Looks like I wasn't able to get it all sorted before the weekend... However, the changes made go beyond the scope of the to-do list and include many tweaks that make the frames, axles, and suspension much more stable. Now the only vibrations come from the tires, which at low speed is due to having 10 rays and at high speed (100 mph+) due to them being small. This also will include changes to the beam structures of the engines, so they connect to more logical points on the frame instead of all of them connecting the same nodes. List of changes since last post: Frames Adjusted front subframe break values and connections Adjusted spring values Adjusted some node positions slightly Front Suspension Revamped the front arms so that camber, caster, and toe adjustments are more independent of each other Adjusted spring and strength values of the front subframe Rear Suspension Rear axle beam structure refined Rear independent suspension structure refined Reduced node count Changed tie rod location Changed anti-roll structure Changed hub shape All Suspension Added dedicated racing coilovers These have reduced travel. No more endos when braking! Added sport coilovers Tuned with the stats from the sport config Travel is between the race and standard coilovers Engines All engines now have drag All engines now have full collision triangles All engines now have beam structures that make more sense All 250 and 450cc engine meshes have been updated All engine particulates have been retuned All engines now have exhausts All engines now have thermal simulation The engines that did not have exhausts did not simulate thermals at all. Updated chain meshes to match new engine meshes Transfer Cases Added a crawler transfer case Wheels Added 4x6 front wheels Tires Refined tires Dummies Redid hand connection to the handlebars Adjusted break values so it falls off only at 6Gs+ or a front-end collision at 25+ mph Redid collision triangles that were backward Aero Redid a lot of the drag coefficients Any flat faces such as the kart floor or the front panels were given a coefficient of 20 (the same as the wood load for the trailers) Others were reduced based on their shape, which is all just rough guesses. Redid beam structure of the front wing No more helicopter when falling(hopefully) Added a wider front wing Added separate front and rear wings with more realistic properties The lift and drag coefficients are based on the SBR hillclimb wings. To Do before upload Copy front suspension changes to the rear This will just be the alignment changes Reduce or eliminate any instability This excludes the tires since I do not know how to make them more stable at high speeds without making them larger. I believe it's just the rpm of the tire that makes it unstable. Refine configs Refine engine thermals Right now, all of the 250 and 450cc engines have way too much cooling and some of the others have too little Test each config
Almost everything is done now, so it's down to retuning the configs, which I should be able to finish pretty quickly. Barring any major issues found during testing, this should be uploaded tonight and updated in the repo tomorrow.
i dont know if its a bug or what but seems that the exhaust options are only on the rear mounted engines and doesnt change anything
Is this for the CVT engines? Edit: Double checked it and noticed I completely spaced that! It's something I didn't put too much focus on, but expect an update soon to add the missing options If it is the high and low end exhausts, I tried to keep it realistic where the high end adds 20% to the high end rpm range and removes 0% from the low end and vice versa. The change is very subtle right now, but I can make it more impactful --- Post updated --- On top of the reported issue above, it appears a couple of configs fell through the cracks and still have the old values. I will for sure be posting an update tonight to correct those. as well as the missing exhausts. Please let me know if you see anything else I may have missed
I wasn't able to upload the update in time for today's batch of releases, but I have it awaiting approval now. I am working on a new idea for the kart, but I will wait about a week for bug reports before I dedicate attention to implementing it and keep in the brainstorming phase for now.
Oofs abound! I discovered that I messed up the breakgroups on the independent rear suspension, which is causing all of the breakgroups to trigger when a rear wheel breaks off. It is too late to get in an update before the weekend, but I will have it ready by monday! As usual, if you see anything I have not, please let me know! The update on Monday will have a few WIP changes as well.
The update over the weekend included a texture that ended up corrupting. This texture is only for the new engine mesh, so it shouldn't cause issues unless you plan on unpacking the mod to work on it yourself. I am still uploading an update tonight to address this. My main focus has been optimizing the new engine mesh, so the WIP suspension variants are not perfect, but they are stable. Here is the widened suspension Below is a list of changes since the last update: Refined new engine mesh and textures There is still a lot of work to do with the mesh as it was incredibly well detailed and I need to go in and reduce that detail It even had the internals fully modeled. Added widened front and rear double wishbone suspension This is still WIP, but it is stable. May or may not add configs for the new suspension setups The main focus I have right now is optimizing the engine mesh
It's only been a day, but I figured I'd come post a post-update post update. I am getting ever closer to a point where I can stop tweaking the drivetrain. After changing a couple of the torque reactor nodes, the engines and axles no longer twist to the side. Instead, they twist towards the rear since the engines are sideways and are driven via chain instead of a diff. This had a much bigger impact on the stability than I anticipated. The v10 doesn't veer off so hard during wheelies and the other configs handle much more smoothly under power. I also decided to try out some incredibly thin wheels for the lols and they work surprisingly well! The new engine mesh is coming along fairly nicely, I managed to remove around half of the faces without distorting the mesh too much, so hopefully, by next week I'll have it finished. I also went through textures and resized those not seen much or that could be a smaller resolution and also deleted a bunch that are not used. This reduced the file size by roughly 70MB. Plans before update: Finish engine mesh Refine wide suspension Refine one wheel rear suspension The thin tires on the standard frame
I realized I haven't shown the state of the engine mesh. Below is it in its current state. Notice the absurd number of microscopic bevels. If this engine model wasn't nearly 1:1, I wouldn't bother trying to make it decent. The textures for this model are all also made by myself using procedural textures, so I can make changes to the mesh and check how it looks in game without having to redo the textures by hand. You can tell which parts I have worked on so far by looking at the edges. If the edge has fewer than 5 bevels, I went in and changed that part. There is still a bunch to do, but it's been strangely relaxing to work on. Here is a closeup. It is one of the teeth of the shaft in the bottom center of the first picture Here is the section I have been working on today in game. I need to fix textures and apply smooth shading, but it's not looking half bad
Strange... Is this with the default configs? I think a couple of the wheel options that are not used in the default configs do not have tires available and I forgot to remove them.
Coming in with a weekend-end update. The engine mesh is coming along. Got it down from 170k to 60k faces without much distortion and nearly have all of the unnecessary bevelling removed. I also discovered that the final drive ratio is much higher than I thought. Previously, I could not find a concrete answer as to the final reduction of the drivetrain of the original 150cc engine, so I relied only on the CVT and the chain drive for reduction. The actual final drive at the axle is closer to 8.78 than the 2:1 that has been in use. What this means is I can finally put in the true engine from the original kart. It was not used originally because it only has 9ft-lb of torque, which could not drive the 700 lb kart with only a 2:1 reduction. So expect the next update to include a new 150cc engine, an accompanying diff with the 8.78:1 ratio, and new configs with the one-wheel drive spindle. Changes since last update New 150cc engine New rear diff Further reduction to engine mesh complexity
Okay, so I got the mesh done, the textures (mostly) finalized, as well as updated the drivetrain and widened suspension. I am going to be doing a bunch of testing today as well as getting the configs straightened out, but expect an update to be ready tomorrow! As usual with these updates that edit meshes and textures, if you experience missing meshes or textures, try clearing the cache or deleting the file "[beam user folder]/[game version]/temp/vehicles/bigkart" Full list of changes since the last update: Engines A new mesh for the non-kart-based engines that use a CVT 150, 250, and 450cc Reduced poly count from 170k to roughly 25k. A new 150cc engine This is the engine that truly started the kart. I decided on the 250 because I did not realize that the 150cc engine had a much higher final reduction since it had the full drivetrain. It needs a drive mesh to fully represent the IRL setup. Adjusted some sounds Separated exhaust breakgroup from the engine Suspension Refined widened suspension Refined widened suspension coilovers Wheels Added a few skinny wheels 10x1 WIP, but they are silly 10x4 Scooter This is the size of the wheel originally on the scooter the 150 engine came from 6x1 Super floppy tires 16x4 Dirt Bike This is based on the rear wheel from a mid-2010s Honda CRF150 The motorcycle and scooter wheels use a stand-in mesh Powertrain Updated powertrain to rotate longitudinally instead of transverse This means the rear wheels should not lift under power since the torque will try to spin the axle Added new diff for the new 150cc engine
So uhh, it turns out I put some nitroglycerin in the dummy... Crash too hard and it will explode. I will be working on fixing that for the next update. It doesn't happen all the time and I only notice it during head on crashes above 100 mph.
Late Week start update: I am working on simplifying the frame mesh since now I know it does not need to have 16 sides on each pipe to look decent. This will also make it easier for me to work on the textures as well as allow me to combine the textures for the different frames. I also added a separated front, center, rear frame mesh, which will allow for not only having them be removable, but also allow me to make frames more modular. For example, the Independent rear frame only differed from the standard frame in the rear subframe and I had to set up an entirely separate frame and texture for that. But now I can combine all of the frame options into one UV map since the simplifications and the reduction in complexity means there is less clutter overall. Changes since the last post update: Simplified frame meshes Combined frame mesh UVs This is still done using the auto-generated UVs from blender since I am still a noob at that. Updated textures to be more uniform across all frames Added a new rear wing based on the sunburst hillclimb wing It is mounted on the bottom of the frame instead of the top, which looks a lot better I need to adjust the mesh to not collide with the drivetrain Currently on the standard frame only for now Continued tweaking the tires and wheels The HR welded front config can get under 2 minutes on Suzuka without needing to fight it as much, so I am getting closer to being happy with it Changed the first-person camera to no longer have sound dampening thanks to a tip from a reddit thread
It turns out the part I used to estimate the size was cut by about 30%! This means the kart as it is in-game is significantly smaller than IRL and much lighter. I do not want the work I put into optimizing the kart to go to waste, so I will not be replacing the existing frames with the larger ones. However, I will be making a larger frame to be more accurate to real life and putting in basic configs (the 250cc and 350cc variants) on that frame. If it turns out to be more stable than the current frame, I will probably be adding the more niche variants (Independent rear and raised rear axle) to it as well. EDIT: this assumption was wrong. I only messed up the front subframe. The front subframe is supposed to be 10 inches square when looked at from the front and I had it 6x10. I am really happy I do not have to make a new frame and whatnot now. What this does mean is that the front coilovers will now work a lot better since they will be compressing more per degree of change in the arm positions. Below is what made me question the scaling. Those front wheels have 10-inch wheelbarrow rims and the extents of the front arms is 10 inches top to bottom. I initially thought that the rear wheel must have been smaller than 15 inches since I assumed the front wheel was 6x4 with a 12-inch tire, but it's 10x4 with an 18-inch tire. I will be editing the 150cc config to have this size of tire. Other than that, not much has been done since yesterday other than tweaking the textures on and reducing the complexity of the existing frames.
Hello everyone! I managed to find a serviceable engine model for the 350cc engine. It was a free model I found on sketchfab here. The engine model is from a 450cc, but it is close enough to the 350 that I don't really care myself. My goals for this weekend is to fix up the model for use in Beamng, which will be really easy since it comes with the original blend file with all of the modifiers unapplied, so I can easily make it low poly without too much work. So far I got the engine separated from the bike frame, imported to the main kart blend file, and have started working on simplifying the block. Below is an image of the new mesh with exhaust next to the old mesh. I plan on keeping the old and new exhausts and using the old one for the standard exhaust and the new one for the tuned exhausts. It also came with coilovers that really closely match the ones that were on the IRL kart. These are a lot slimmer than the coilovers currently in use, so I plan on keeping them for the standard coilovers and using the existing ones for the heavy, sport, and race coilovers. The front subframe changes massively improved the handling. The standard front coilovers went from needing 18000 spring to 8000. This is an immense improvement over the previous setup and now it feels like it actually has real suspension. What this means in regards to configs is that now there is a whole lot more wiggle room for tuning since the damping values do not have to be on the edge of structural stability. I am getting much closer to tires and wheels that are stable at high speeds without sacrificing low-speed performance. I can now get around Hirochi Long Course in just over a minute and the only major fighting I do is with my own skill. So, these changes altogether will push the next update out a bit, but I feel like it will be worth it in the end. Changelog: Frame Changed height of front subframe Used to be 6x10, is now 10x10 to match reality Changed coilover mesh to match the new angle Significantly reduced face count on the frame It's roughly half of what it was previously The change is only really noticeable if you look closely at the pipe ends Tried a new texturing technique to attempt to reduce the total number of textures required Split IRS frame into front, center, and rear sections This change allows me to further reduce texture count by having the only difference be the rear subframes This also allows for adding experimental front subframes since the subframe nodes/beams are now isolated in the suspension jbeams. Engines found a new mesh for the 350cc that doesn't look like playdough The focus of this model was the motorbike, so there are a few details that are iffy. Overall, it is much better and I can get it to a lower face count than the original mesh without making it look so bad. Textures were not included, so I am going to have to make my own Tires Got the Ultra tires much more stable at high speeds Can now get up to 160mph before they start getting really unstable Managed to increase stability while reducing weight closer to IRL kart tires Wheels Wheels are now more stable without allowing as much expansion The stability increase also came with a reduction in weight. Tasks before update: Complete engine mesh simplification Redo configs Redo coilovers Redo front subframe precompression Ensure textures aren't glitchy For some reason, there is texture bleeding although the UV map does not show any overlap in the spots that have it.
I managed to get the mesh simplified to an acceptable level. Now I am moving on to texturing the rest of the kart, which will take a bit of time as I am doing this differently than before. Previously, I just unwrapped everything and baked the texture from that. What I am doing now is UV duplication for duplicate or similar parts, which will allow for greater texture quality since the UV islands will be much larger. I am following this on all parts except for the frame since each pipe has a unique texture due to the weathering pattern. I am also updating the chain mesh since the old one was a mess and incredibly poly-dense. Although the new mesh is more complex-looking, it actually has less than half the faces the old chains did. Here is the new chain
