Ignoring all the discussions about the BGE performance and future, to wich I am personally really looking forward, I want to know your opinion about wich is the best method to create more or less realistic car simulations in Blender.
I have spend a lot of time on creating a vehicle wrapper script that features realistic car physics.
It includes a gear, clutch, steering, braking, hand brake, lights(blinkers, brake lights etc.), proportionaly lockable differentials and it handles up to 8 wheels.
But some facts are really limiting the vehicle wrapper, for example that the visual wheel rotation is based on the current velocity and not on the wheel spin. And even worse is that you cannot apply hp and torque to the wheels, you can only set the engine power wich makes it nearly impossible to achieve a realistic driving experience.
Long story short of it:
Are there alternatives to the vehicle wrapper, e.g. could other constraints be used, or is it possible to rewrite the vehicle wrapper constraint itself to have different functions that give you more controll?
As the name says it is a wrapper around the physics system to enable users to apply vehicle behavior.
As usual with such solutions it does not fulfill everybodies needs.
So you need to make your own physics system setup. I can’t help you on that as I never cared car physics that much (except creating a better handling of the vehicle wrapper). But I know there are threads dealing with this topic. As far as I remember they use rigid body constraints, but do not nail me on this.
I made a car from rigid body joints back in the day, my only issue was dampening the steering and now I could do that…
python is nice
using RBJ’s and TorqueTrackTo
you should be able to use the physics engine to make it,
I’ll try and get a example up
this .blend isTorqueTrackTo, I think about damping using torque, by using the “Target” as the car, and the “wheels” pivot points trying to match the orientation slightly with torque,
equal to what the suspension does IRL.
with this and a few other scripts + Rigid bodies and RBJ’s I think it’s totally doable
