is one of them in fact, but it's very hard to see especially after steamable downgrades the video to 720p), but also some footage with very clearly no pixels of the pedal bar visible in a HUD mode where the bar is about 90 pixels high.

 

This scenario has been in the game for a very long time now. I had to increase my deadzone to 11% to fix the issue. Strangely enough it only affects a few cars. I found reports as far back as 2020.

 

That was posted 3 years ago

 

Exactly the point I was making!

 

Well it seems like there are a few bugs which have been in AMS2 since the start

 

Thanks. Is that forum a private section? I can't find it, nor does the forum search facility find the post you screenshotted.

I failed to find any reports but I probably didn't use quite the right search terms.
It feels like it should have been semi-trivial to fix, but then again it's only an issue when the dead zone isn't quite right (so it probably wasn't at the top of any to-do lists).

 

You can’t find it because it’s apart of the beta forum

 

Yeah I saw that, hence the question if it was a private section ("subforum" would be the right term I guess) - it sounds as though it [edit: the beta forum] is only open to a select few?

 

Only to people who gave Reiza a certain amount of money during a certain period