How it developed over the years: https://youtu.be/_IMN9XVYSiY
How a few games worked: https://youtu.be/hcmSBwLKVOY https://youtu.be/p5s-zbXtDoo
Absolutely recommended!
https://youtu.be/Tn04UwfKk9o?si=8V0kGMSVoBfkZaBT
I’ve lost hours to this.
YMMV
Depending on the velocity settings of your reality
TacticalCoder•8mo ago
I then plotted that torque curve (it requires knowing how many cylinders, gear ration, wheel size and a few other things and there are a few approximation [like tires deforming with speed, loss, ...] but it's doable) and, sure enough, the resulting curve was very close to the one given in the car's official book.
Yup, back in the eighties car manufacturers (at least some of them) would give you a book with the gear ration and torque curve nicely plotted.
IIRC you only need to record the acceleration over one speed (say the 2nd gear) and then with the gear ratio you can plot all the gears.
It was my first Java app with a GUI! I probably still have the code somewhere on obscure backups.
PaulKeeble•8mo ago
herpdyderp•8mo ago
zelon88•8mo ago
As a side note, BeamNG.Drive has the most accurate throttle response and audio response of any driving game I've ever tried. You can almost feel the car pull vacuum (or build boost).
tpae•8mo ago
jstanley•8mo ago
lan321•8mo ago
I'm gonna try it after work.
The only precision revving in neutral I've done is for emissions testing a couple times but the throttle tube was barely rotating to keep it at 4k. It was still at that point where the cable just gets tensioned past the freeplay and it was kinda tricky to keep it there since very small movements would move 0,5-1k RPM.
PS: Treating 20% as 20% throttle tube rotation, not necessarily linear to how much chooch you get due to how throttle bodies open.
JKCalhoun•8mo ago
I wanted to simulate shifting too soon and lugging the engine (vs. shifting at too high an RPM and having thrown away efficiency/performance). But determining when you were lugging the engine depended on the engine RMP which needed to allow for the gear you were in and the current forward speed ... forward speed determined by what gear you were in, what RPM ... so we're back to RPM... Never mind possible slipping of the tire if you broke traction and spinning out or drifting....
Happy to see someone lay it all out in a blog post.
(And happier still that the folks that did the game Carmageddon did a convincing enough job of all the car physics to entertain me for hours back then.)
rasz•8mo ago