Hi, I hope this thread is not considered to be bumped since the last one on the subject is from over a year ago and the first one from over five years or so. (and still not 'solved') So, what's the deal ? Is it really that difficult to create manual gear shift animations ? I've been giving it some thought lately (I mean creating them) and indeed it's no simple matter to me. But I'm not too experienced in 'game creation' at all so that brings me to the above again. I mean, there has to be a reason why we don't find this feature in common use, common vehicle's, common mods... I read about a long ago mod, the Del Sol, which seemed to have it and I know the Satsuma has it. In fact I've already sort of figured out how the latter one is working but it's a different case on it's own because it's a column shifter. (the word 'shifter' is not accepted by the spell checker, is that no English?) The Sat's shifter has hydro's running up the body's pillar and floor and firewall or something. It also moves in a sort of way that suits a column shift stick but it wouldn't suit a floor (or near floor) gear stick. What I guess is that the difficulty lies in the node/beam structure that is requested to make it function ? If it must rely on other existing nodes then perhaps it will provide unwanted motion from the other beams' 'springyness' ? And to give it more stable structure the network of beams would grow way too far through the rest of them beams ? I don't know. It's apparently also quit difficult to make it work as a prop (I would prefer this to save unnecessary n/b structure) such as the steering wheel and pedals. The prop should in this case be able to work as one mesh across different axis which I believe currently isn't possible. I have this funny idea to (when the stick itself might work) to use the same sort of n/b structure that is used for the hero bus' flag or the inflatable cushion, for the cloth around the stick. The material is plastic and I believe it's lua controlled to make it flexible ? Or is it flexible by itself ? Anyway, I'm probably thinking too much out loud again and first I'd like to see the stick working anyhow. Any ideas ? NC
A working floor shifter has been in the Satsuma 100 for ~1 month or so it uses Mike94's lua from the Satsuma 210's column shifter, but modified to have the x & y co-ordinates suitable for a H pattern gearbox instead. G0 is "H" axis in this case, and G1 would be "V" ("H" meaning height, not sure what "V" stands for, but i didn't write the lua.) anyways, this lua sets the shifter positions depending on what gear is in use. which is then handled by these hydros, the G0 and G1 nodes are supposed to be fixed to the car body / interior to do their job of pulling the top of the shifter around. i'd go more indepth if i understood more of it :| anyways it would be annoying to set this sort of thing up for all manual gearboxed vanilla cars, and beamng doesn't support animation baking, or having dual function "props" (yet?) so we're SOL for another solution. side note, above method of handling shifter "animation" is very funky sometimes. and inherently unstable.
Awesome reply ! Thank you very much, I will look into this later when time let's me So this means the Satsuma is updated ? I just have to re-download it then I suppose ? Hm, also don't know about animation baking, will check too and funky or not : if it's all we have for now then I'm going for it ! edit : Oh now I get it, Satsuma 100 not 210.. heh.. I see the video now, yes it's a little shaky and believe I know why. I think it needs more reinforcement beams for higher stability. I was trying power windows a while ago and the window also acted wobly while driving. In this case the force of the hydro must be a little high and the spring of the beam a little low. Add to the soup a few (juust a few) 'reinforcers' and I think will be much better. Hope to find the 100 here on the forum.
* update * Tried to stuff the Sat's system into my 'Corvette'.. One of the results can be seen in https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-cursed.62495/ bottom of page. Then I figured : "Let's revert to the Covet first !" since it's the Sat's base.. Oh yes the hydro's are working, but.. what's this ? Where did the shifter go ? And how about that strange dance it does ? Needs a 'little' more fine tuning I guess.
Petals... Steering wheel.. Etc are all animated based on a linear input. Gear shifter would have to be animated in a different fashion (i.e. what if there are only 4 gears.. 6 gears.. Dog leg... Etc) and I can only imagine that the devs are waiting for a further milestone to be hit before starting on something like this. In theory there's nothing to it at all. I'm pretty sure some cars already so this for their column shifter. It's clearly just not a priority for them.
ive heard chatter about this before, and ive definitely thought of it myself, i really want to see this in the game
Chances are it can be done with prop but idk yet, have to figure it out when time.. If the props are within reach inside the game's core files it could be done I guess. What a prop does is basically turn around an axis. So if a good code can mod a prop so that it works around 2 axis that would already be nice. The hydro's work too but they need too much supporting beams and so they mingle bad with the rest of the car's beam structure. If beams begin to rub one and other here and there then things can become very unstable. Overall the n/b structure IS very sensitive as even can be read in the wiki..
Remember that your flexbody group need to be group of nodes you want mesh to 'follow' / be attached to. You need X, Y and Z, that is minimum of three nodes and from bottom to top they should be same distance apart than your shifter is tall, bottom one should be a pivot point and for base rubber you might want to have four nodes (plane) that are not moving. Well that is how I think it might work, haven't done such, but based on how mesh follows position of nodes, that might work. If your node group consist nodes from larger area, mesh gets positioned weird way.
Indeed I quickly assigned the flexbody mesh name to an arbitrary group to make it work. I believe transmission or body or so (have to check). Because the Sat 100 has it's own group for the shifter itself but the Covet doesn't. Thanks for explaining how the mesh follows the coordinates. I was thinking before to split the base rubber from the shifter in Blender so that its no more part of it except for the top or two top layers, so that perhaps it looks a little smooth in its movement. Anyway I will change (create) the group and set the coordinates soon and see how that works out. (will post) Thx
really cool! but as of rn its a bit hard to tell what gear your in lol. but im assuming thats getting fixed.
Hah , took me a while to realize what you meant. You probably mean the gear indicator on the shift knob right ? Yes I got no problems creating such and indeed over time I should.
i guess- what i really meant was that the movement of the gear shifter was a tad bit imprecise so it was kinda hard to see what gear you were in in the video. If that makes anymore sense
What's imprecise? Every gearbox has it's own gear positions don't they ? This case : 1 - up left 2 - down left 3 - up mid 4 - down mid 5 - up right R - down right In real life you would also only know by trying them out, only by looking at them 1 could be 3 or 3 could be 5... Anyway, once you get as far as I got here then the lua file allows a lot of movement to be adjusted, really. By typing in numbers you can 'place' that stick where ever you want. Also positions (like dogleg and reverse) are no problem. You can just tell the lua : if gear == 1 goto 'this' position and so on so you could even say : if gear == 3 go to position '6'. Just to give you an idea. I'm still on 0.15 otherwise I maybe would have wrapped this one in an upload so you could test it yourself.
yeah i get how a shifter works lol i guess it was more of how it looked in the video. Im not dissing your work at all, its fantastic quite honestly, just thought i might express some mild concern i had. But you seem to be on top of it, so i will leave you alone. Sorry lol
