First wheel I ever used wan on the OG xbox with PGR 2, we only had one wheel so we would take turns playing split screen. That got put away at some point and collected dust until it was donated to a charity store. Years later, I started playing fm2, loved that it was like NFS but more realistic physics. Played with a controller mostly and learned how to drift, then I bought myself a Microsoft wireless racing wheel. Leaned how to use it on my lap and was OK with it. When fm3 released I played it on a controller to start with, because I remember having to learn how to clutch and throttle blip with multiple fingers. Didn't take long for me to dust the wheel off, set up a table and started improving my wheel skills further, I went on to being one of the top 10 RWD drifters on the leaderboards (still hold WR on that game but they are buried by cheaters).
I enjoyed that Alot, being a cheap wheel with not very good FFB I wasn't bad, but at some point I started to try tune my cars to use the FB and self rotate like they do in the real world. This led to me buying a fanatec gt2 setup, my first 900 degree wheel with clutch and h-pattern.
It took me all of about 20 mins on FM3 having no experience on this kind of wheel before that something wasn't quite right. The game had a serious input mapping bug when you went to countersteer a drift with 900 degrees. Was hugely disappointed, reported it on the forums with a few others and was basically told by other members at the time that there was no issue. So I found a workaround with a glitch in the fanatec firmware (as 2 wheel profiles were used by the game, 270 and 900, 270 had some speed sensitivity and linearity mapping modifiers where 900 was raw input) that allowed me to use 900 but with the game thinking it was 270, so it had bad linearity and speed sensitivity but if you were drifting the input was linear. It was a trade off but it was the best you could do at the time.
Then FM4 came along and boasted simulation steering mode that would remove all steering filters, I thought you beauty they listened and fixed it. But no, the countersteer input mapping was still messed up. It wasn't until inside sim racing reported the issue that it actually got attention from the devs and it was fixed in a patch, but only for simulation steering, for some bizarre reason they left it in the normal steering mode.
So I spent a long time playing FM4 on my gt2 constantly switching between normal and sim steering because neither of them felt right to me. Normal was too heavily assisted and sim just felt way too twitchy and unpredictable at times. It was around this time I stated focusing on FFB and vehicle physics, and I started to complain about how the FFB, but back then wheel users in forza were very small in numbers, and I was kinda shot down in my theories at the time. My gt2 wheel died and I replaced it with a t500 and played on my PC a fair bit, mostly LFS and Rfactor, but I eventually got myself a CSR Elite because I was missing forza. I began to do crazy modifications to my wheel (bigger, stronger motors, quick release custom made wheel rims, slip ring mods, air cooling etc) and it was the best you could get on FM4.
When fm5 came out I bought into the BS PR about all the new wheel and FFB features that were capable on the xbox one. I didn't get a wheel until about six months after the game released (Thrustmaster TX) and absolutely hated it. I didn't enjoy the wheel at all, it was nothing like the t500 and I was spoiled by all my mods to my csr elite (and the first TX i received was DOA). But most importantly I was so enraged at the BS marketing of the xbox one and FM5 because my setup for FM4 blew it away, and the FFB was not improved.
I probably only played FM5 for a couple hours in total compared to thousands on FM4.
FM6 came and boasted new FFB built from the ground up, I thought you beauty they've finally done it... Wrong, they rebuilt the same FFB but added spring and Damper setting that where not adjustable for the user, they were always set at maximum. What a disaster, I played FM6 more than I did 5, but man it was a chore.
Then FM6 Apex dropped on PC and I gave that a try. And what do ya know, they added the adjustable spring and Damper settings! FM6 Apex felt great, the best forza I had played on a wheel, until you pushed the tyres past peak slip and you lost all FFB. It was good fun but it was missing all the things that made forza great, customisation, tuning, painting, multiplayer etc.
So my passion for forza was still not satisfied.
Come FM7, first full FM on PC, I had high hopes, talks about a new wheel guy updating wheel suppprt/FFB. I had issues in the demo, and somehow we managed to get developer interaction on the forums and he started helping us understand how it all worked, I got some new settings and tried again, and it was decent, the best forza has ever been for wheel users, but I was still unsatisfied. It just didn't feel right to me.
So, when tree data out feature released I got working with the guy who created EmuWheel (who has helped hundres if not thousands of wheel users on PC fixing issues and adding support were the developers couldn't or wouldn't) and start to help out calculating our own FFB from scratch. We did Alot of research and testing of a few different methods at first, then we settled on what we considered tree best possible approach with what we had access too. At the very start we were not sure what we could achieve as we both had never done anything like it before, but I believed in my vision of could be possible and when we first started testing early versions of what we have now I was blown away at how good forza felt on my wheel.
Now T10 are starting to take this stuff seriously too, with the recent FFB update they have improved the ffb from what it was but it still has some issues, not everyone seems to be affected by them but there seems to be large numbers that are. While I don't spend Alot of time on T10s FFB because I've been using our own FFB for quite a while, I have never had as much fun playing forza on a wheel as I do now.
It's been a decade of playing forza on a wheel for me and I wouldn't play tree game any other way.
I Love forza, FFB and steering wheels and just wish that everyone could enjoy the game on a wheel the way it should be.
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