Putting any tire on any wheel (within reason)

I have a number of mods already that add a multitude of wheels and tires to the game, many of which are compatible with eachother and the vanilla stuff, provided the wheels are the correct size. Unfortunately some of these, despite matching sizes, simply don't show up in other wheels (e.g Adler wheels only show a given selection, despite being the 'same' size as many other wheels with a greater selection of tires)

My question is if there is a way to 'force' the list to display all available wheels, or is there something in the wheel/tire JBeam that can be modified to make it work?

 

I've worked with this extensively. What's available today in the game does not allow for an easy solution to this problem. I hope that one day a new system will be put in place for wheels and tires, but I haven't seen anything to indicate this is even under consideration. It would take a significant amount of work AND it would not be compatible with current content.

 

Damn, thats annoying, its actually quite a few of your mods I'm interested in making work What is the underpinning of drop down tyre selection? Is there anything I can do to force it at least on my own machine, not necessarily as a mod?

 

You can certainly force whatever you want. Just read up on jbeam slots and you'll be golden.

For the most part the results will not be pretty. The biggest issue is really mesh work. The meshes are not parametric, they are modeled in a static fashion. Not all of the rims feature the same bead contours, so the same tires would fit them in different ways (at least based on the way the artists have created them). Additionally, not all of the official tires and wheels are scaled correctly. (Needless to say, this problem is even worse with mod content.)

Assuming that the scale is the same for a pair of rims, and that they are the same size, the offset is not always the same. Sometimes it's off by a little (mistakes/inconsistencies), and sometimes it's off by a lot (rims with larger actual offsets). The game does not have a proper offset system, so wheel types with different offsets must use tires which are also offset. This concept is difficult for most folks to understand because it's significantly different from IRL... IRL when you move the rim, the tire certainly goes with it! That's not how it works here. It is common in the official content for a single, unchanged, tire to be repeated 3 times to cover 3 different offsets.

If the shape of the bead/lip is different you may find that a tire which would otherwise fit will clip through the rim in that area.

The tire jbeams should adapt just fine IIRC. If my memory serves, the tire jbeam generator doesn't even care what the rim size is.

Adapting individual tires for individual wheels is not terribly hard. Doing it en masse is very tedious.

 

I'll do some reading and see what I come up with, that all makes sense, I've seen the results of the offset issue on some other mods, so I understand what you mean there. Thanks for your help

 

I've had a look around the JBeams both in game and on the mods, and I think I've worked out where I can manipulate it to work. First question, can I assign multiple slot types to a given JBeam? Or do I have to have multiple copies of the same JBeam with different slot types? If so, can I put that in a separate mod folder and it will correctly reference the models it needs or does it need to be contained within the same Zipped file?

 

The game mounts all resources into the same virtual directory structure. Zips don't matter, what does matter is folder paths. /levels, /vehicles, etc are all in the root directory of the virtual structure. If the official content has a file called "vehicles/common/dude.dude" and you put a file into your zip like "vehicles/common/dude.dude", you will overwrite the official content while that mod is loaded.

Just start hacking. You can't permanently break the game. As I was trying to explain above - once you learn how this stuff works your project will seem much less attractive. Jump in with both feet: simply move some tires between slots and see what happens.

There is no support for a part fitting multiple slots. There wouldn't be any point since everything is arbitrary... position etc. If you have Slot A and Slot B but somehow Part 1 works in both slots... why do you have two different slots?

 

I've been working on a VBA Macro that can Parse the Wheel and Tyre JBEAMs to find the different slots, Managed to find that the vanilla game has 547 unique wheels, with 84 unique tyre slots between them. There are a significant number of 'shared' wheel sizes, but using an "alt" and "altb" suffix. You mentioned there that mod directories will always overwrite the vanilla content. In that case can I simply copy the JBEAMs I have, do an Find/Replace for "alt" and "altb", getting rid of both, and the game will simply read my new mod folder, ignoring the vanilla jbeams of the same filename?

 

Yes, just copy the files and then modify them in your mod directory. For working on a mod of this type I'd use a path something like this:
Documents\BeamNG.drive\mods\unpacked\mymod\vehicles\common\whateverwhateverwhatever


I assume that you already understand Visual Basic, but your life might be easier if you started doing that stuff in Lua since your reference material is all Lua:
Steam\SteamApps\common\BeamNG.drive\lua

Certainly if you intend to do any automated processing it's worth consideration.

I'm sure that you can reach this conclusion on your own, but you want to do your find&replace on "_altb" first and "_alt" second.

 

I've never worked with Lua, I might have a play to see how I work with it, you may be right! I'll smash together a mod folder and test it in theory and feedback results. If that works then I'll try to put together a full set of wheels and tyres.

 

Nailed it. As you say, the tyres work fine but the positions and what not are slightly off.

Looking closer at the JBeams, I assume the co-ordinates below are what would cause this mismatch?

 

That's where the mesh is positioned, so 'yes' as far as that goes. It's been a while since I've done much work with wheels/tires so I can't remember if that's the only offset issue. (is the jbeam not offset incorrectly?) The post you quoted actually discusses several potential issues, not just intentional offsets. Bead/rim-lip shapes, incorrect scales, etc are all still issues even without the offset issues. A script like the one I wrote for my wheel spacers mod could be used to adjust offset for tires en masse. It would require a large look-up-table (which is a nest of problems on it's own). The main reason not to expend the effort to write such a script is all of those other issues. Tires clipping through rims, tires that have a larger ID than the OD of a rim, etc.

My personal advice is to continue pushing on towards getting a small handful of tires ported over between rims. It'll be a strong learning experience. While I doubt that you'll want to continue once you've done a few, the knowledge will leave you well prepared to work on more fruitful modding projects.

 

Yeah I understand what you're saying. To be honest the VBA script I wrote before effectively provides me with a lookup table, so that may be a starting point? I'll have a nosey at the code behind your spacers mod, I've been using that since damn near its inception and its working is genius

That quick test above was only 5 minutes of work, I'll start messing with numbers and see how different things get affected and go from there, I can definitely see the scale of things though after doing that one set of wheels and tyres.

Next question, is there a way to refresh the game if I'm messing with JBEAMs in a mod for a semi live update of what I'm doing or do I have to close and open the game every time I make a change?

 

Try CTRL+R. By default that should be mapped to a full reload of the vehicle from disk.

 

Unfortunately explorer wouldn't let me modify any of the files while the game was running.

However



I somehow got it to work! Now to work out how to commonise these offsets and make it work for most wheels Wish me luck!

 

https://www.beamng.com/threads/d-troxx-stretched-tyre-add-on.57665/

I definitely see what you mean by a mammoth task! I wasn't able to make 'every' wheel work with every tyre, but I gave it a damn good go with my first ever mod Just awaiting approval in the Repo