Do you have some public sample for buses or trucks?

Question

I still miss some settings for real buses and trucks, hehe... It would be nice having a "generic" truck or bus setting, just values, not models. There are some hints in the documentation, but since it depends on many other blocks, it is very difficult to achieve a real one based on that. It would be great having some samples with placeholder models (like simple cubes) or at least screenshots of some pre-configured vehicles.

Answer 1

If you own Edy's Vehicle Physics it includes a Bus model you can get several useful settings from:

• Mass
• Center of Mass
• Suspension: spring rate, damper rate, suspension distance.
• Maximum steering angle
• Aerodynamic drag (the value may be copied directly, IIRC).

Porting it to VPP would then require setting up the remaining mechanical parts: engine, transmission, brakes, safety assists.

I may develop some heavy vehicle examples in the future, but I can't tell for sure. Currently there are quite a few car models scheduled for setting up & publish already.

Comments

PS: Placeholder models are EVIL! They give you physics for cubes and cylinders, but not physics for vehicles. The quality of the setups you can get using real models, even simple ones, is orders of magnitude better than those from placeholder cubes and cylinders.

The developers of nVidia PhysX Vehicles use cubes and cylinders in their test environments, and I believe that's one reason for them not to be able to easily see some of the issues we're experiencing with PhysX Vehicle SDK.

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Yes, I have EVP too :)

The settings I'm getting stuck the most are about the clutch on manual, and automatic gear changing for automatic, I still cannot find perfect values for these heavy vehicles to mimic real ones. It would be great having a sample with a Citaro or MAN bus, for example (very popular on Europe).

In Brazil we have lots of manual buses, there's something in clutch that is not great here too.

Talking about simple boxes or placeholders... I was using box colliders since NotifyCollidersChanged() apparently had a bug in the version that I'm using (one of the latest with source on Professional license). I got lots of runtime errors if I disable or add new colliders (at EnableCollidersRaycast and DisableCollidersRaycast).

After your comment about "placeholder models being EVIL" I decided to put a try...catch inside the loop on that functions in VehicleBase, now it seems that I can finally use MeshCollider with VPP (it is loaded at runtime as user vehicle mod). This will improve behaviour a lot on certain terrains, since on the back part of the bus the body border is more elevated than on the middle.

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Well, those specifications are not difficult to find. I've configured several buses and only had to apply some minor adaptations.