Micro Blog(s) - March to December 2016

206 different configurations in the game

 

Toying around with some actual performance information: (These were not entered by hand )

 

Added a simple vehicle extension that will display a skeleton by default (no matter what the debug mode is doing) if the vehicle contains no flexbodies. This is supposed to ease the work with jbeam, as you see sth on the screen without having to switch debug mode on.

 

Working on proper (not-randomly-in-the ground) vehicle spawning

 

Small GIF with the various steps of creating a new skin for the Rally version.

 

A short technical description on how the new auto placing system works:

1) shoot a ray down towards the ground on the refnode, left and back nodes.


green lines = rays, blue balls = hit with ground

2) it figures out the rotation of the triangle it projected onto the ground and rotates the vehicle accordingly. That works most of the times. Green nodes = new positions after autoplace

 

Just fixed the famous god-nodes replay bug, and in exchange we got a brand new awesome bug to fix!

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

mi amor <3

 

Working on some things (deep architectural engine changes) until 6am on Sat morning:






also, a new spline for the decalroads:

 

While browsing Imgur,
I've stumbled upon an interesting GIF:


A few hours later and with the help of @Goosah


We use a coupler to stabilize the wheel, and allow it to spin at 1000rpm.
Then we release the coupler, and with the help of node-grab we move it in position.

It's no trick, it's no illusion. It's physics!

 

I guess it's time to show some progress again.
@Goosah and I have been working on a completely new differential code which is now based on a tree structure consisting of differentials and shafts connecting those differentials.
It also features things like switchable diffs or disconnectable shafts.

Here are two little video showing a Grand Marshal with various driveline setups:

1. Open rear differential
2. Locked rear differential
3. Locked front, rear and center differential

Notice how the wheels spin according to the differential setup.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Back in the brainstorming stage for this new driveline system, I found it was hard to find good "schematics" of drivetrains to share. So I whipped some sketches. These are not any kind of game art or supposed to be fancy, but they show examples of the types of drivetrains that we have working now in our prototype:

This is a standard 4wd/awd system using a center differential. Any one of these differentials could be open, viscous lsd, clutch lsd, or locked, or switched between those on the fly, and any shaft could be disconnected on the fly. Oh, also, any torque split is possible at any differential as well.



Next is what we have been calling a "budget" awd system, such as one that a fwd converted awd system might use. Instead of a center diff, torque always goes to the front differential, but if the front starts spinning faster than the rear, torque starts to transfer to the rear through a viscous coupling.



Taken to the extreme, here is what an 8 wheel drive vehicle would use if you want it to steer without any binding. 7 differentials! Again any shafts or diffs here could be locked on the fly.



Here is a somewhat simpler way to do 8 wheel drive, where pairs of axles are coupled with a locked connection.

 

Friday night, obviously working on BeamNG

We brainstormed about art toolchain problems today:


And some impressions from the office:

Our individual coffee maker


And the mass coffee maker:







We tested / supported quite some wheels over time:


32 Deg Celsius still D:


Found some VR in the corner


#coffeepic


Got dark outside - not many people left working this late

 

Doing some relaxed sunday night performance profiling of the new driveline code.

 

We finally decided on the translation toolchain and have a dedicated website now: http://translate.beamng.com/projects/beamngdrive/game/

You can now register separately and start translating the next version of the game. The sources are not complete yet - We'll add a lot more strings later on.

 

Our internal changelog for the game engine includes 361 items since the last public update more than a month ago.

It looks like this (font size intentionally too small to read ):


Note that this list does not include changes to cars, maps, user interface, drivetrain physics, etc (those have also taken place, but is not reflected in the image above).

So most of it is... invisible stuff, things that nobody will notice after the next update is released, things you don't even know how to explain when someone asks "what did you do at work today"

The items in the list can be as small as one-line bugfixes (which may or may not have taken hours to track down), or as big as the removal of 138540 lines of code in one go (code that needed to go, to make our dev lifes simpler).

 

Had to fix this, this annoyed me for years...

 

Took me two days to track down this bug. Contributed back to open source: https://github.com/diegonehab/luasocket/pull/190