Best City Car Driving Settings for Thrustmaster T248

City Car Driving is a completely different kind of driving game than a typical racing game. Focused entirely on teaching safe driving techniques, you are never going to be pushing the car to the limits of grip. As such, the force feedback is incredibly basic. It's mostly a centering force and some vibrations if you hit a curb or go onto the grass.

The Thrustmaster T248 has some strange issues with this game. The in-game force feedback setting doesn't work for some reason, so you have to make all the adjustments on the wheel itself. The control preset also has non-linear steering applied. This makes turning the car feel nothing like a real car, which is the entire point of the game. Thankfully, it is very easy to fix.

In this guide, I will show the settings I use to get the wheel feeling as good as it can.

Thrustmaster Settings

City Car Driving uses the steering angle that is set on the wheel. Unfortunately, the in-game steering animation is always locked to a 1080° rotation, so it won't line up perfectly with these wheels.

The in-game force feedback setting doesn't have any effect on the T248, so you will need to adjust the strength on the wheel itself and the Damper in the Thrustmaster Control Panel to configure the feel of the wheel. If the Damper is too high, the wheel feels too heavy, but if you lower it too much, the wheel starts oscillating.

Don't forget to return these values back to their originals when loading a different game.

FORCE at 2 bars is about the right strength for a road car. You can try 3 bars, but 4 feels too strong and unrealistic.

FFB at 1 creates a perfectly linear force feedback response, which is the ideal for any racing game.

Rotation and Overall Strength are identical to the ROT and FORCE wheel settings, respectively. Changing it in one place overwrites the other. I recommend changing these on the wheel and ignoring the values in the Thrustmaster Control Panel.

Spring is not used by City Car Driving, so can be set to any value without issue. As a general rule, I leave it at 100% since there are some games that require it.

Damper controls the weight of the wheel. Unfortunately, there is no in-game way to adjust this, so it must be done in the Thrustmaster Control Panel. You can adjust this to your personal preference.

BOOST should always be turned off. For an in-depth look as to why, see my BOOST Force Feedback Analysis.

City Car Driving Settings

In Settings > Controls > Basic Settings:

While there is no preset for the T248, you can use the one for the T150 instead. This is nearly perfect, but you have to manually fix the Steering Linearity and enable the Force Feedback below.

In Settings > Controls > Advanced Settings > Vehicle Control:

Accelerator and Brake Linearity can be raised to about 30% to feel more natural, but this is personal preference.

Steering Sensitivity has no effect on these wheels. It is only useful for cheap wheels with very limited rotation.

Steering Deadzone should always be set to zero.

Steering Linearity needs to be manually lowered to zero. The default creates a non-linear steering, which is extremely unrealistic.

In Settings > Controls > Advanced Settings > Feedback:

Force Feedback Scale has no effect on these wheels, so its value doesn't matter. Instead, you control the strength by using the FORCE setting on the wheel itself. FORCE at 2 bars feels just about right.

Conclusion

City Car Driving focuses on learning the rules of the road more than delivering a thrilling driving experience. On that front, it does a fairly good job. I wouldn't say it's realistic, but the amount of cars slamming on their brakes for seemingly no reason and pedestrians randomly walking out into the streets will certainly teach you to be a defensive driver.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.