To accurately simulate hybrids 'n stuff. There should be the ability to have an electric and gas supply for an electric and gas engine. There could be a ui app to determine which motor to use. If I wanted to create a prius, I could only have one engine at a time.
This would be a cool idea for some of the vehicles, perhaps a modified Covet could have a backup electric engine that generates different power levels, speed, torque and that type of thing. It could have a button, say the "T" key or whatever, that switches between gas and electric engines. If one engine were to break due to radiator damage, you could switch to the electric one.
I like this idea. I'd love to be able to properly simulate electric and hybrid vehicles. Rather than "two" engines, I'd rather be able to have "more than one" because AWD electric vehicles usually have four motors, and some hybrids have an engine powering one pair of wheels and a pair of electric motors powering the other pair of wheels.
Alright then. I honestly was thinking that doing this would be for hybrid simulation. And for electric cars. I honestly think that lua is what is going to make this work.
It would also be cool if the electric engine could be combined with a gas engine like in modern hypercars, where the electric engines help with instant torque, and then the gas engine takes over for top speed.
This seems mostly feasible right now. Just specify which engines control which differentials. Diffs in BNG can control any number of wheels iirc, and you could tell one engine to power the front wheels and another engine for the rear! Or assign both engines to all 4 wheels and write some lua code to decide when each engine should be running
I've done some hybrid and full electric vehicles by simulating electric motors with negative brake torque in lua. It works quite well when there should be one motor per wheel, and it's more versatile than engine + diffs. You can do torque vectoring or drive in electric only mode with the engine off. One of my cars has front wheels driven by engine and rear wheels by electric motors. Only problem is, brake torque reverses direction at 0 speed, so the motors often try to spin the wrong way when driving from a stop. I haven't found a way around that yet. There's a function that should apply torque in the same direction, but it seems to get overwritten by drivetrain.lua.
