Problems with a Logitech Driving Force GT wheel!

[Cadde]

I noticed under 'Throttle and Brakes' you also have N/A ~ Should I change that too?

Not if they are set to your current buttons on the wheel that you use for acceleration and braking.
If it works then better leave it as is.

[Amy_N]

Ok, will do

[Amy_N]

Yesterday I was messing around with the wheel.
I have always used the "Real Automatic" option in the Transmission Type.

Yesterday I tried the "Sequential" transmission using the 50k Scania ~ Using the 6x4 500 hp with the highest upgrade for the transmission.
Firstly I noticed the gears were from 1 to 14 ~ Not having driven a 'Stickshift' ever in my life this was rather new to me.
Obviously no clutch but I found that driving the truck with no trailer the first 6 gears were almost useless.
By that I mean I could pull off in 6th as it felt like 1st. With a load, I could start in 3rd gear. The first 7 gears are so close to each other.

Just wanted to know if when driving with a trailer, do you guys always go through all 14 gears?

As I said, this is all brand new and it's like driving all over again. I want the gear changes to be smooth. On the rev counter, I normally change gears once it reaches the 'blue' Would that be correct?

Can someone give me advise as to what I should do... how you do it etc..

I just used the 'Hat Switch' for doing my gearing.

Any help from you guys would be extremely appreciated!

[ohaha]

If you watch the automatic transmission, you'll see it often changes two gears, at once. You can do it, too.
The lower gears are meant for moving large loads, that's why they are close, together, to prevent stalling if the truck loses momentum.
When driving an empty tractor, start in 3rd and you can skip up to 5 or 6, on the first shift, but be aware that the truck will accelerate very fast and you have a good chance of losing control, if you can't turn the wheel quickly enough... Sometimes a lower gear will also prevent going too fast for a certain situation.

[BHS]

Yep. Using my H-shift range, I normaly go 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Only use the odd numbered lower gears for hills and mountains. Getting out from a quarry with a 320 or 360 bhp engine also needs using 1st gear.

And driving without a load, I normally start off in 5th or 6th gear.


So now you're quickly going to 'graduate' to using a real H-shift manual


Regards,
BHS

[Cadde]

The real life Scania has a 4 position shifter (one always being the reverse gear).

[ external image ]

That of course is a H-shifter layout, irrelevant to the sequential but that's how it works with 12 gears. (14 gears is a custom gearbox provided for 50keda's Scania)
Pressing Toggle 1 will switch between gear 1LO/HI, 3LO/HI, 5LO/HI (1/2, 3/4, 5/6)
Pressing Toggle 2 will put the gearbox in low/high range (allowing you to use gears 7-12) and the same thing here, pressing Toggle one will change between LO/HI gears 7LO/HI, 9LO/HI, 11LO/HI (7/8, 9/10, 11/12)

This guy explains it way better than i do and it's an interesting watch...

Watch on YouTube

Now, as you notice. the Scania H-splitter only has 12 gears, to get to the upper range you would need a custom H-splitter layout but we can get to that later (if you switch to H-shifting in the future).
My current setup allows me to get 12 gears in the low range of the gear box and 12 gears in the high range of the gearbox. A total of 24 gears.
And my reverse gear is the default for the G25/27 which is push the stick down and to the bottom right gear. (6/7, 11/12 place in the above picture)

That's how i shift. So normally i can save myself the use of the low/high range gearbox splitter and just split the gears LO/HI as i shift up to 12th gear.

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With a light trailer (<12 tons) i start on 2nd gear and immediately shift up to 6th when i start moving, then quite soon after that i go to 8th and then start to split my gears through 9, 10, 11, 12. (depending if i am on flat/uphill or going downhill, on downhill i shift to 10 and 12 as normal.)

With a medium trailer (12-20 tons) i start in 2nd gear and rarely go 4th (depending on slope) and shift to 6th a little slower to let the truck pick up some speed to maximize the power from 6th gear.
Then i can start splitting at 7th gear depending on slope or drive as normal with a lighter trailer.

With a heavy trailer i start on 2nd, shift to 4th and then to 6th and always start splitting at 7th gear no matter what.
I get better acceleration that way.

EDIT: Though a 14 gearbox is much more interesting to drive and i would love to do an 18 speed one. But for that to make sense we would need heavier loads and some better physics.
The engine shouldn't rev slip like it does now, as it is now it's easy mode driving and it's easy to get into the optimal power range. In a real life scenario your clutch would be gone.

[Amy_N]

Thanks guys ~ Ohaha, BHS and Cadde for the great explanation. That video was awesome even though a little confusing and over my head at times but still very informative.

As each day passes I am learning a little more and that can only be a good thing

Are there times when you just don't use say 10th, 11th and 12th gears?

I have been doing quite a bit of trucking since I got the transmission gearing and the sound fixed and still make mistake forgetting that I have to shift up or down but I'll get there I'm sure!

But I have found a few times especially on short strips of road where I know I am gonna be doing some downshifting soon, I go through the gears and sometimes only bother getting up to 9th and travel in the gear and before I know it, I am downshifting.

Seems like 10th, 11th and 12th gears are more for highways when there will be a stretch of longer 90 km/h moments.

Would that be the case with you guys as well?

[Cadde]

Oh I just noticed i forgot to tell you about when to shift. As you said you where shifting at the blue marker.

For this it helps to know the power curve of the particular truck you are driving. Now i don't know the figures of the game, how it's calculated etc so we will just take some real world data to help explain how it sorta works in game.
But before we go further we have to understand the difference between torque and horsepower as well, in the most simple terms...

Horsepower helps you accelerate, it is derived from the torque of the engine but at higher RPM you always have higher horsepower. Thus it is easily said that to accelerate faster you should go higher in the RPM. But this isn't necessarily true, which brings us to...
Torque helps you do work, if you try and screw in a bolt using your fingertips it isn't going to become very tight. Easily loosened with any tool. You might have a billion horsepower at your fingertips but without a lever to help you screw in that bolt it will translate to nothing in terms of how tight that bolt is.

Likewise, if your vehicle is light then lots of horsepower will help you reach high speeds. But if your vehicle weighs a lot then you will need a lever to make any effective work on that vehicle. (or bolt)

Ok, so how does a bolt compare to a heavy vehicle? Well lets take another example, twist a pencil between your fingers... Easy right? The pencil doesn't weigh anything after all.
Now, take a car wheel and try to spin it at it's center the same way you did with your pencil... It will rotate but it takes a lot of work to get it up to speed.
BUT, if you now grab one of the bolts of that wheel (further out from the center) and yank it it will start to rotate much easier. You applied the same "horsepower" but you now have much more torque as well.
And finally, if you put your hand on the outside of the wheel you will make it spin with even less effort.

Now then... Speed.
Imagine if you could make your hand rotate around your wrist, say you could make it spin a full revolution every second. Putting your hand on the outside of the wheel will make it easy to spin the wheel but it won't go very fast. Now, if you could do the same at the location of the bolts on the wheel then you could get the wheel to spin faster but it will require more work to make it do so.
And finally, putting your spinning hand at the center of the wheel would make the wheel spin as fast as your hand but just like before, it would take a lot of work to get it up to that speed.

That's why we have gears, you start off on the outside of the wheel and gradually move closer to center with each gear change to keep making that wheel spin faster and faster.

Ok, so let's look at those power curves shall we?

[ external image ]
[ external image ]
Source: Cableprice Scania 16-liter engines.

Lets start off with the "small" (top picture) engine, when you initially take off you have very little power (horses) but you have lots of torque allowing you to get that heavy trailer behind you moving. As you rev up you notice that the vehicle accelerates faster and faster up til around 1400 RPM, where your effective torque starts to die off. Naturally this is also where the increase in horsepower starts to die off.
The reason for this is due to engine design, i will not delve deeper into that subject except to mention that the engine designers have made sure that the engine will deliver as much torque as possible at a certain RPM range for that engine. The stresses on the engine is the lowest at 1000 RPM but it still can supply as much work as it would at 1400 RPM. It just cannot accelerate as well at 1000 RPM.

As you should notice the amount of horsepower you gain after 1400 RPM is minimal, thus it's best to change to a higher gear at that point. (The green area on your tachometer reflects the same power ranges as in these pictures by the way, change gears when you are outside the green area!)

Now, lets take a look at the "bigger" (bottom picture) engine. Immediately there are 2 things you should notice here.
First is the optimal power range is shorter. (starts dropping at 1350 RPM)
Secondly is that the amount of power after this optimal range still rises pretty rapidly.

In game i can tell this works as expected, however i feel all trucks have rapid power gain after the optimal torque range. Thus when to change gears becomes slightly more complicated than just changing when you are outside the green area on your tachometer.

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So in conclusion, when do i change gears? I have found that it's best to change to a higher gear at around 1500-1600 RPM. This is where the torque is no longer strong enough to work through the weight and overall air/road resistance but i have gotten as much out of the horsepower (rate of acceleration) as i possibly can.
So why did i waste your time explaining the above if all i could have said was "change gears at 1500-1600 RPM"?
Because it depends... With a lighter load you don't need as much torque as you do with a heavy load. The same way your pencil spins really easily, a bicycle tire spins easier than a car tire etc etc.
Finding the optimal ranges to shift will become second nature if that's what you are after, to get the best acceleration with light loads (or no load at all) then shift up later and with heavier loads you really want to make use of all that torque. Or you can stay in the green area all the time because that will work just fine too!

EDIT:

Oh by the way, you might wonder what the blue marker is for?
Well, with the exhaust brake. The higher the RPM the more effective it is.
The blue marker is the upper limit (and most effective point) to use the exhaust brake.
On Volvo's that blue is a tapered line going down to about 1400 RPM. The idea then is to downshift to stay somewhere in the middle of this range (1400-2000 RPM) as much as possible while exhaust braking.

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Now to answer your last question, are there times where i never get to use 11th or 12th gear? Well yeah, if the road is twisty and the AI is slowing me down then i can do a whole delivery without ever getting to 11th or 12th gear. But as far as weight goes, it doesn't affect me as i am running the top engines for the trucks i drive. (Scania 730, Volvo 750 etc)
I bet it does matter of the lower powered trucks though. I will test this out at some point, possibly even making a let's play where i start over and drive the lesser trucks.

[BHS]

I normally shift to 10th gear at around 60-65 km/h. To 11th at around 72-76 and 12th gear only at approximately 84 km/h. So use highways or b-roads where you have enough space. 10th to 12th are cruising gears. Most of the time you don't really need 12th unless you have removed speed limiter, however, I still use it as it's relaxing just to cruise along in 12th

I don't upshift even if I'm close to red-lining if I'm on an incline as normally you'll just lose speed if you shift up there.

As for manual shifting, I use the range split H-shift. It's the easiest to use. My gear stick has 6 positions. By default those 6 positions will be 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th. Then by pressing a button (i use the left paddle on my wheel as it it's handy to use at the same time as being able to use the stick) you can change the 6 positions to be 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th. By pressing the button/paddle again, you revert to the odd-numbered gears. So when I want to shift from e.g. 8th to 9th gear, I press the clutch, press left wheel paddle and move the stick from position 4 to position 5. Believe me, it's easier than it sounds

On the mountain roads you just go as high as your truck will allow - normally meaning that you never use 10th, 11th and 12th going uphill. Nor downhill as you'll gain too much momentum to be able to brake. As I'm only playing my low-income profile now, I still haven't been able to upgrade my gearbox to include a retarder. But engine braking and service brakes together with selecting the right gears make going downhill safe


Regards,
BHS

[INSTG8R]

But isn't that available within Windows?
edit: I will have to check this sometime later this week. Personally, I think I am doing well enough typing this after an evening with my Polish colleagues visiting Denmark

Correct you do NOT need the Profiler to use or set up the wheel but you DO need to install the Profiler software to get the proper drivers. I HATE the profiler and have NEVER used it and I have had a G25 since it was released and DFP before that you can adust all the wheels essential setting in Windows under Devices and Printers when the wheel is plugged in. Only issue I really have with the Profiler is some racing games force it to start.(rFactor is a recent one that comes to mind) which annoys the crap out of me. Because I already have my Global Settings forced thru Windows and that can cause it to change it.

Here is an old pic I found of my TDU setup and wheel settings, The little box with the Rotation and Forces is ALL you need

http://imageshack.us/f/398/mycontrols3yj2.jpg