Each vehicle in real life is designed to behave in a certain way during a collision. Some have specially designed crumple zones, others(older models) do not and will deform differently from the newer models etc... Also vehicles have important components such as swaybars, shocks, springs and chassis stiffness which would affect how the car handles at different G forces and conditions. My question is how does Beamng drive replicate this in the Jbeam(nodes and beams ,triangles,stiffness,spring rate etc...)? How do they know how a car should deform at a certain angle and certain velocity? Car companies spend billions of dollars designing how each car handles and deforms. Do they work with engineers from real car companies? How do they convert real life parameters to ingame values. It would be nice if they could make a "Making of" video or a behind the scenes video.
Well, I think they use real world cars as examples for the suspension geometry, but sometimes a bit simpler. For the crashing, node and beam placement is done by "following" the structural shape of the vehicle, from there on, it's a matter of adjusting individual beams and nodes to get the desired behaviour. At least, that's how I do it and I thought that the devs did it in a somewhat simular way. Converting real world to beam values can be done with math and some engineering knowledge(it gets harder if the shape becomes more complex). Say you have a certain beam from steel, you can look up the density of steel and the rest of the structural properties of it and with some calculations you can remake it. I don't think the devs actually do this but rather guesstimate the values and tweak them to get the desired behaviour. If they calculate everything, I would love to know how
They don't really need to know how vehicle deforms from certain angle as they don't build canned effects, but create a structure that has different density of nodes and strength parameters of beams that represents strength of the structure. My guess is that they build different parts to be strength that produces believable results when crashing, there probably is no conversion from real world data, building beam structure is more of art which takes lot of testing and adjusting to get it deform way creator of structure wants it to behave. With experience of building such structures they then have learned to estimate good starting point, which is then tweaked to perfection you see in game. Few links that might help: https://wiki.beamng.com/Sway_bars https://wiki.beamng.com/Construction_Guide#Suspension Then there was a page, where I saw examples of different suspension types, but I can't find it anywhere now, also my memory can lie to me and it might of been in ROR or rFactor documentation that I remember, because I can't find such page now. However general principle with suspension is to replicate the geometry, when you place pivot points at same relative locations as IRL and make sure suspension form stays as designed trough motion range, it should work like IRL. Difficulty is that in BeamNG you need often additional supports that need not to interfere with the motion. However there are additional complexity to this, it is possible to make correct structure, but still have instability, which makes it hard to get suspensions to work, certainly more information of how to design them successfully in game would be appreciated, but as many things in BeamNG there might be some future changes needed and such information will come when more stable state of game has been reached. So maybe with that you can have a picture of how things work inside of BeamNG. --- Post updated --- How thickness of said steel would affect the result of calculation, can it be taken account into too? I think that attempt to calculate vehicle would be as successful as my attempt of calculating NA torque curve from turbo torque curve, it is so close and nothing even there, it is like holy grail which you hunt and hunt, it keeps you just enough close that you are hooked, but yet enough far to loose your hair with every attempt to solve the mystery and I guess that is why we love doing those attempts of creating that perfect formula
The real question is not how they make the Jbeam rather than how do they know whats the outcome they want. Like how do they know that a covet at 45mph will deform differently from a etk at the same speed. Do they work with engineers who tell them which parts of the chassis are weak and which parts are strong, where the crumple zones are, how much stress the roof can take before it caves in etc.... All this detail cannot be obtained just by looking at pictures and videos of crash tests on youtube. Is there a way to mention or tag a developer or staff member in this post without annoying of course?
From what some people seen on the forum, the devs may have the knowledge by working with an Audi research team. You could ask someone like @Nadeox1 or @thomatoes50 or @tdev
They are transformers and spend their time beating the crap out of each other in their car form to take the data and still fight decepticons.
That's pretty much exactly how they do it. Works as well as it needs to for the damage to be accurate.
They are working with the Audi research team for the electronics such as ABS, traction control and stability control, not crash physics. On the Beamng "About us" section I found a BeamNG research section in which they explain some of the research they done, one article is about how theyr making and fine tuning the tires and how they perform. Its a long and technical article but its exactly what i was looking for. Now if only they could make an article like that for the chassis tuning and deformation. Heres the link to the page containing that tire article : https://beamng.gmbh/research/
1. Nice to see that more people are getting to know about Aggretsuko in these forums. The only others I've seen so far that know about Aggretsuko (atleast from what I saw as of now) is B727TheAirliner and MisterKenneth. 2. Yeah, I should change my username to Fenneko. Gotta "call up" meywue again in a PM.
