So I didn't have time to faff about setting the wheel up and I had an old wired XBox 360 controller to hand. Like many folks here I've played the likes of Gran Turismo and Forza with a pad and I have to say that I've enjoyed them both with a little practice. Forza 6 has to be the winner here though due to the XBox One's superior vibration feedback - but I digress. I plugged the controller into the PC and was pleased to find that the game recognised it and had a default profile available. Good! Out on track I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of useful feedback I got from the gamepad's modest rumble feature. It seems that the Devs have taken the time to take full advantage of the range of frequencies available, to relay distinctly different behaviors extremely well. For example, it's easy to distinguish between lateral tyre slip (probably the most important feedback of all), wheel spin, skidding, gear changes, grass/gravel textures and rumble strips. In fact the only feedback that seems to be missing is under steer lightness (expected though, due to no force feedback on the sticks) and road bumps and undulations. The lateral tyre slip is worthy of special mention as it is both subtle and extremely informative, easily signaling the onset of grip loss in plenty of time to do something about it. Very impressive. This level of feedback combined with the excellent sound cues available meant that this game was great fun to play with a gamepad. I was really impressed! The best of the sound cues for me has to be the gentle brake squeal which really helps you to brake gently with the trigger without heading straight into a lockup situation. The only problem I had initially was the tendency for the pad to steer too aggressively with only minor corrections on the stick, making small steering inputs too severe. To fix this I delved into the Advanced Controller Settings and turned the 'Analog Sector 1' setting down from 2.0 to 1.7. This did the trick and meant that there were no more sudden over corrections. Both slow and fast cornering was now much smoother resulting in lines that didn't betray the use of a gamepad. To further enhance the fine adjustment steering I also reduced the 'Steering Dead Zone' from 20 to 0. This improved control a lot and surprisingly did not seem to introduce any spurious steering effects. Finally, under the Force Feedback Settings I reduced the 'Shift Effect' from 100 to 50 to prevent the masking of more subtle and important vibration effects, e.g. side slip. There's a picture below summarising the settings I used in case anyone else would like to try them. I'm pleased that the Devs took the time to implement the use of the controller option so well. After making the tweaks I described above, I proceeded to play for a solid three hours using the gamepad with a huge grin on my face. I tried out a variety of cars including the DTM 1992 BMW M3, Audi TT, NSU TTS, Formula Raceroom 2, Silhouette Canhard, WTCC 2013 Lada and Touring Classic BMW 635 CSI and they all seemed to drive well without the need for further alterations to the new controller settings. So, if you're used to using a game controller this might be worth a shot if setting up a wheel isn't always convenient. It's still great fun to play this way. Yes, subtle left stick control is required which might take a bit of practice but in the end the driving becomes surprisingly fluid.
Here's a quick video showing how well the controller works. It's capable of smooth steering in both tight turns and longer high speed bends. Played on Get Real setting with manual gears and auto clutch.
The gamepad defaults in R3E are pretty good. Especially in recent patches where there was a point in the past, the gamepad steering was really stiff to the point it is hard to turn around the hairpin. The only thing I did not like with the default setup is the rather stiff handling. Other than that, everything is spot on.
Yup, I've been playing R3E with an Xbox 360 controller for the last couple years, and the default settings and feel have been really impressive. S3 really seemed to have taken their time to make it right (bodes well for GTR 3 on console). Or rather, I was playing R3E with a controller. Finally bought a wheel the other week.
Oh, you'll have great fun with the wheel. As I'm sure you already know, the force feed back for wheels on R3E is also top notch.
Oops, well spotted, Sir! So many tracks and layouts available now (which is excellent of course), that I managed to get myself confused. EDIT: Fixed now. Thanks.
Really impressive for a gamepad gameplay. Give it a try when i'm too lazy to connect my wheel ^^. If you haven't done yet, share the settings in the "Controller profile" thread in the forum