Massively delayed force feedback Thrustmaster (TMX FFB) [150317]

[future]

Hi, I have big problems with TMX FFB steering wheel. In the past my steering wheel worked perfectly fine until last year around November.

Version of the game - 1.39
Operating system - Windows 10 64bit (2004)
Reproducibility of the bug - Always

When a collision occurs, the feedback responds with a delay that increases over time. Initially, the delay is 10 seconds, during playing it increases up to half a minute (maybe more depending on the playing time). Also road feedback - dirt road driving will also be delayed. In general, all force feedback is delayed. The delay started to appear after the game was updated and it is quite clear that the error is in the game. I'm not sure, but the bug was already before version 1.39.1.5s. I tried everything - reinstall game, drivers, different usb ports, lastest beta version. Nothing helps. In other games, the steering wheel works fine.
Thank you in advance for your help

[Harven]

I have the same issue in both ATS and ETS2 - I was thinking it's something with my system/hardware but thanks to your report now I'm sure it's not. My steering wheel is Thrustmaster T150 so it looks like it may be Thrustmaster related issue. I also tried reinstalling and I went even further - I downgraded my steering wheel firmware to a much older version (from 2018 I think). I'm sure the issue wasn't there before but can't tell which game version introduced it.

[HoB]

I also have this problem with the Thrustmaster TMX Pro.
If you have that wheel there should be no need for Log files. Especially when crashing into a wall for example, the reaction in the wheel is delayed by seconds.

Although if you need more information about this let us know. I will be happy to provide all the data you need.

Btw the Beta 1.40 up to build 100 is also affected. I haven't tested later builds.

[Frate]

I wanted to create a bug-post myself about this issue. Thankfully someone did it already. This bug is present for a long time now and I´ve spent a lot of time trying to fix this issue myself. I posted it inside of the Help Center, maybe that will help to fix it:
viewtopic.php?f=111&t=293898

[soldamerican]

Having the same problem with my TMX wheel. Hope it is fixed soon. Have tried old wheel firmware, old versions of ATS/ETS2, every USB port on my computer and nothing solves the issue. Wheel works fine with other games so clearly it's something with ATS/ETS2

[BeauVerwijlen]

Hey!
I've this problem too since a couple of months.
Hopefully they will discover the problem and try to help us with it.

[Harven]

I have an update on the issue for everyone who's interested/affected. I've been testing this issue yesterday and exchanging messages with Devs. Turns out it wasn't introduced in any game update - I reverted back to 1.31 and was still able to reproduce it. The issue seems to be linked to the Windows 10 drivers for the steering wheel. Are you guys using Windows 10? @future, in the message you posted that you indeed have win 10, but have you upgraded from an earlier version recently? I upgraded from win 7 to 10 some time ago and that would roughly be the time when the issue started to appear for me. To confirm this suspicion, yesterday I plugged my steering wheel to a laptop with win 8 and was unable to reproduce the issue there. More than that, the FFB was even more accurate than on my win 10 PC.
The Devs suspect that win 10 steering wheel driver isn't able to process all the FFB events the game is sending and gets "overwhelmed" and that causes the delay. I was asked to do a test - set all the force feedback sliders in the game settings to 0 except for steering centering (and force strength of course). With that setup the game will not send that much FFB events to the driver and indeed in my case the delay is gone. Can you guys test it as well and post your results here? I suspect the dampers feedback is the main reason for the overflow.
In conclusion: while the Devs work on improving the FFB on the game side we are advised to turn most of the FFB sliders in the game settings to 0 leaving only the steering centering to improve our game experience. Feel free to experiment with these sliders to find out which FFB event is causing the delay and then please post your findings here. Like I said, I suspect the dampers and/or terrain feedback to cause the issue - I always used to have the engine feedback set to 0.

[future]

Yes, that's exactly it! The dampers feedback is the main reason. A few minutes ago i tested the lastest beta and all is as you say. When i set the dampers feedback to zero, game worked fine for me. Just move the slider only one step (a little above zero) and the problem is back.

@Harven

I have been using windows 10 since 2016. I bought the game in September 2019 and it worked without any problems. The fact is that I have encountered the issue several times in the past, but it has always disappeared (probably after updating the game or silent updating the driver via windows update?).
I first registered the persistent issue in September 2020. I thought it was a Windows 10 (1903) bug, so I upgraded to Windows 10 (2004), but the issue persisted. Then I tried different variations - reinstalling the drivers (also the steering wheel firmware), resetting the game settings, different usb ports, etc... Nothing helped. I officially started to solve it in November 2020 on the Steam forum.
If the Windows driver is really suspected, it must have been changed through an update before I upgraded Windows to version 2004. I haven't upgraded to Windows 10 20H2 yet, but if anyone is already using them, they could tell if they have the same problem. But I think the drivers will be the same.
I know from the past that Microsoft has caused a similar problem with the mouse driver. In the old game CounterStrike 1.6 (possibly newer), after double-clicking the left button, the shooting jammed until the mouse moved. It took over a year until Microsoft to fix the bug - and the bug only affected CounterStrike game.

[Harven]

Thanks for the info. It's not certain that it's the driver fault, it could be at some other layer between the game and the steering wheel, like direct input or something else. I haven't tried 20H2 yet as well.

[Frate]

If tested your suggestion of turning ffb off except of steering centering and suprisingly it worked. Even though this is a workaround for now, it is still not a solution to this problem. I am trying to solve this problem for almost 5 months now, let me share some stuff I found out:

At first, I tried those things to fix it:
Reinstalled the Thrustmaster driver multiple times
Tried used 2019 and 2018 Thrustmaster drivers
Tried diffrent USB-ports, including 3.0, 3.1, 3.2 of my mainboard and 3.0, 2.0 of my pc-case
Deleted the cache of all my USB-ports in the device manager.
Deleted the ingame settings and reconfigurated everything again
Deleted the ingame settings and used the ingame device helper
I reinstalled Windows 10. The first thing I did afterwards was to install Steam, ETS2 and the Thrustmaster Driver but still no luck.

After those steps didn´t work I tried my Wheel on a diffrent Laptop (also Win10) I had at home and suprisingly the ffb worked flawlessly.

Afterwards I played around with deleting the settings again and one line of error catched my eye:
00:00:02.324 : <WARNING> [di8] Device detection did take 103ms, disabling interactive

This error only appears if you start the game for the first time on your system or if you delete historiy.sii and config.cfg then start the game.
I think this error means that something with my wheel-driver is not working correctly. The log says there is a massive delay (103ms).
That means, if every effect is delayed by 0,1 seconds (100ms) and you drive for 10 minutes, the next effect, which should actually happen after 10 minutes of gameplay will be delayed by 1 Minute.

My PC/specs:
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6x 4.6GHz
Asus PRIME B550M-A
16GB DDR4-RAM PC-3200
GeForce RTX3070 8GB
1TB M.2 SSD NVME

As you can see if have a high-end computer, there shouldn´t be a problem with the cpu or gpu overloading or something like that.

My conclusion is, that certain windows or Thrustmaster-drivers for certain motherboards (motherboard is where all of the USB-Hubs are) are not working correctly with ETS2. FFB-delay won´t happen on all systems (It didn´t happen on my Laptap). It might be the case that newer systems are affected, as my Laptop is from 2016/17 and I build my PC end of last year.

I´ve already installed the new Windows version 20H2 (I am using Win10 Pro if that mathers), that did not fix the problem. Also the new ETS2 update released 1 hour ago did not help neither.

Thanks for the info. It's not certain that it's the driver fault, it could be at some other layer between the game and the steering wheel, like direct input or something else.

I´d like to add that the ffb is working without any problems in any other game. I´ve played Dirt, Asseto Corsa and F1 2020.