New car physics discussion (0.8)

Game Talk The Bunker
1

So I got my new character a car and found that they’re not the rolling death wagons they once were. Well OK, they were definitely OP so I think the nerfed damage at lower speeds is just fine. What I don’t get is why they’re stopped dead by shrubs, even at low speeds. We’re talking about a ton of steel against, well this:

Forgive me if I’m incorrect, I don’t drive, but I’m sure a car wouldn’t have much trouble getting through that, it’d slow down maybe but not completely stop. Even if it is entirely realistic I think from a gameplay perspective it makes driving extremely tedious at lower levels, because without a good amount of skill in driving it’s dangerous to drive fast and navigating all of these brick walls shrubs at 9mph losing control every two seconds is a nightmare.

2

Drive faster. I’ve driven through tons of shrubs at about 30 mph in-game and haven’t really had any problems with them. (I mean even in real life most cars would have problems driving through that at slower speeds, I know for certain most cars where I live couldn’t make it through that below a fairly high speed).

Also a tip for leveling up driving skill fast:
Hit left-right-left when you want to go forward rather then hitting wait (’.’).

3

[quote=“i2amroy, post:2, topic:3117”]Also a tip for leveling up driving skill fast:
Hit left-right-left when you want to go forward rather then hitting wait (’.’).[/quote]

I noticed this and would call this a bug. I realize that maybe I gain more experience driving while turning than going straight, but the application of this to actual gameplay is definitely negative. Spamming left right is very annoying and very required as is. Making “.” give the same skill improvement would result in the same skill growth without the frustration.

By the way, I agree that bushes at slow speeds are not quite right. I recently got my car wedged between two bushes and was trapped. I had to get out and smash the bushes to continue. I should be able to power over a bush from a standstill.

4

Err… not so much, really. At least not in the cars I’ve driven in real life. Ending up in bush means you’re gonna have a bad time, and usually you will have to get some friends to haul you out of the bush.

Thats a bunch of wood that gets thicker at ground level after all, and the torque on most vehicles isn’t nearly as good as you seem to believe. Attempting to drive through a bush from a full stop is unlikely to work out well for you.

5

It depends on the bush. Some things are just evil and pure wood, winding up worse than a wall, while some is just paper.

6

My first thought was, “let’s clarify the description”… there’s no description, doh.
I think this is a big part of the issue here, some people are thinking tiny little shrub no bigger than 3’ across or so that they expect to be crushed by the car wheels or just ridden over, and some people are thinking mammoth hedges that could slow the advance of a blitzkreig*.

Now there definitely IS a problem when a 10-ton military cargo truck or something can’t make headway from a standing start against a single bush square.

How it works is it calculates damage on both sides based on velocity, and if it doesn’t smash the obstacle, it auto-stops the vehicle. So momentum is ignored. The reason for this is to try and preserve the condition where you can’t drive over/through obstacles. If we took this check out, you’d be able to drive “over” some obstacles without destroying them, but they’d smash other components as you drove over them, and if they DID stop you without being destroyed, you could be completely stuck since there’d be no way to clear the obstacle. Obviously this makes sense for some obstacles, but not others, you definitely can’t drive over a wall without smashing it for example, but a bush is more arguable that if you have enough torque and traction, you could push right through it, but still perhaps not destroy it.

I’m not totally sure what to do about this, this is definitely the source of the issue, but just removing it will lead to some very bad outcomes, like bicycles probably getting permanently stuck in bushes a lot instead of just being stopped when hitting a bush, and it sometimes happening to cars as well…

Here we go! If you hit an obstacle and it doesn’t break, it reruns the impact until the obstacle breaks or the vehicle runs out of momentum. (I think I’m adopting the suggestion that someone made a while back, sorry, can’t remember who.) This way vehicles with low momentum get stopped as appropriate, and vehicles with a lot of momentum keep smashing through. I’m not totally happy with this as a simulationist thing, but I think it’ll address the matter at hand without rewriting huge swaths of the collision code.

Side note: No matter how tough or large, monsters never auto-stop vehicles on collision, though they can erode your momentum enough to force you to stop.

*Is that a godwin? I’m really not sure :wink:

7

Shrubs can’t stop blitzkrieg, but General Moroz sure can.
However, bushes are overpowered as fuck. If you can move through them this fast on foot, then there’ll be no problem with whacking it with your car.
What if you calculate the chance of wrecking that leafy motherfuckers depending on the mass of your vehicle?

8

My proposal does incorporate mass, you hit an obstacle at velocity V1, and have a V1magic_formula chance of destroying the obstacle and lose V1other_magic_formula velocity. If it doesn’t smash it, it tries again with your new velocity, and repeats until you either run out of velocity or it smashes. If you have a massive vehicle, the momentum lost to each impact will be very small, giving you many more chances to crush through the obstacle.

9

Erm, sorry, read you with my butt earliery. That’s exactly what we need.

10

I would be very happy with a system like this.

Guess I’ll just have to do doughnuts in a field until my skill is high enough that I can speed around in the meantime.

11

This seemed appropriate:

1998 Ford windstar vs. Blackberry Bushes

12

[quote=“phaethon, post:11, topic:3117”]This seemed appropriate:

1998 Ford windstar vs. Blackberry Bushes

lol, I was literally looking for a video like this before I made the thread.

13

The only good thing about the Windstar, is that Ford stopped making the Windstar.

14

Erm, sorry, read you with my butt earliery. That’s exactly what we need.[/quote]
If I didn’t read this with my butt too, then this caters for momentum vs resistance considering durability, calculating dynamic deceleration until either the bush is destroyed or the car is reduced to zero velocity (fucked or functional). But what about the fact that I can/might want to attempt to accelerate through the bush (counter momentum loss via acceleration)?

I half lost myself there in trying to sound like a smart-ass. You got what I mean though right?

15

Would’t that just be accelerating before impact? I get what you’re saying, but I think that applies more to a series of bushes rather than to a single bush impact.
Here’s how acceleration works.
Either you have cruise control off, and you accelerate whenever you tap “up”,
or you have cruise control on, and your engine accelerates you at the start of every turn where you’re lower than your selected cruise velocity. (it’s not actually cruise control, just the player maintaining speed, though actual cruise control might be added at some point).

So to apply this to the bushes scenario:
So say you’re cruising at 40MPH, and you’re about to hit a clump of bushes spread out over 10 squares or so. You hit the first few bushes, smashing through them and deccelerating. At the beginning of each turn after that, you’ll accelerate again (limited by your power/weight ratio) and then deccelerate again as you hit more shrubs. As long as your engine is up to the task of bringing your velocity back up by whatever amount is lost to the bushes, you’ll keep going, otherwise you’ll lose velocity, and probably stop at some point.
Replace bushes with zombies if you want, it works the same way.

At some point we might implement a power curve for engines, so that at higher speeds they have less torque, and therefore accelerate less per turn at higher speeds. This would tend to allow a vehicle to maintain a low speed plowing through obstacles better without having to have a ridiculous engine to do so.

16

Actually I reversed my car into a hedge once a few months back.

I was expecting the hedge to move in favor of the car, but… well, it tore my rear bumper off.

17

Ah yes, cruise control, fair enough.

This’ll be ninja. Momentum and torque will make for some very nice vehicle ‘physics’.

18

[quote=“phaethon, post:11, topic:3117”]This seemed appropriate:

1998 Ford windstar vs. Blackberry Bushes

Looked like it drove inbetween to bushes, not actually through either of them.

19

Maybe the (average) size of the wheels should have a direct influence on the chance to overcome obstacles.