Micro Blog(s) - 2017

We'll post some nonsense here that is not worth a dev-blogpost since it might confuse the hell out of people of what the company is doing or where it is moving or alike. Comments welcome here, try to be friendly to the company guys, they do this micro blog for fun beside their daytime work.

The opinions in this thread are the author's and do not reflect the company's one in any way.

Continuing here from last year's thread

 

Happy new year everyone!

#coffeepic

 

Gotta paint that wall before everyone else shows up again

 

Finally found some time to start the rewrite of the ABS/brake subsystem.
The plan is as follows:

• Implement a "perfect" cheating ABS that uses non-local data such as the vehicle's airspeed to get a good reference of what is possible with the tires etc
  (This is what other games would use as their regular ABS)
• Implement an optimal ABS system that uses only local data that a real vehicle could use but which at the same time might ignore some of the real life issues of brake systems (such as a limited ability to regulate brake pressure quickly) and compare against the cheating reference ABS
• Potentially implement a classic ABS which also mimics the shortcomings of real brake hydraulic systems and gives worse results than the reference and optimal ABS

So far I got the perfect cheating ABS working nicely, my test car improves distances by around 2.5m from 100 km/h (around 34.5m now, which is pretty good for that particular car) while at the same time the ABS works no matter the surface. So unlike the current ABS it also works on ice and other slippery surfaces.

The next step is to dig out my old "virtual airspeed" code, which tries to calculate the vehicle airspeed purely by local data (a mix of looking at wheelspeeds and integrating the measured accelerations, combined with some smart logic) and use that instead of the actual airspeed.

This leads to a fully local ABS that is theoretically possible IRL. (As pointed out above, hydraulic pressure regulation issues make such a purely PID based ABS difficult IRL, even though I suspect it's not impossible, just not worth pouring lots of money into to get a slightly better result in the end - the "good enough" symptom)

Right now it even looks like the ABS won't need much vehicle specific configuration which is a very good thing to make it easier for vehicle creators as well as potentially offering a "default" ABS for all cars (no promises here, it's just something that gets a lot easier in case we ever want to have that)

 

A little update concerning the ABS:

Without ABS

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

With ABS

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

The reason for this effect without ABS is that the mu-split surface introduces a yaw moment due to the uneven brake ability on the left/right side.

 

Our new company website is finally ready: http://beamng.gmbh

And we have an open position!

 

Story time!

Back in October a few of us non-germans were working at the office in Germany. And it happens that the famous Nurburgring racetrack is only about 4 autobahn hours away, so naturally we had to pay a visit for a weekend. And then another weekend. All in the name of science and vehicle physics research.

The second time, we rented a car, the second cheapest RWD car available absolutely anywhere, a nice BMW 328i, which had just been prepared for us. The original car we were going to rent had already been totalled in the ring, and in real life there is no Recovery function that will save you or your car.

This car was well balanced, in the sense that it had EBC YellowStuff brake pads and vented rotors that should easily last a whole lap without overheating, but also this "brake malfunction" red light permanently turned on in the dashboard.

That tourist day started extremely foggy, which is a recipe for accidents, so the ring stayed closed until after lunch time. After it finally opened, there were still several crashes that forced the track to either close again, or to yellow-flag some track sections. We could only get to drive 5 laps total, none of them clean. This is my third one:

 

Dedicated some time to improve the Controls menu, hopefully this will make it more obvious what each slider does:

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

CDN (that delivers the mod downloads) status:

• level3: still down - super fast and super expensive
• cdn2: offline - used up all the bandwidth for Jan. (30 TB)
• cdn3: new and up for 45 minutes, 78 GB delivered (see attachment)

 

A bit of work on camera lua, video was recorded in a single continuous take:

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

Fun fact: as you may have noticed, graphics quality is set to lowest. That's often the only way to get 15+ fps in development/debug versions.

 

"fixed" node grabbing:

 

Visualizing our progress in the replay system. Not only does it look cool, but it plays an extremely important role for playback to look smooth in a soft body simulation.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

It will completely escape everyone's attention and be taken for granted when it works correctly, but immediately stand out if for some reason it decided to work incorrectly.

 

Warning, video dump ahead:

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

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Some more stuff

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Lightbars have been refreshed a bit.
Along with the changes above, also materials and some models have been updated.
They also have 'flares' for a better visual effect.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

Mods that have made 'their' own version of the lightbar (ie. imported the original ones and then exported them in their own file) may need to be updated, as the materials changed.
Mods that simply relied on the official files may just need to have the Jbeam update (as the Jbeam now includes the light patterns).
Changes will be posted in the Wiki when due to make it easier to update mods (where needed)

 

12 hours of work yesterday, 11 hours today to get 0.9.0.1 out...

 

A while after publishing the 0.8 update with the all new powertrain and controller system, it turned out that it's just not practical to replace the entire vehicleController if you want to have a custom shifting logic.
While this is perfectly supported, it means that you need to copy/paste a lot of the stock code that doesn't deal with shifting just to have your own shifting logic. Certainly not an ideal way of solving this.

So the proper solution is to outsource the shifting logic into its own module that can be easily replaced while still keeping the other code. I finally found time to tackle this and now it looks like this:



So every gearbox type has its logic in a dedicated file now. This means a few things:

• A lot less code is loaded into memory for every vehicle (since it just loads the relevant code for a given gearbox)
• The vehicleController code is a fair bit cleaner now
• It's very easy to specify a custom file with your own shifting logic

 

Working on Apple for the next few minutes, oh and an improved minimap

 

Currently working on making rev limiters optional.
And guess what, it means we'll also have some sort over-rev damage. Finally!
Currently you have a chance of damaging your valves (less compression/torque) and of completely messing up the engine (locked up).

 

Working on procedural track generation...