raaaaant

[carmatic]

just finished another bout of racing against bots... well, my computer stopped crashing and now im in the mood to type some stuff down


skidding... the amount of time i've spent trying to regain control of the car ... any car... in this game is just enormous, the cars just turn into a sliding brick or something when they skid and the wheels seem to have no effect whatsoever...

when you use a small car like the rally cars and bump into another small car, theres this wierd tendency for the other car to be 'flicked' into the air... hmm...

and when a small car runs into a monster truck or something, it just 'slips' right under the wheels of the monster truck...

can the dust effect actually descend after they are shown? like the dust should actually settle down back into the ground instead of dissapearing in mid air...

when im playing with bots too, they spawn as characters on foot, squatting and holding nothing... if i run them over and kill them, they respawn in cars and continue racing... and if i try to squish them under a monster truck like the master of disaster's wheel, the wheel somehow just rolls over them without hurting them, i have to actually hit them with the axle or something between the wheels to kill them... oh well i suppose it doesnt matter unless we want to kill people in unwheel

ah, and why are the monster trucks the only vehicles on my entire unreal installation (i cant make my own vehicles, awww) whose wheels would dig into the terrain sometimes, this is especially obvious on monsterchallenge...

and about those buggies... they are splendid looking things, and they look right in place on just about every track in unwheel... if only the suspension on it can animate properly , because they are so visible... the same goes for monster trucks... im interested in how the suspension can work, like, i know that the wheels have to be children of the chassis, despite being on the end of the suspension... but how do you make complex suspension like the monster trucks work?

 

[ProjectX]

just finished another bout of racing against bots... well, my computer stopped crashing and now im in the mood to type some stuff down


skidding... the amount of time i've spent trying to regain control of the car ... any car... in this game is just enormous, the cars just turn into a sliding brick or something when they skid and the wheels seem to have no effect whatsoever...

Best way I've found to et out of a skid is turbo, it just shoots you off and he tires grip like a dream. Wait for Teh P4tch.

when im playing with bots too, they spawn as characters on foot, squatting and holding nothing... if i run them over and kill them, they respawn in cars and continue racing... and if i try to squish them under a monster truck like the master of disaster's wheel, the wheel somehow just rolls over them without hurting them, i have to actually hit them with the axle or something between the wheels to kill them... oh well i suppose it doesnt matter unless we want to kill people in unwheel

This should only happen if you put more players in a map than there are start points.

Can the dust effect actually descend after they are shown? like the dust should actually settle down back into the ground instead of dissapearing in mid air...

This occurs naturally and is called particle dissipation. Think of disolving sugar in water, now try that with very fine powder in air. Some goes to the ground admittedly, and maybe every other one should sink to the ground, but some of it just dissipates.

and about those buggies... they are splendid looking things, and they look right in place on just about every track in unwheel... if only the suspension on it can animate properly , because they are so visible... the same goes for monster trucks... im interested in how the suspension can work, like, i know that the wheels have to be children of the chassis, despite being on the end of the suspension... but how do you make complex suspension like the monster trucks work?

Currently AFAIK we don't have enough time to give every SVehicle animated suspension like the SPMA, however you could always plead to Ultra New-b (I think he's still the one who converts all the models to SVehicles, we have a very fluid team heirarchy)

 

[QuickBeam]

P4tch?... :tup:

Waits patiently...

 

[Smokin]

The players spawning as people and not car is a problem, It happens with me and i know there are enough start point on my map.(2 start points and 2 players)

 

[ProjectX]

The players spawning as people and not car is a problem, It happens with me and i know there are enough start point on my map.(2 start points and 2 players)

Odd... I only experience it when there are more players than startpoints. You have labelled the events/tags of the startpoints seperately right?

 

[Smokin]

It proably is to do wih not mapping them properly but i make sure eachstart pooint has its own unwheel vehicle actor named and taged

 

[UltraNew-B]

In my newest maps, I insert no less than 12 player starts. Better to have more than not enough.

 

[carmatic]

hmm , like, i just know where the lap ends when i see pedestrians and i run them over just as i finish the lap, first again and again, cuz im playing against bots... it seems to be happening every single time i launch unwheel, there seesm to be a ridiculous number of players on each race or something, the scoreboard wont even fit my 1024x768 screen

oh, my brain has begun moving around in my head again... like, uhh yah im thinking of like, updating the svehicle wheel rotation animation or something whenever you get another bar lit or dimmed on your speedometer or something, up to say 5 times a second for each car?? or is it just another case of how cipen would put it...

"you shouldn't be messing with a class as high up the chain as SVehicle or KVehicle"

also can the suspension of the vehicles be less... umm... 'trace-like' if i can put it that way, like the wheels behave like they are where of some kind of energy beam that shoots down from the car meets whatever the car is standing on, like they just pop up and down when you run over something that's tall enough to stress the suspension but short enough for you to roll over... especially other cars, its strange looking when that happens, like when a monster truck is going over a car, the wheels snap into position above and beside the car....can the position be artificially 'smoothed' or something, like the apparent height of the wheel is an interpolation of the svehicle data... is that possible? it would make the wheels look softer as they clip into things that reach them at high speed, and this smoothing strength would differ from car to car...
also, i've learnt of something called angular momentum... like, when a car is hit anywhere other than dead-on, it will start spinning as the center of mass of the car will create a moment of inertia with the force that is applied to the car (secondary school physics, anyone?)the game simulates this horizontally ,correctly... but i dont think that it is doing it right vertically, because whenever i run into a car, for some reason there is this tendency to flick the car upwards in a way that doesnt seem to make sense????in fact when i drive a small car into the wheels of a monster truck, this 'flicking up' thing causes the car to slide under the monster truck, when common sense seems to suggest that the monster truck would at least stop the car in it's path, and if the car hit it hard enough, it should slide away and tilt towards the car because it is so tall and the car hit it near its bottom ... which by the way looks like the vehicle code ignores the traction of the wheels on any movement , all there is for the wheels , is the height of some obstacle, and you can effectively have a small car racing on a track with a monster truck 'overlapping' its position, only elevated above the height of the small car... cant it be made like a 'sub collision' or something where the rubber of the wheels at least grip the car underneath it, and some of the momentum of the car is imparted onto the truck... or something... hm its kind of hard to say what should happen when theres a car moving forwards and a monster truck comes up with a greater speed from behind it and runs over it, cuz i have never seen it happen before, but certainly the monster truck shouldnt 'slide' onto the small car...maybe it should be like, the car 'collides' with the bottom of the wheel when it does make contact, as in the bottom of the wheel should always be absolutely still relative to the world, and a collision here will transfer momentum from the car to the truck , in addition to whatever momentum the truck already has... the car loses alot of speed and acts like a ramp, and the monster truck gets a sudden surge of force on one wheel and loses control, and gets ramped into the air... how does that sound?
hm friday night here.. i know i should be socializing with my friends instead of giving thoughts on unwheel, but heck i never said i was in the mood to socialize today...

ok just had another go at unwheel... maybe theres a certain 'chemistry' of the vehicles, like what happens when a monster truck runs into a small car, or 2 monster trucks collide with each other, or when the 939 hits a monster truck, etc etc, and i can see that the motive of the 'flicking' sideways is to simulate tyre grip in the event of a lateral force being applied upon the car,which causes the car to roll sideways... and this effect should only get more observable the taller the vehicle is, which reminds me of angular momentum again... can the physics code be made to calculate angular momentum on a vertical plane? sometimes i notice that a car gets hit first, then after a small delay, it will be 'flicked' away, is this some kind of calculation going on or something... it was alot of fun ramming the master of disaster against the caterpillar and being bounced right off it and then being dragged in front of it helplessly, but when switched to a buggy and raced against rally cars, they get flicked away the moment i laid a feather's touch on them or something... ok the more i play with this flicking phenomenon on small cars, the more it looks like its to bypass some indeterminate steps on the physics calculation which would have frozen the game solid otherwise or something, like what happens if i hit a car which then hits another car, or what happens if i hit at a particularly acute angle, or what happens if i was shoved by a car into another car... it looks debug, like getting the vehicles out of the way of further physics processing...also, i really wish for an option to switch the 'auto right' off, like , flipped cars have no magical force that keeps them horizontal,people will just have to drive more carefully...