Outerra forum
Anteworld - Outerra Game => Tech demo, support, updates => Topic started by: Planetscape on October 21, 2012, 11:17:37 am
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Hello everyone! I've been following this great program for quite some time and today I decided to buy the alpha,
so I could play around a bit more. I would really like to edit the land vehicle engine physics so it can drive a bit faster.
I've already found a map called "jsbsim" which contains a whole lot of (at least I think) unused files. Is the file for
the UGV land vehicle somewhere among those or is it impossible to edit vehicle physics at the moment?
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you can edit wehicle physics in the vehicle.cfg in the outerra main directory , the jsbsim files are for aircrafts only.(Not that you couldn't drive a vehicle with it, but it sure isn't supposed to do that) :D
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Hello Chaoz, thanks for your quick response! I can't seem to find vehicle.cfg, I am looking in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Outerra\Anteworld folder.
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did you install the test version ?
http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=1146.0 (http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=1146.0) here you will find for now the newest version
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Ah cheers! I'll give that a try :)
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Info about the vehicle.cfg is here (http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=1146.msg13263#msg13263). Note that it's just a temporary hack, and a scriptable vehicle system is coming soon - just working on it.
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I am interested in seeing how you finalize the adjustment files/editing. Will it essentially be a huge text file with 200 parameters or are multiple files each for engine torque and suspension and steering geometry and weight distribution and camera positions and transmission ratios and tire model info and aerodynamic info all going to be zipped in an obscure format for editing.
This is the big one for me so I have to make sure it is acceptable otherwise you two will have to sit in the naughty chair for a time out.
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Right now it's a single file. And it's a script, not an array of parameters in some fixed format.
The basic vehicle interface expects the script to provide the forces to apply to individual wheels (engine force and braking force) as well as steering angle. Technically you can compute the forces as you wish, simulating lots of things in the script already. A simple default version just assumes the engine provides some maximum force, and multiplies it with the 0..1 input value of throttle (gas), and applies to each wheel. The same with brakes using the brake input, and steering for steerable wheels. There's an underlying physics engine that simulates the vehicle, but the control of forces acting on the vehicle is on you. Things like the engine and transmission characteristics can be handled here already.
Someone can develop a whole sophisticated script universally controlling some class of vehicles, that would be requiring you to adjust some well-named values at the beginning or in a separate file to make it fit for your particular vehicle.
From our side there should later come some more advanced vehicle interfaces that will provide a better control over the physics. The basic interface now uses a simple tire model and expects you to specify things like slip coefficient and suspension coefficients etc. Additional interfaces for tires would enable you to handle the tire physics in more sophisticated way.