Physics tools

[Juise]

Few questions:

Will the modding tools include inertia calculator (for tires, car body and other parts that need to have it calculated)? There is a rough tool called CarInertia somewhere in the internet, but is somewhat restricted to be exact (but then again how important is it to have it absolutely spot on or is 'just close enough', enough?)

Tire modelling? Are we going to get somekind of tool to be able to make first draft tires just by inserting numbers like: width, height, carcass stiffness, compound softness, durability etc. and finetune from there on?
Or do we have to draw curves and work like in rFactor questimating and making adjustments by trial and error?

Damage modelling physically. Is there plans to have some special features like broken driveshafts etc (at least in cars with live axle and lots of camber on it, this is quite normal)

Thanks,
Juha Mikkola

 

[Mr Whippy]

I think it'd be nice to know these things too.

So far I haven't seen anything to suggest AC is really that accurate or using realistic data, or that any modding tools will be useful at all. Ie, inertia calcs, kinematic definitions, engine parameters and drive-line effects, yadda yadda.

Ie, if it's like rFactor then it'll be really hard work to make physics mods for.

Why hasn't any of the physics tools/capabilities been shown off yet AC team? Any internal scripting capability to do cool things like active damping, ESP etc?


A good moddable game has to have good modding support? I'm sure plenty of those interested in this game (me included) are interested in it exactly FOR the modding capability.

If it's just another rFactor in that regard I'll be leaving it on the shelf.

Dave

 

[Mapu]

I think it was said several times that it will be possible to feed the physics engine with real data (e.g. tire characteristics). The real data will then be transferred into the code and give proper output in the game.

 

[Juise]

I think it was said several times that it will be possible to feed the physics engine with real data (e.g. tire characteristics). The real data will then be transferred into the code and give proper output in the game.

Yes I'm aware of that, but _how_ do we feed the data... in what form etc etc..

It's great that Kunos are even providing us with tools and not like ISI did it..

in rFactor we have plenty of values which weren't opened to us until 2 or 3 years on the game, and then by a person who wasn't a part of ISI. And even then they weren't 100% sure how the values worked.

 

[Aristotelis]

I've been reading this thread right now when I'm working on the 10th or 11th, lost count, remodelling of tyre heating. Why do I need to remodel how the tyres heat? Because the game is not public yet and we try to make it as good as possible and until I can find improvements and have the time, I will do it again and again. But this also explains why modding tools are not out public, it is simply not final version yet, so you would end up doing a mod and you will need to re do it again for version 1.0.

That said, this a sim with quite hardcore physics. If you expect to be able to create a car by just clicking a button "BMW" then it won't happen. All our files are similar in values to the ones you've seen in the ISI based sims. What we are trying to do, and hopefully succeed, is to provide you tools for the most difficult tasks.

For example, we should be able to provide a tool where you put in the tyre dimensions of an M3, specify street tyre and such and it should provide you values to copy&paste, identical to our officially licensed M3. That we think is a big helpful hand for the modders. So if you're trying to make a street tyre, a semislick, a gt tyre or a formula tyre you'll get help. If you're trying to do a different kind of tyre, then you should take one of ours as a template and work your way to something different. That's why the tool doesn't exports a ready to go file but just values to copy paste.

On the other hand, if you don't know what suspension geometry points are, and don't know how to insert them in the sim, then there is not much we can do about it. Same goes for aerodynamics etc. Of course we will try to support you as much as possible, but you need to make your homework, there is no other way around it, sorry.

 

[Jorge Alves]

Very good approach ... car mods will be more realistic for sure

 

[Juise]

Thanks for the answer Aris!

About the tires that was what i was hoping for In rFactor it took numerous hours to get the tires even in the ballpark depending on the car and the loads it's tires had. Specially the street tires seemed to be a real wild west of approaches by different mod teams..

About the chassis creation, have you planned something similar as Kangaloosh! carFactory or the suspension editor we had in rFactor? I used to work mainly just with the numbers but it's very error (typo) prone when you didn't see them errors realtime

Hopefully we'll have proper measuring tools this summer for scanning suspension points and get them accurately in Cad form and not like last time with measuring tape while doing this few years back.

 

[Aristotelis]

For the suspension, you could already use kangaloosh for example and then simply convert the points to the different reference point AC uses. We use the axis hub as a reference point (for reasons that will be much easier to understand once you have the whole thing to play with)

So actually you could use whatever suspension geometry program you like, get the points and then simply convert the numbers for the hub as a reference point. Takes about half an hour or so.

We do have (and hopefully provide to you) a graphics editor for the suspension. It's not very advance, but you can see in real time things like caster, king pin inclination, roll centers... the usual. It's not what I'd call an amazing automatic editor, but does the job for some values.

 

[Juise]

 

[Mr Whippy]

That all sounds perfect to me.

Enough help to get you reasonable values, then if you want to dig deeper you can.

Hub-centric coords sounds fine too, easy to do the conversion if you've already modelled the suspension points in a 3D app for example.
If you don't know them, then just use a pre-made suspension from someone else that is similar and tweak where needed.
AC will come with a wide range of cars as reference for different basic suspensions which is also great.


Also does AC have a lot of real-time debug data available. Ie, can you log most of the physics parameters and also watch them in real time?
That is really important when making content imo, more so when you have very little real data and need to build up your physics from snippets of known data and be able to tweak and observe to achieve desired behaviours.

Thanks

Dave