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That awful jerky steering... It's really time for developers to completely rethink how they simulate steering on motorcycle games. Bikes tend to maintain a given amount of lean with little to no steering input, especially at higher speeds.

A refined version of this which takes into account the limitations of gamepads is exactly what I'm dreaming of. Left thumbstick to tip your bike into a left turn, controller rumble/scraping sound to let you know when you're scraping knee, thumbstick back to neutral to maintain the turn (in real life the rider would need to maintain a small amount of pressure on the bars to maintain the turn but it's too small to be accurately simulated using a normal gamepad), thumbstick right to exit the turn and bring your bike back up.

They need to completely change the steering system in motorcycle games. In real life a leaning motorcycle won't simply pop straight back up like a jack in the box when the rider stops providing steering inputs. This is the reason why the steering looks so jerky and unrealistic in this video.

Mate, no need to get riled up  . I only proposed this control method because I feel like it may be a feasible alternative method of providing high-resolution control inputs besides the steering wheel or joystick solutions because ultimately isn't that why we use those solutions and not just stick to gamepads? Because it's easier to modulate control inputs and get rid of the dead zone issue?

Pressure sensors move only about 1mm try controlling that. I know its pressure but it is too sensitive. And yes I have wasted money and tried lol.

How much torque on the handlebars did it require to depress that pressure sensor the full 1 mm of travel? I'm guessing very little so it would have been very difficult to modulate the input. A torque sensor is completely static though. Let's say you use a torque sensor that's able to measure 0-20 NM of torque to an accuracy of 1 NM. I think your arms would be able to modulate a progressive torque input within that range.

And how would you do that ? Convert a torque into what exactly ? A target lean angle (guess that's what you call standard steering command) ? That wouldn't really make sense to me.

On a real bike it requires constant pressure on the bars to maintain lean so this makes sense to me.

When I say little to no feel, what I really mean is that you don't really get any sense of the bars turning when you steer unless the front is getting light or you're on the edge of grip limits. Most of the time the bars just feel pretty "solid" no matter how hard you push on them.

As for direct steer angle, it's a bit of a red herring for me. It's not implemented realistically in GPBikes and there are too many parameters to work with. What I'm talking about is simply converting torque forces from the stationary handlebar directly into standard left/right steering commands. Not exactly realistic I know, but seems like a much more realistic solution than rotating handlebars.

I don't know really know which subforum to put this in but playing GPbikes and the recent Ride 2 with a crappy gamepad with an annoying deadzone has got me thinking about this again and it's this:

Isn't it possible and relatively easy and cheap to simulate countersteering (i.e. the ONLY way bikes turn above ~10 mph) by mounting a handlebar to a non-rotating torque sensor (transducer?)? There would obviously be no feedback through the bars whatsoever but 90% of the time when you're riding on the streets, there's little to no "feel" through the bars anyway right?

Anyways please excuse the complete lack of technical knowledge on my part but it's just something that I wanted to get off my chest.

Ian thanks for the effort! It looks like this mystery will have to go unsolved for now. I'm also pretty certain it's not netbike as that was an unpublished mod and there are videos of it on Youtube.

Brilliant! I'm 99% sure the demo was featured between 2001-2003.

Now I'm not going to ask you to leaf through all those issues but I would like to let you know that there is probably a demo of a hidden gem of a motorcycle game in there somewhere 

Arvoss thanks for the list but I'm afraid it's not any of those games. It was a realistic Moto GP sim with licensed bikes if I remember correctly. There is the chance that it was never released because I can count the number of realistic bike sims over the years with one hand. All I know is that I definitely had the demo installed at one point and that it's the only motorcycle sim to date that I know of which featured ragdoll rider physics (no falling/tumbling animations).

Ok so the thread title is a bit over dramatic but I was wondering if anyone here knows anything about a PC motorcycle game that, if my memory serves me right, was featured as a demo on a 2002 issue of PC Zone (a defunct UK PC gaming mag)?

From memory, the game was based on MotoGP, was very unique as it had brutal and hilarious ragdoll riders when you crashed, featured a realistic physics engine and bike handling including convincing low-sides and high-sides.  I remember the demo featured the 125cc class only and one track. I also remember playing the demo for the first in the long-running MotoGP series of games a few months later and being thoroughly underwhelmed in comparison so I know that it wasn't one of the MotoGP games. It's also not Superbike 2001 because I have that game. I've been trying to find this game for ages without any luck.

That hasn't been an issue so far. The main problems that I'm having now is that the trigger resistance is a little too high which tires out my index fingers and right turns are a bit more tricky than left ones because I have to modulate throttle and brake with my right thumb at the same time which is a little confusing to my brain as well as creating problems with leverage. 

Yep, I'm using trigger steering  . It feels more realistic to me (a closer approximation of counter-steering maybe) and I feel like I can be a lot smoother than if I used the analogue stick. Mid-turn corrections certainly feel easier.