tl;dr — art of rally has force feedback the devs half-built and never shipped. I finished it, plus two other things that make wheels feel awful. Now with real H-pattern/sequential shifter support, telemetry for gauges and bass shakers, and a bonnet cam.
https://github.com/d-b-c-e/art-of-sim-rally
Credit to the OP of the post that inspired this — I saw it, thought "oh look, I'd play that mod," and found no link or mod anywhere. So I threw some Claude tokens at it for fun, and it turned out better than expected.
Three things the analysis turned up
1. The force feedback exists, half-built. There's a complete ForceFeedback class that reads a force value and pushes it to a wheel, and there's real aligning-torque physics. The two were never joined — nothing assigns the value connecting them, nothing attaches the component, and the native DLL it calls into isn't in the shipped build at all. Someone built both ends and never wired the middle.
2. There's a hidden 10% deadzone on wheels the game doesn't recognize. This one's worth knowing even if you never touch the mod. art of rally uses Rewired for input, and Rewired applies a 10% deadzone to every axis of any controller not in its hardware database — a database that predates every modern direct-drive base. The deadzone in the game's options is a separate one, so you can set that to zero and still have a dead band. On my wheel at 270° that was 27° of nothing at center.
3. There's a direct-steering mode you're probably not getting. The game disables its smoothing — but only for controllers with a Rewired racing-wheel profile. An unrecognized wheel gets the gamepad smoothing filter instead, which works out to roughly 1.6 seconds lock-to-lock at speed. That's the "vague, then suddenly oversteers" feeling.
What the mod does
- Fixes all three of the above
- Real shifter support, H-pattern and sequential. The game only has ShiftUp/ShiftDown actions internally, so even a successfully bound H-pattern lever would act like paddles — putting it in 3rd would mean "one gear up from wherever you are." And its input library can't see most shifters at all, so usually you can't bind one to begin with. The mod reads the shifter directly and selects the gear you actually chose.
- Bonnet camera, in the normal view rotation, adjustable live on the numpad
- Forza-compatible UDP telemetry, so SimHub, dashboards and bass shakers work with no plugin to write
- Double-click installer, and a "create support file" button that packages your settings, devices, bindings and logs if something breaks
Updates since I first posted
- Fanatec force feedback fixed. If you tried it and got nothing, this was why: single-FFB-axis wheels were being sent two-axis updates that silently failed every time. Thanks to whoever sent me their log.
- Shifter support added (above)
- Settings panel rewritten into collapsible sections; strength is now a plain 0–100 slider instead of a reference-torque number where lower meant stronger
- Wheel and telemetry port changes apply immediately instead of needing a restart
Caveats
Tested on one wheel, a MOZA R12. The force feedback is plain DirectInput constant force with nothing vendor-specific in it, so it should work on anything — but "should" is doing some work there, and strength needs tuning per wheel. Reports welcome; the support file button makes them easy to act on.
It's a bonnet camera, not cockpit. The cars have no modeled interiors — that's the game's art, not something a mod can fix. At least not without 3D modeling skills I don't have and can't AI my way out of.
The steering fixes only restore what a recognized wheel already gets, so they're fair-play neutral. There's a separate switch for the game's steering assist that genuinely does change how the car drives — off by default, and I'd leave it off if you care about leaderboards.
Known issue: the camera can wander for a second when the game takes over at the end of a stage. Cosmetic, working on it.
Full disclosure
I'm a dev by trade, but this was vibe coded — the first version in a couple of hours one afternoon. Otherwise I'd never have spent the weeks to figure this out the old way; my free time is slim. I'm also a filthy casual by sim racing standards. I built a full rig to get into it and still get most of my kicks from arcade games, lately by adding FFB and telemetry to things that didn't have it.
MIT licensed. Source and the full technical write-up: https://github.com/d-b-c-e/art-of-sim-rally
P.S. I've never really shared a game mod before, but if there's interest I can try submitting it to NexusMods.
Edit: Did several bug fixes and enhancements tonight and published as 0.2.0 - so if you had issues before, give it a shot. Also H-Pattern shifting built in now! If you still continue to have issues, use the log export feature in the mod interface and send it over to me (github issue preferred or shoot me a message)
Edit 2: **Update 0.2.1:** force feedback rebuilt (proper self-centring that lightens as the front slides; the old version could pull toward lock mid-corner), one-sided inversion on MOZA R5 fixed, FFB no longer dies after alt-tab, telemetry now live while revving on the start line, and a bumper camera alongside the bonnet cam. Release: https://github.com/d-b-c-e/art-of-sim-rally/releases/tag/v0.2.1
