There is actually a lot of literature on how to simulate vehicles, which would be quite a bit of help. He also mentions BeamNG whose approach is very weird if you actually want to get accurate vehicle dynamics. Their ongoing tire simulation project seems even weirder and as if it was done by people who actively tried to ignore standard approaches for modeling tires.
Germany has two state of the Art companies developing tire models and their parametrization and instead of relying on the decade of research and experience in that area they are ignoring it all and are going to some company around the world to get any data at all. This is just totally bizarre, they likely could have saved themselves a lot of time and money by just hiring a couple of guys from that sector and just implementing well studied approaches or just worked together with world leading experts in that field.
>They seem to take a bottom up approach and I think it's a decent way to do it.
If nobody else had ever done tire simulation, sure.
I’m sure you’ve driven it, so you’d know that it’s not the best but it’s no slouch.
Or maybe they're operating at a level of fidelity much higher than the game needs? If they're working on simulation e.g. for Formula 1, they might be doing full fledged numerical simulation (FEM etc) rather than simplified models for real time games.
I'd be curious to know more though, what else do you know about this?
Could you link some? I'm interested in this topic but have struggled to find good resources
That makes it much more valuable for me, than simply copying what everyone else is doing.
I already have basically every other sim, purchased on Steam and installed.
I can just jump into them, and for example enjoy AMS2, or LMU, or iRacing tire models instantly.
That game was like Carwars pen and paper roleplaying.
That closest I've seen was Interstate76 from 1990s.
You do not have the "sims" I was talking about, which are the ones used in automotive industries and who are using tire models which are certainly more advanced than what is found in any game.
>I can just jump into them, and for example enjoy AMS2, or LMU, or iRacing tire models instantly.
Which is the difference between a game and engineering software. In a game the tire physics should be fun, in engineering Software they should be accurate.
I recall the Warthog and other vehicles actually defining some specific properties about vehicles like RPM and gear ratio, at least I think, because in first person you'd see some of those properties reflected in the dashboard of say the Warthog, or you'd hear it in the audio for a covenant vehicle.
But wow, man, what great feeling vehicles. Nothing else like it in the industry, in my opinion. The ridiculous feeling of vehicles in Grand Theft Auto 4 came really close, but those seemed to be much, much more detailed from vehicular motion and damage-taking perspectives.
I completely agree that the Warthog in Halo 1 felt the best, by far.
That's it! I also added skid particles. The drifting was achieved by playing around with the wheels and body damping. The game is here: https://apps.apple.com/app/drift-mania-infinite-car-racer/id...
Love the self-deprecation! Downloading now.
- I enjoyed the immediate start - skid particles are practical - game looks good - it’s too difficult for me; I’d like a “zen” mode that doesn’t reset when I hit a wall.
This just reminded me of AngeTheGreat's incredible video series showing his engine simulator- absolutely worth checking out, considering it's optimized enough to run in real-time! The fact that he's simulating it well enough to generate realistic sound is absolutely mind-blowing.
If people try something fancy... the clipping and weird physics glitches will ruin their day. Only somewhat depends on the game engine =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLiL0GLSvIw
(tldw: Real time internal combustion engine simulation something unexpected.)
The fact that this guy did the same thing, just to have better sounding racecars in his vidya, blows my mind.
Ah, the quest for more time...
It makes the case that cars in games offer a wide variety of unrealistic experiences and says this is unlike guns.
Is that really true? I've played games with homing bullets, slow projectiles, enormous projectiles, gravity guns, rocket jumping, hit scan guns, guns with bullet drop, freeze guns, ... idunno, I think there's a lot of variety in guns that are about the experience and not about simulating physics.
> It's because when it comes to cars, we derive our expectations of them not just from first hand experience. Our understanding of what “driving fast” feels like is often built from second-hand sources; films, games, pop culture.
And then this just feels like a theorycrafted thing with zero evidence. It's also even more true of guns than of cars, isn't it?
But then, there's stuff like, uh, jumping, where there is just as wide a variety in how you can jump in games even though my expectations about jumping come a lot more from actually jumping than do my expectations about driving come from actually driving.
The act of dealing with those frustrations while you are already stressed is what makes them good. I will say Tarkov takes some liberties with its recoil making it even worse than real life.
Firearms in games tend to be less real because they prioritize making you believe in the power fantasy of a gun: it looks and sounds fearsome, and enables the bearer to dispense death. Running and jumping, likewise: there's no need to explain in an empirical sense how or why Mario jumps extremely high - it's an aesthetic choice that highlights the thing the game is about.
We tend to get stuck on portrayals of physics, camera, and photorealistic rendering in games because in those instances, we have tools that are good at systematizing verisimilitude: the car can behave more like a real car by fastidiously emulating everything we know about real cars. Those simulations can be made comparable to ones used in industry.
But many aspects of games can't take that approach and have to be cartooned to some less grounded approximation: the way in which human figures move and talk, or how a national economy works, or the pacing of combat.
As makers of designed products, we're meeting players in the middle by making choices that cohere with the rest of the game's goals while staying believable to their expectations. There are lots of ways to achieve verisimilitude while destroying the overall structure of the game, and that's a classic newbie-designer pitfall: "do X but with more detail".
A quick typo though: s/Imperically/empirically (I guess)
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUahe1BHkKtVN4nPDmueo7huQ...
The simulation of tires is interesting too, because you can get totally playable vehicles without simulating them at all. Or you can simulate some aspects for gameplay reasons (tire wear, heat, rudimentary grip level change)
Or, you can go really, really deep, and simulate the real physics going on, and that's what games like Beam NG, iRacing, Assetto Corsa etc. are doing. Usually known as the "tire model" in case you want a term to search up. They're still approximations but ever improving accuracy.
Andre Marziali - Physics of Racing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYp2vvUgEqE
That’s the most important follow up. Without it, you’ll notice that the driving feels icy - I see it in the demo video. Most folks who fail to do the anti-roll bar and suspension wind up with cars that easily flip on turns - so they make the tires slip or they play with the surface friction, which makes the driving experience worse.
Haha. My car recently had issues in that department and I got to experience the lack of fun firsthand.
I made it in anger when I played a sidescrolling flight "simulator" on my phone in which the plane didn't behave anything like a plane! I figured "how hard can it be" and started learning a lot about how planes fly. It turned out there was a level of abstraction that was just right. Too unrealistic felt static and unsatisfying. Too realistic was difficult to calibrate for fun gameplay.
What's not mentioned in that article is that a couple months later I tried switching from modeling the plane as a point to modeling it as two separate wings attached by a rigid stick. It was a nightmare to get into a shape that played well, though I'm sure someone more skilled than I would be able to do it.
My inspiration was a fun game on 1980s intellivision!
That side view game had momentum and stalling airplane physics that aren't in any arcade game since that I've found.
Dogfights were hilarious because each player would risk stalling so they'd have more momentum to maneuver an attack.
Did you play that old game?
Unreal Engine comes with two car demo projects. The first one is the "Hello World" of Unreal, and has a simple vehicle. The second one has an actual suspension model.
Suspension is implemented as well but it didn't feel to me like a unique problem to implement for cars, at least not a simple suspension that can carry a car, and it didn't fit too well with the flow and limited time I planned for this.
On the other end of the spectrum, playing purely for fun with no regard for simulation or realistic anything ... I'll take a 1980s spinner wheel Super Sprint arcade cabinet any day for guaranteed smiles per mile.
Disclaimer: I worked on Rocket League, but not on the game client.
Hamish Young, Vehicle Physics and Tire Dynamics in 'Just Cause 4' https://gdcvault.com/play/1026035/Vehicle-Physics-and-Tire-D...
Jan Erik Steel & Patrick Donnelly, Supercharged! Vehicle Physics in 'Skylanders' https://gdcvault.com/play/1023219/Supercharged-Vehicle-Physi...
Edward Pereira, The Science of Off-Roading https://dev.gdcvault.com/play/1024004/The-Science-of-Off-Roa...
Jared Cone, It IS Rocket Science! The Physics of 'Rocket League' Detailed https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024972/It-IS-Rocket-Science-T...
Great resource. I wish this was available back then.
I was fascinated by AngeTheGreat https://github.com/ange-yaghi/engine-sim simulator
jimmySixDOF•6mo ago
[1] https://github.com/omigroup/gltf-extensions/blob/main/extens...
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