More friction in the turns? [NOOB Question]

Hey guys,

I downloaded the source for Stunt Playground 2. Thank you so much to Walaber for posting this, it will be an invaluable resource for all! Although I must say I had one hell of a time getting it to compile.

I am making a kart racing game and want more friction for tighter turns. It seems in SP2 when a vehicle is travelling fast and tries to cut into a turn it just flys forward at an angle rather than gripping the ground and making a tight turn as desired. I noticed this to be the case with the simple vehicle demo (Newton demo) as well.

In my game it is very important to have tight turns. What stats do I have to tweak to get this?

thanks

Probably two things to look into: suspension strength and maybe letting the car fish-tail a bit (lower rear-tire friction or it might be some "slip" option I think I saw documented.)

If the suspension isn't strong enough, it might be throwing the weight too much into the turn and rolling; also, if you let up a little friction in the back it might slide the tail into the turn enough to keep the body stable.

Haven't tried it, but I know what you're dealing with.

thanks for the reply.

After getting more aquainted with the vehicle class stuff I was able to mess around with the XML file and get some pretty good results. I bumped up the friction in OgreNewt for the tires and ground. I also bumped up the grip and messed with the gear torques. I messed with the slip option but could not inteligably change it to work.

However, the car still has a very wide turning radius and the steering is really sensitive (one tap jerks the car from side to side). Does anyone know how to get a POWER SLIDE effect?

i have had steering problems since what feels like the begining of time.

do you know newton has a bug, where the ajoining terrian-faces cause the wheel to 'bobble' over the edges? if you optimize, this is really bad for each face edge, but if you do not optimize, the wheels lose grip when they go over each face edge (which is all the time), and so they do not 'stick' to the ground properly. as a test, get a really flat (ie completely flat) terrain and just drive your car in a straight line, making sure you get to a pretty decent speed. you can see the car sliding from side to side a little bit (the best way to see this is by looking at the clouds, if you are using a sky box or something - if the car were travelling in a straight line the clouds should not move from side to side!).

anyway the reason i mention this is because it makes the steering really touchy. i have the same problem, where the slightest touch from the steering wheel causes the car to jerk from side to side.

one thing you could try is setting the cars centre of mass. if it is high, the car will flip over like a double-decker bus taking a corner. if it is low, the car will doughnut in a 360-handbrake-turn sort of thing. a happy medium will do what you want im sure. i think this is what you were talking about.

as for the friction, the wheels have the same friction as the car, you cant set it per tyre. a too high friction gets you top speeds but flips the car when turning. a too low friction and the wheels lose traction when accelerating, but turning is ok. again, a happy medium is what you want. the slip settings you can set per tyre though, like hexidave said, try this too.

I tried for a long time(couple weeks of work) to get an acceptable car sim going but never got it right. The car would spin out when too much force was applied to it, I also nticed that the tires would occilate (bump up and down) if the mas of the car went high enough. Worked fine at low speeds but not much higher then what felt like about 30mph.

My suspicion for getting a good car sim working is to use joints to hook the tires up with the car, but I haven't looked beyond my suspicions.

Anyway, just wanted to say that if you get a good one working I would like to know as I'm planning another project with vehicles and will probably be taking another crack at this kind of thing.