Dkutch and me were building a car for RoR as a quick little side-project, and we thought it would be nice if there were easier ways to simulate certain types of car/truck suspension. Basically, the car in question is using torsion bars in real life, many cars use them. For those who don't know: torsion bars rely on a grooved "axle" that goes inside a grooved hole in the chassis, with an arm attached to it that leads to the wheelhubs. The "axle" of the torsion bar twists, and the springiness of the metal forms the spring-part of the suspension. Normally, you'd just ignore those and use shocks with springs to simulate them... However, cars tend to handle much better if you can accurately replicate its real life suspension(take Dkutchs cars in RoR for example!). Seeing as there will be this really nice and realistic tire model in BeamNG, building suspension properly is likely to have an even bigger effect on how unique and realistic a car feels... So then I thought, maybe in BeamNG the developers could code some new "sections" to help with this. Of course, in many cases you can build some clever n/b construction to simulate these kinds of things. Ie, for torsion bars we could try some sort of like a twisting cube, which twists around the axle of the torsion bar. But it would be much cooler if, like slidenodes and rigidity nodes in RoR, there was a section that doesn't actually require you to use extra nodes(weight distribution, extra chance of making the n/b unstable, etcetera). Rigidity nodes could actually be used for this, probably, if you could set the springiness of the forced "angle" between the arm and the chassis. However, even then, an actual twisting spring/shock-type would be even more ideal. Leafsprings can probably be simulated by just making an arch of nodes and connecting them in some complex way(I tried it before but it didn't turn out very well). However I am sure there are other types of suspensions(or constructions) that would, with RoRs features, require us to build some overly complex n/b that would end up not working as well as it should. For example: air-suspension for trucks? hydraulic (bouncy) suspension? I mean, yes, I know you can come close to all that with just springs and shocks and command-beams, but I'm sure all these types of shocks have different properties in real life that you *cant* replicate with just springiness and damping and such(I'd imagine, since they're all constructed quite differently and use different fluids etc.)... Perhaps hydraulics are easily coded in LUA, since you did hubcaps like that too(right?)? I have no idea if torsion bars would be possible to be coded like that too though... Then I have another suggestion: Ability to code a program to change certain settings by the press of a button. That would enable us to do a lot of cool stuff: the adaptable suspension new Land/Range Rovers(amongst others) use. And again, you could do the raising-part by using command-beams with sliding nodes and shocks, building some complicated structure, but then you're, again, using nodes and beams with extra weight and spring/damping that shouldn't really be there... Or the adaptable traction control many cars have, so you switch to a sportmode(sportscars), a mode for grass-driving(Evos and Imprezas, for example)... Wouldn't it be great if we could code a "program" that changes the actual characteristics of the shocks on the fly from tarmac to rough terrain settings, ie stiffens it and raises it, with the push of a button? Like, F1 = tarmac, F2 = gravel, F3 = rocks? I'd imagine that would open up a world of possibilities for some pretty cool and complex vehicles. Then again, I also don't know if that is possible to code in LUA(since I've read somewhere that you can change beam-properties on the fly already?)... Also, please think of all this as suggestions only for when you ran out of things to do I don't see this as something even slightly important, there's much more important stuff to take care of before this. This is just something that would be something fun to have added later on. The icing on the cake, if you will...
+1 for beam settings that you can toggle. i tried setting up a similar system in RoR by using a complicated system to detach and reattach shocks with different properties. i could only get it to work one-way, and not very well. this feature could be very useful. i usually set up torsion with rotators and they are quite a pain when tuning and stabilizing. considering all the detail they're putting in to the vehicles functions, i wouldn't be surprised if they've thought of this.
Pretty sure you can replicate the torsion bars and leaf springs with a few settings of the beams, and I think the settings/modes will be really easy to make.
