So, this is my idea, instead of assigning node weight by hand, why not have them assigned automatically based on the beams connected to them ? I can see this mostly used with a ladder chassis jbeam or for example a bus or trailer frame. The beams would act as a steel tube, and you'd assign the weight of said tube to the beam, which in turn would assign that weight to the nodes it is connected to, for example a beam connected to the nodes "n1" and "n2" with "beamWeight:10" would add 5kg of weight to "n1" and "n2". Since images are better at explaining than I am, here are some showing how this would work :
1. This would most likely require a physics engine rewrite 2. What if a node has a preexisting nodeWeight and beams connected to it also have beamWeight? 3. Would require all of the current cars to be adapted to this new system, which would also completely destroy all of the already existing mods 4. I see no advantage over the regular nodeWeight method, this just seems more complicated. Node are weight points, not beams. If you need to assign a weight to a specific part, you just divide the total part weight by the amount of nodes that part has. You also often have to tune the nodeWeight very precisely to avoid Jbeam instabilities, doing this would mean twice the amount of tinkering as a beam's weight would impact 2 nodes instead of the current system only affecting a single node. Overall I think this isn't a good idea and wouldn't bring any benefit, only disadvantages compared to the current system.
I can see many problems with this. Say you did set a few "beam weights", lets say they're all 20, and connected them together. Then you added another beam with a weight of 20 and connected it to them. This would immediately bump up the weight of the other node, even if you wanted them to all be the same weight.
To answer those arguments : 1. It wouldn't, the beam itself doesn't actually have weight, it's just a faster way to assign weight to nodes in some cases, the beamWeight would get devided in 2 and would be added to the nodeWeight of the 2 nodes. 2. As I said above, the calculated beamWeight would just get added on top of the nodeWeight 3. Not really, beamWeight default would be 0, therefore no weight would get added to the nodes it's connected to 4. It can be faster in some cases, for example I'm currently working on a bus and seeing as the frame is just a lot of steel tubes it would save me quite some time from manually calculating each node weight based on how many steel tubes are connected to it I'm not sure I understand this correctly, but as I said this would be useful in only some scenarios, you can always manually set the nodeWeight, since beamWeight just adds weight to the nodes it's connected to, it can always be set to 0 so it doesn't change the nodeWeight.
You are overcomplicating things for yourself A LOT. You don't have to be so extremely precise, it will only lead to instabilities later on if you do this, and your mod will take decades to make. Give the same weight to all nodes on the frame except for the shock mounts and you're good to go. Why would the devs have to invent a whole new system that would definitely break lots of mods just for your specific case?? Apart from what you are trying to do (and doing it wrong) I can't think of a single other case where this would be useful. And you obviously didn't read what Lucas said carefully because those were all really valid concerns.
