A few others and I were discussing a fun, friendly little competition to try and inspire some creativity in the community. The idea is, you build a vehicle around a given thrust limit, and weight of said thrust, along with other rules, and then we compete to see who can build the best vehicle to go as fast as possible within a 20km map, all wheels on the ground and in tact. Rules are: 1. Maximum total thrust must NOT exceed 30,000n. This value is named "thrustLimit". You can have as many "thrusters" as you wish, however the max total thrust must be divided evenly across all "thrusters". 2. The weight that everyone must carry for the 30,000n of thrust is 1,000 kg's. Because a single thruster uses 2 nodes and one beam, those two nodes would then be 500 kg's each. Just like with thrust, if you have more "thrusters" you must then divide the 1,000 kg's evenly across all thruster nodes. 3. Minimum drag coefficient is 10. You can have higher drag, but nowhere in the jbeams will it drop below 10. 4. All body parts must be accurately replicated and submeshed with node and beams. 5. Minimum of 3 wheels. All wheels must be housed in some sort of body work. 6. Must be able to stop itself. Also must have wheel brakes. 7. Vehicle must be able to steer on one end at a minimum. 8. All entries must be original, a.k.a. no taking a Bolide and making it go xxx mph. 9. Entries must be released to the public after judging. 10. Entries must also deform semi-realisticly in a crash. Gabester will be judging each one. As of right now, there is no set dead line. I was thinking about one month or so to give everyone a fair shot. Gabester said he would judge. He's going to be examining each vehicle fairly close, so cheating will NOT get you anywhere. Here's the list of people signed up so far. Registration is open to competent people: 1. dkutch 2. Mythbuster 3. Muira 4. DrowsySam If anyone wants in, send me a private message and I'll try to update the thread as soon as I can. Also, huge thanks to Muira for providing a map:
I'll update the map later. The current version is just a couple of hours of work and has some issues. I'll make the edges of the flat area more visible and add some clearer straight lines, so it's easier to stay in line. Maybe some other groundmodel would be better, it's sand now. Length of the flat part may change too if most people agree that 20 km is not enough. 30 km could be possible.
I would join if dummiesman's converters were still working because i kinda rely on the visual n/b maker like blender
8. All entries must be original, a.k.a. no taking a Bolide and making it go xxx mph. EDIT: Bobpls stahp being fast :|
well, then have fun, because the majority of the community has no idea how to model, including me, as its to complicated
Oh dont sweat it man you've alredy done so much magic just a question for the participants. Do you guys build the n/b traight out of the notepad?
I use Notepad++, and blender. In blender, there's a 3d curser that you can pull coords from. You place that where you want a node, copy the position. Then move to the next one. From there, each beam is done in game. I'll load all the nodes in game, and freeze the physics while it's still in mid air. Add beams, repeat.
I'll be the first to say that 20km isn't nearly enough to also have room to stop, for my vehicle at least. As we talked about on Skype, Miura, changing the 4 to 6 in the map block size thing makes it (barely) big enough for me at least, I think you said that was around 30km. 20km for me is enough to reach a high speed, but then I have no room to stop. And I think a proper salt-flat style groundmodel might need to be chosen(the stuff that is on the left patch on Gridmap, perhaps). Going straight-out outside of Gridmap, I can reach way higher speeds(about 300km/h higher) than in the sand that M40 currently has, and acceleration is way higher on the tarmac too. I know someone will say "but it's supposed to be across a certain distance"... Yeah, it is... Except the real salt flats are WAY longer than 30km, and Thrust SSC(way heavier than our vehicles) needed 20km to get to 1200 or so km/h... And then it needed to slow down. Even with massive airbrakes you're not gonna slow a vehicle down from 1200 to 0 fast enough, because it'll just break the vehicle(I'm saying this from experience, I had to make dual-stage airbrakes in order to stop in time without completely destroying my car)
Ahh that seems a little tedious than how i used to do it but i see the benefit in it to where you can name the nodes individually like ax1,ax2 etc. Good to know
might want to add it to the rules. I didn't want my wheels powered to add to the max speed, just to put around edit: and the car has to have a 3d model for it right?
Seems a very interesting challenge to build some really retro classics like the Bluebird...for example or Thrust 2
wish I was a computer modeler. I would be all over this! I've been building an rc replica of the Green Monster. If anyone is down to build one for me I'll name my next born child after you! (imported from here) (imported from here) (imported from here)
