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car.txt

How to make a Bounding Box with Plaything and it's 'asc to physics' command

Right, There's not much to doing this really.
It's one of the easier things related to car physics
And can be done using CarEd (or any 3d program that can models in '.asc' format), and Plaything 2.

-This first thing you'll want to do is open you car's model in your 3d program of choice
(CarEd or what have you) and create a new object that surrounds the car in it's own
basic shape (besides the wheels) as shown:

-save this new object as a new file (seperated from the car model) and export it as an
asc file.

7 February 2010 - 7:22pm | Econobrick

How to define where fire appears on your car

Tutorial: defining a car's fire points

You mave have noticed that the places where some c2 cars catch fire are pretty weird (like maybe on the middle of the roof when the damage indicator says it's you engine that's supposed to be burning). This problem can be fixed fairly easily in both CarED and Plaything.

This isn't really that important but it can make your car look a little cooler when it has the shit beat out of it! :)

If you're using plaything 2:

  • Open the desired car (by importing the .act file or opening the .SDF file...if the cars has one.)
7 February 2010 - 6:37pm | Econobrick

Setting up your car's text file with help from PT2

Tutorial: getting values for your car

7 February 2010 - 6:33pm | Econobrick

Rolling resistance

This is a piece of cake. How much the wheels resist the movement.

0.01 = Should be the default. This is the most realistic value.
0.02 = Still a good one.
0.05 = Default value in C2, but not the most realistic.
0.50 = Why should you use this?

7 February 2010 - 6:27pm | C2 Scientist

Friction and grip

Fractional reduction in friction when slipping

How slippery the tires are, when the car is sliding. Smaller value means smaller friction.
You could put biger values to bigger wheels, but not too much.
Friction angles affect also to friction, but I'll explain them after this.
The surface affects to friction too: the surface materials are defined in tracks' textfiles, and usually the tyre road friction is 1.0 there.

7 February 2010 - 6:26pm | C2 Scientist

Suspension give and damping factor

Suspension give

The best value for suspension is car's ride height from the ground, divided by ten.
If the space between car's bottom and ground is 0.05, then a good suspension value would be 0.005.
Smaller value means, that the car's body won't come down easily.
And a big value means that car hits the ground more often, and body leans in turns. Make sure you have defined the bounding shapes well.

When I played C2, the cars didn't seem to have very much ride height.
I thought: "Maybe they modeled the cars so."

7 February 2010 - 6:24pm | C2 Scientist

Positions of wheels

This is quite important, because it has a strong effect for handling of the car.
These values equal the center points of each wheel.

Once I was editing a truck, and I had to tweak the angular momentum proportions.
When I put 1.6 as Z-value, the handling went crazy. I thought that maybe those angular momentum proportions don't mean the exact width, height and length of the car.
But then I checked the wheels' positions: they had been defined as like in normal car, so the rear wheels were too front.
I had to double the Z-value for rear wheels, and then truck started to handle like real.

7 February 2010 - 6:23pm | C2 Scientist

Wheels

7 February 2010 - 6:21pm | C2 Scientist

Camera positions

Because this is so simple, Ill just give one tip now.
To get better view from cockpit, you shouldn't put the camera exactly to driver's eyes, but you could put it like in this picture: (The picture on the right will show the view in the game)

Camera pointView in the game

7 February 2010 - 6:21pm | C2 Scientist

Bounding shapes

There's nothing more horrible than bounding shapes, which don't fit to the car.
So I recommend that you spend some time making bounding shapes. I'll give you some tips.

You can have more than one shape, just put 2 (or more) to "Number of 'Bounding shapes' entries".
Usually I put the body in one bounding shape, and roof in another. So that makes two bounding shapes' entries total.

There is an easy way to create bounding shapes: Make a simple mesh to cover the car. (not very detailed: 32 points is maximum)
Then define the triangles, and select "file/export .ASC"

7 February 2010 - 6:18pm | C2 Scientist
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