Handling guide

• Powertrain
• Grip and handling feel
• Other stuff

The scripts build upon the base handling parameters the game provides, and use its existing physics. This means some work is needed to create an optimal experience. In the following sections I go over the work that’s needed to achieve this.

Powertrain

Custom Torque Map, Custom Gear Ratios and TurboFix are needed to change how the game simulates the drivetrain, from how the engine (with or without turbos) behaves, to the gearing used to apply that power to the ground.

Gear ratios are easy and can be applied from common databases easily. While “final drive” is not directly applicable to the game, this can be approximated with the top speed (per gear) values from these databases. I use Automobile-Catalog to gather this info.

For NA and supercharged engines, taking a dyno run output and stuffing it into CTM (Custom Torque Map) gets you close enough regarding engine behavior. Taking the peak torque output in N⋅m and using that in the handling.meta (fInitialDriveForce = torqueNm/curbWeightKg) gets you nearly on the spot.

For turbo engines, it’s a bit trickier. My approach is to find a similar NA variant of the engine, taking those torque numbers, and using TurboFix to create the corresponding boost power and spool-up to match up with the actual behavior.

Grip and handling feel

Default grip levels and slip angles are very high. This is great for arcade gameplay where you don’t want to slide off the road while doing your GTA stuff, but horrible once you try to play it with a wheel.

The way Manual Transmission works since 5.5.0, it takes slip angle data and feeds that into the force feedback calculations. With stock handlings, you’ll end up needing to steer quite a lot to get the car to rotate, but it’ll stick and stick forever, resulting in a very rubbery feeling. That’s not how cars behave, and setting up the grip and slip angles as explained in the linked section, makes miles of improvement for driving feel (and how the car actually behaves!).

While this is great for achieving realism on many ported tracks, it does cause for the bumpy Los Santos roads to cause you to crash, so adjust your expectations!

Other stuff

Generally this has mostly been covered by the community, so I won’t repeat too much. Eddlm has a great guide.

My Real Time Handling Editor script also contains a bunch of tips, embedded inside the script menu, from this repository.

Finally, I’ve contributed to GTACars.net, which also is a good source to get familiar with the workings.

Other handling.meta settings I always change:

• Reduce fInitialDragCoeff
• Adjust fInitialDriveMaxFlatVel to match Custom Gear Ratio values
• Set fLowSpeedTractionLossMult to 0.0
• Enable the FREEWHEEL_NO_GAS handling flag so cars don’t slow off-throttle excessively
• Enable the TYRES_CAN_CLIP flag to simulate tire compression
• Check if the ABS flags are accurate for the car

If you’d like to ask about specific things in handlings, feel free to reach out on the Discord server in the page header!