Unified in-car dashboard code

Over the past weeks, I've made some effort to unify our in-car dashboard lua code base.

Up until now, they all used their own lua controllers to do their job. While that works, it's not very efficient (or elegant), they mostly do the same job with just slight differences in which data they display or what specific functions they offer.

In a strive to reduce complexity and to also increase the approachability for modders, all our dashboards now use the same lua code and are configured via jbeam.

As usual, this is not a static system, the dashboard configuration tells the game which values to send over and which specific functions to execute. Of course there's also plenty opportunity to still use custom lua code for super fancy things, but for "standard" dashboards, that need is hopefully very small.

Here's an example of a jbeam config from the ICE Vivace:

Code:

"controller": [
        ["fileName"],
        ["gauges/genericGauges", {"name":"gauge", }],
        ["gauges/customModules/environmentData"],
        ["gauges/customModules/combustionEngineData"],
    ],

    "gauge": {
        "configuration": {
            "materialName": "@vivace_gauges_screen"
            "htmlPath": "local://local/vehicles/vivace/gauges_screen/gauges_screen_basic.html"
            "displayWidth":1024
            "displayHeight":256
        }
        "displayData": {
            "electrics": [
                "signal_L",
                "signal_R",
                "lights",
                "highbeam",
                "lowpressure",
                "lowfuel",
                "parkingbrake",
                "checkengine",
                "hazard",
                "oil",
                "cruiseControlActive",
                "gear",
                "rpmTacho",
                "fuel",
                "watertemp",
                "engineRunning",
                "wheelspeed",
                "esc",
                "escActive",
                "tcs",
                "tcsActive"
                "fog",
            ]
            "powertrain": [
                ["deviceName", "property"]
                //["mainEngine", "outputTorque1"]
                //["mainEngine", "outputAV1"]
                //["gearbox", "outputAV1"]
            ]
            "customModules": [
                ["moduleName", "property"]
                ["environmentData", "temperatureEnv",]
                ["environmentData", "time",]
            ]
        }
    }

As you can see, it consists of two major sections, the screen configuration and info about what data it needs.
The data itself can be split in three main parts:

• Electrics values
• Powertrain values
• Custom modules

The first two are fairly self explanatory, the custom modules however might not be.
Custom modules are a way of providing custom (ha!) data to the dashboard if the need arises. This can be literally anything you can do in lua as these modules are controllers themselves at their heart.

Here are some examples of custom modules that will come with the game:

• combustionEngineData: Provides info on fuel consumption, generates data for the pretty info bar of the ETK800, calculates remaining range etc
• electricMotorData: similiar to above, just tailor-fit for electric motors
• environmentData: Provides info like time and outside temperature
• navgiationData: Takes care of built-in navigation screens
• accelerationData: Handles acceleration values, used in the SBR screen for example

We hope to make creating your own screens a little more approachable with this while also increasing performance somewhat (no need to send lots of unused electrics data if you are just after a few values...)

The JS code of the screens will remain specific per screen as that includes a lot of design and layout things and can't be made generic easily.

As you are used to, the old way of doing things will continue to work, but I highly suggest to all modders with screens in their cars to upgrade to this new system once it's released.

 

This is what we needed, creating custom gauges used to be kinda messy and people would just copy them directly from official cars, this solution is WAY better!

 

This will be released with the next big update.

 

This is already possible in public versions in the cases where it makes sense.