On other thread I got an idea, it might not be possible to make at all, but anyone making maps probably can tell straight if this would work. I thought that adding snow pile next to road as a fence/wall forest object that is also a soft bush and then having ground outside of road as a mud with snow texture, tuned with new mud parameters that came in 0.9 so that car sinks to "snow", might add lot to immersion, but would it work? Even if snow pile next to road would be just non collision object and ground would be something one can sink would be improvement over having just snow texture. I guess someone has experimented with this, does it work at all?
Why would we need the bush? You could just add a (Retextured) mud pile next to the road. Also, you need ice to complete the wintry feel!
I guess mud would work, setting it just enough deep so it kills speed instead of launching car up like a ramp, someone capable would need to experiment with this, I'm not that capable Ice is not that hard I guess, just adjusting road grip levels for gravel and tarmac for snow and ice, then placing appropriate textures. Bit challenging would be the fact that we don't have spike tires, so some tires would have unrealistic grip levels to be able to drive there at all, however maybe something could be cooked up. I can contribute only idea to this, sadly.
I live in the northeast us, and I'm used to snow. If we have snow, it needs to turn roads to slush, and there needs to be different hardnesses of it. (Light vs Heavy).
What you would do with the ground model is create a terrain with the shape of the snow bank in the height map, then use a depth map to make the actual bottom of the terrain flat like the actual ground. Then, using the new, better ground fluid physics, you could create a pretty good feeling with it. About the ground model physics: The old ground fluid physics (what makes mud, sand, or anything with "depth" act that way) had a few limitations. It relied only on nodes, which meant that tires acted like "perfect paddles" in the fluid. Cars were always able to get out of the mud provided they had enough power. Coupled with this, the vehicles would act like they were floating totally (unless they touched the bottom), bobbing up and down and slowly drifting around. The other problem was that stability was not very good so the density had to be low, so everything would tend to sink to the bottom of the fluid. We redid the system, now it uses the pressure or collision triangles to understand better the shape of the object in the fluid, so it is more like the aerodynamics system in function. So, now, when a tire is spinning in the mud, instead of nodes acting like a ton of "scoops" in the mud, it looks at the triangles and sees that all the surfaces of the tire are moving through the fluid with a small angle of attack, and so the tire doesnt get much traction. Now, when you steer in the fluid, it sees the sidewall of the tire as a flat surface that acts more like a rudder, whereas before it would just see nodes and apply the same drag regardless. We massively improved the stability of the density system, so tires can float/skip on top of the mud/sand if the tires are wide enough or moving fast enough. With the shearStrength, a threshold of pressure has to be overcome in the fluid to make it to move. This represents the internal strength of the fluid. Think of sand or snow. When you leave it alone it tends to hold its shape, until enough force is applied to break its internal bonds, and then it tends to act more fluid like, until it comes to rest again.
That is really cool I had to load my old "mud map" from 0.7 and test this. I can confirm. New system well improved. Hopper does good. Pessima, not so much
Indeed that is really cool, thanks @Goosah! This all allows me to do stuff I'm used to do IRL (mainly getting stuck part, but then getting tractor part and pulling part too ) Do you realize guys what maps people are going to make for next Christmas? It might be small line in devblog, but opens up whole new possibilities for map makers, certainly worth the time and sweat devs have put into it!
I think for that we should charge something, it would allow people from south to experience real stuff so naturally that needs a price tag, it is an experience
No. We'll make shoveling my driveway a tourist attraction! I'll get paid for others to shovel MY driveway! --- Post updated --- We already have something that could be used as a snow shovel, the front of the SBR4 Hill Climb! (Close Enough)
I think that if you have them wide enough, they might float on mud and paddle car forward. Ninja'd by Gabester. Tractor tires work really well on mud it seems (almost like if mud would not be there), also on sand grip is lots more than on pavement with tractor kind of tire, you can pull wheelies without much of any wheel spin actually, so maybe tires need to be updated for 0.9 version. Another idea I got for realistic snow, using gravel road's dust effect we can have effects of what happens when you drive on fresh snow, also mud splatter effects on deep snow can be used to make snow fly, which should add some to immersion factor. Also ETK driving experience centers water splash effect, maybe possible to change texture to snow so you get additional possibility to add effects of snow near the tires / running snow around car/tires when ending to deep snow. Ghot's river discussion at Repo had small hint how he made that effect. Thinking about Swedish winter rally stages. For reference:
Being swedish, I like where this is going! More or less grown up sideways on icy lakes and on snowy roads in the forrest. Amazing what speeds you can reach with a Volvo 740 with studded rally tires on those lakes. Also amazing how far and long a 740 can be pushed before it gives up (read: if it ever gives up that is lol).
One suggestion (which may not help much) is to make your paddles smaller... from the structure you have there it looks like your paddles are absolutely huge (Almost the entire radius of the tire it looks like) which would generate the huge forces you are describing. If you could somehow make them similar in size to the ones you have on your mesh wheels, your results would probably make themselves a lot more realistic without having to tinker with the engine. Edit: Ahh, I see why you did what you did... the paddles are not connected to the tire, but merely driven by them... Thats pretty clever! That does require a rather large contact area though to prevent the nodes getting by the paddles due to tire deformation.
This is true, but even paddle wheels don't have perfect grip in mud... if anything, they are just "better" then regular mud tires, so your results might surprise you in how they handle. Now if you reduce the paddles to regular size and can barely tell that they are there as opposed to a tire without them, then I would agree that some modifications may need to be made to the calculations.
Ah, there is a bit of misunderstanding how our aerodynamics and mud physics works i think. Forces are applied at the nodes as if there is a little airfoil on each one, with the angle of attack determined by the normal, which is influenced by the angle and size of the surrounding tris. So just so you know, the actual forces your paddles are applying is occuring at the nodes on the tip of the paddle. The triangle dragCoef will affect the forces in air and water, the node treadCoef will affect the performance in mud. TreadCoef is default to a value of 0.1 but can go as high as 1.
A higher ray wheel would have more nodes but less area per node, so it should work out the same in mud. I didnt mean to say the paddle system is a bad idea, it just doesnt need to be so large probably, and the coefficients can be tuned as I mentioned. I may try adding paddle triangles internally to the tire structure and see if it might be a worthwhile option. The current distribution of treadCoef is biased to hamper the drag tires as much as possible; they have a huge frictionCoef that needs to be multiplied down on all sorts of dirt surfaces or the drag car would still wheelie everywhere. In my opinion a 20% increase in grip is considerable headroom, the factor only goes from 0 to 1, to give more there I would have to reduce the range of the other tires, and race tires would start outperforming rally tires on dirt again.
