Physics [split from network thread]

[thelusiv]

Well it's nice to see developers of other sims stopping by our forums to chat. By the way, thanks for the MOSP-1, aka VDrift GT. Did you model it yourself?

It's interesting to hear these things about ODE, performance was one thing I was concerned about, and it does seem that a pure ODE-based car physics simulation might be inneficient. However we're not looking to replace all of Vamos with ODE, we understand that ODE doesn't provide many of the things we need anyway (such as tire modelling, as you pointed out).

What I wonder is if we just used ODE for things that VDrift/Vamos doesn't really do all that well. In particular, our collision detection and response code needs lots of improvement. Suspension is another area that needs improvement. Also at this point, objects on the track are not movable, so ODE would make sense for that too.

On the topic of suspension, I see screenshots of Motorsport using double-wishbone suspension and I'm interested. We currently have a simple suspension system that does up-down movement on a curve defined by setting a "hinge" point. I have some issues with this system, mostly that it's not very easy to figure out how to make cars using that system act like cars in real life. With the current system, even if the suspension "feels right", the handling is still qutie unpredictable when one attempts difficult maneuvers like drifting. Tuning the suspesion can be a nightmare of moving hinge points around, and testing repeatedly. I have yet to find a very good way to set the hinge points on a given car and know it will work well.

So what I'm interested in trying is setting VDrift up to use a hybrid Vamos/ODE system for physics. The other option is to just write optimized versions of the things we need ODE to do ourselves, which would probably be better in the long run...what do you think? Would a hybrid system perform fairly well, or should we forget it and just write it all ourselves?

So yeah we're way offtopic, but oh well...back on multiplayer, it would suck a lot less if our system had car-car collisions. :lol: