Driving surfaces

We all know driving over dirt isn't a smooth activity, and there where alot of perfectly flat surfaces in RoR off-road. well, that got me thinking that maybe adding noise to the level's collision model would help... but there's always a trade off between the size of the map and the detail you can put in there, so it's actually rather difficult not to have bumpy surfaces that ruin your FPS. Maybe some engines have a way to manage it, but certainly not all.

but that got me thinking, what about procedurally generated noise? not randomly generated, because that means the same patch of ground is completely different every time you drive over it. but procedurally generated in a fashion similar to Space Engine generates stars and galaxies. That way you can have noise in your collision model, therefore bumps and imperfections on your driving surface and a surface to drive on that is consistent. If it's only generated around a small area surrounding your car, and removed again at distance then it wouldn't murder FPS either. you would greatly increase realism when driving on surfaces that by nature aren't smooth.

you could also do something to resemble terrain deformation when it comes to handling if contact with the ground "smoothed" the peaks and troughs generated by the noise. It should have a very similar effect to the weight of a car driving over dirt and flattening it out, similar to how a car in real life flattens dirt out by pushing it out to the sides.

I don't know how one would handle it, and tell the effect where not to generate said noise but it's just an idea. I'm not talking about an effect that is entirely obvious, it should be subtle. but it would have a similar effect to one I've felt driving over dirt, that when you're going something akin to straight the rear wheels love following the tracks made by the front wheels and it can occasionally make cornering a little difficult.

 

That's a really good idea, but i think CryEngine can't handle that or it's just too difficult to make that work because it's an engine made for FPS games :\

 

He is thinking that it is not possible in cryengine3, he apparently never noticed that beam ng is a completely different engine that can run any c++ program.

 

I actually think procedurally generated noise might be possible for terrains, but it would require a ton of polygons I think, even if it only renders out a few meters around your vehicle... I'm actually just starting classes in school on a program called Houdini, in which you can easily generate a lot of complicated geometry using procedurals. The possibilities of what you can do with it are pretty much endless I think.

However, I think time invested in making noise in the visual model would be better spent researching if it's possible to write code telling wheels to try and follow a track made by other wheels previously when driving on dirt... I think it would be a lot easier to add that affect via coding than recreating the effect with procedurals in the actual model, even if it would require the game to log a path where you've driven in memory...

Yes, then it wouldn't be visual where you'll get stuck more easily and such, but perhaps it would be possible to make it visible with tiremark textures with a heavy normal map, like in most other games where you can go offroad with cars...

I do think it's a good idea if the devs try to make it possible for tires to 'loosen up' dirt after driving over it so it's easier to get stuck in that place next time, even if the only visual effect would be a textured tiremark or slightly darker earth... Would make off-roading so much more than just driving over bumps

 

the idea was noise in the collision model, not the visual model. turns out something much cheaper than my suggestion is probably going to happen. Rather than generating noise around the car, they're just going to add noise to the wheel collision directly.

 

I think Spin Tires is a better alternative for this kind of stuff