Physics in BeamNG

I'm a physics student in college and I'm interested in the physics formulas used in this game. I've been looking around the game files but I can't find anything. Could any dev give me a hand in this?

Thanks

 

you should look at rigs of rods maybe I think it's open source. its not the same obviously but it's similar

 

I second that.
Here's the source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rigsofrods/

I guess nodes have velocity, mass - momentum, kinetic energy and they're affected by gravity and forces from the springs(beams). Nodes also have friction and a radius (spherical collision/ie: distance based; which is relatively simple).
So nodes are like a physics body in every other game, but it's the beams that make a difference: beams are basically springs. I suppose Hooke's Law would be the best resource for that - haven't looked into it in-depth, but Hooke's Law seems to cover how springs behave with different forces/distances.
As for the triangles/submeshes: Aerodynamics, Drag coefficients and stuff. Not too sure about the collisions though (it cant be just a plane and a point because it would clip right through, I'm also not sure how spherical and plane collisions work)
Hope that helps, atleast a bit.

 

I think it's the other way around. Nodes are points with no radius, but surfaces have thickness.

 

Surfaces dont have thickness yet miura, thats actually the cause of inter-vehicle collision = sticking (sometimes). Devs have mentioned it themselves, usually in reference to people posting collision bugs and how adding thickness would solve the vast majority of them.

From what I can tell, nodes collide with terrain and also with surfaces. Beams and surfaces dont appear to collide with terrain, dunno whats going on there but it seems to be the cause of objects hooking on terrain.

The collision bugs seem to be from nodes not detecting the collision with a near infinitely thin surface, carrying on through and then managing to detect the collision on the way back out so getting stuck, as a result the covet I just rammed with an H series is still attached to the H series grill.

 

this man speaks TRUTH
http://www.beamng.com/threads/4943-Car-trailer-for-Gavril-D15?p=61478#post61478
http://www.beamng.com/threads/4960-Loads-in-vehicles?p=55711#post55711

I'm excited for that bug to be smashed.

 

As Gabe explained in those links, currently triangles have one-sided thickness. Nodes will easily go through the surface from one side and get stuck on the other side. The planned fix is adding thickness for the other side too. Even now, close-fitting jbeam structures need a few cm of gap between a node and a surface or they will deform immediately at spawn. That's one downside to adding thickness.