Car Data

[customcreationav]

Hey I would like to help in the development of this game i have played it and realized that it is a purely awesome game. I know programming but i am a mechanic and i am able to retrieve physical data like centers of gravitys and data like that easily and i also know plenty of vehicles that can drift because i do drift. Would like to help

[thelusiv]

Welcome to the forums, and I'm glad you enjoy the game.

Our cars settings are composed of specs for cars we've found by doing research on them, and also by doing a little educated guesswork to fill in some missing details. There are certainly areas in which we do some really heavy guessing, especially details about suspension and tires.

If you really want to help improve the cars, the best way would probably be to learn a little about our car format, so you understand what kind of information to look for. From there you can use whatever equipment you have available to test whatever you have available to test and we can go from there.

[customcreationav]

Well the question i have is like what aspect of suspension the travel when the car weight shifts or what about it but there are tons of aspects that can be taken into with tires and suspension. because with suspension you have the camber angle toe angle stiffness or suspension tire pressure all that to consider.

[customcreationav]

but if you can send me the car format and i can work off of that for yall if you wanna email it i can do that

[customcreationav]

Oh one suggestion you really need to put a e-brake on the game that would make it alot easier to control the car cause the brakes on the cars now are really weak(no offense) ha ha. The braking needs ajusted more than anything

[thelusiv]

Yeah several people (including me) want a handbrake control, some of the cars do have pretty weak breaks, some are too strong. Brake bias is something that can be changed as well. Handbrake is on the todo, maybe we'll get it in the next release...

The best way to learn about the car format is to look at the .car files in the VDrift data such as data/cars/XS/XS.car. Each of the parameters in that file corresponds to a setting in the Vamos automotive simulator which is what we use to simulate the car physics. A good place to start is to check out the Vamos docs. The description of the cars in there doesn't cover everything but it gives you a good general idea.

Vamos is written using the formulas and algorithms found in automotive physics simulation texts, a good example of this available on the web is Brian Beckman's Physics of Racing series. This gives a lot of detail...so if you have questions, feel free to ask, we'll do our best to explain

[joevenzon]

We'd be very happy to get someone with a mechanical background (especially with drifting) to help out. I agree with thelusiv, take a look through our car definition files and play with them for a bit. Once you get an understanding of what each thing means in-game, you can help us tweak them (and possibly suggest and help with adding new features).

[customcreationav]

on the brake bias on the car when the regular brake is pressed is the what part of the car is the brake coming from front center or rear

[customcreationav]

One thing i need to figure is on those files what scale of actual size are you using if any

[thelusiv]

In terms of distance, 1.0 in the .car files is equal to 1 meter. Were using "MKS" units, which stands for meters, kilograms, seconds. All other units are derived from that. Ratios are expressed as a percentage divided by 100, for instance brake bias is defined as a number between 0.0 and 1.0 for both front and rear (this seems redundant to me, because obviously rear will always be 1.0 - front, but anyway...)

For example in the XS (S2000) .car file:

Code:

[ brakes-front ]
friction = 0.73
max-pressure = 2.0e6
bias = 0.57
radius = 0.14
area = 0.015

[ brakes-rear ]
friction = 0.73
max-pressure = 2.0e6
bias = 0.43
radius = 0.14
area = 0.015

So you can see the XS's brakes are 57% in the front and 43% in the rear. This is the best feeling value I could come up with, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it. Not quite sure about the other cars...but that should give you an idea.

[customcreationav]

Alright thats exactly what i needed to know. One car the game needs to add is a nissan 350z, 240, and a 300 those are all very good drift cars i should know ha ha

[customcreationav]

i can get information on all 3 of them right now i have all 3 in my shop right now and i have access to a dyno for spec infor

[customcreationav]

i got a question 2 actually. one is this a drifting based game lol i know stupid but can someone develop a parking lot track i know it sounds stupid but it would be just something really simple for people to spend boredom time practicing drifting across a parking lot avoiding light poles

[thelusiv]

The main caveat of getting any data for any car is that if we don't have a model for that car, the data is useless. We must find someone who has time and can create one, or we must find one already made (sometimes available on the internet...) and convert it to our format. Creating a model from scratch requires blueprints of the car (which can sometimes be found on the internet as well...) but this can be very time consuming, even if you've done it before.

If you have a dyno and can get a good, clear torque charts of cars, that would be of great help. From there, it would also be nice to have torque curves after certain modifications, such as intakes, exhausts, and whatever other modifications up to and including head work, superchargers and turbo. That would help us figure out how much power to add for various addon parts in the game.

If you can get corner weights of cars on a car scale that would also be useful. Centers of gravity likewise.

I'm not even sure what kind of equipment one would use to do this but we also need various tire forces, plus suspension spring rates, and the suspension travel distance of various cars.

[customcreationav]

I have a g force sensor that goes on the car im using and i put the car in certain positions while driving and it gives me the weight transfers and data about the weight