Racing game with loopings

[Henry00]

Hi everyone this is Henry00 from 00Laboratories again, we build an engine which includes newton game dynamics now, and I came to the conclusion a racing game like seen in the F-Zero series would be alot of fun.
I was wondering how I could use Newton to ride tracks like these:



Is Newton capable of not falling down from a looping if you have too much speed, and about speed, does the exact solver stop making me fall out of the world?
And another thing, a little hovering from the ground, what would be my best choise in achieving this behaviour realisticly?

Thanks!

[JoeJ]

I've done something similar in the past.
The key was not to use tesselated graphics geometry, but the spline curve itself for collisions:
Find the shortest distance between car and spline, use that and some tangents to construct a box aligned on the spline below the car.
That's smooth, fast and should work with newton too, just an idea...

If acceleration against gravity is greater than gravity, object will not fall down,
just like in reality - but friction should decrease, which can affect steering behaviour.
You might want to use some magic force / custom joint stuff, to help the car keep on track a little.
Some very cheep trick would be to align the gravity vector with car down axis, if it's very fast, and interpolate to real world gravity, when the car gets slower.

You are resopnsible to keep an object inside the newton world, no matter what solver.

You could use a force or a custom joint for the hoover thingy, but you'll loose friction completely, so steering gets harder.
The hoovering could be a graphics effect only.

[Henry00]

Thanks for your fast reply JoeJ! I have a world that I design in Unreal Editor, based on triangles and I make a single treecollision. I don't know if it is possible to build a spline for this since it's random trianglefans all over the place ( which is how I and Newton both see it ).
Sadly my math skills aren't the best, so I am hoping to get the car to work.. hm, will let you know how it goes =)



And yes, we had lightmaps, but it failed, and now lighting is again an issue.

[JoeJ]

Ah, i guess UnrealEd doesn't have splines?
The unsmoothly changing slopes of the track shouldn't be a real big problem, it works for games like Trackmania pretty good.
The code to extrude a shape along a spline is pretty small, i could help you there.
The greatest benfit from using it might be the lesser amount of work to build and edit the track.
Creating and changing a track is a matter of dragging only a few control points around...

However, since you're bound to UnrealEd currently, i'd recommend to continue that way and see how it goes.

Something different: I need to create my own editor for my own engine.
The last editor i used was Quake III. I recently downloaded Cryengine Editor to see if actual editors allow faster architecture creation,
but i'm pretty lost in that stuff. I'll tryout latest UDK too...
Since you are experienced in UnrealEd, can you answer me some questions?
Can you PM me your Email? Is german your language?

[Henry00]

Using UnrealED I can build small shapes and save them, the track is also a copy paste of thesame track shape, what I can do using UnrealED is add actors and draw a line between them which would be the spline?

And if you say my email, I am wishing so much right now you also mean msn, cause you would be a holy person in my list then

edit:

Did you get my PM? The site failed, my email is:
[nickname]@live.nl

[JoeJ]

Thanks, i'll take a look at UDK first and contact you soon

[JoeJ]

I've created an image, so yo can see what i mean.
The black shape is extruded along the white spline.
Maybe UnrealEd supports it nowadays...

spline extrude.JPG (36.54 KiB) Viewed 2168 times

[Henry00]

Thanks for the example JoeJ that's great! Gives a good insight on what you meant!
Well I guess I can write a game editor in which you can set points in 3D space and it will generate the track, I am not forced to use UnrealEditor maps, I wrote it to be very flexible.
And yes feel free to contact me anytime, just in case you did not completly understand the email ( which I doubt ) = henry00@[ previous message ]

Thanks for helping =)

[Henry00]

Issue! I am currently racing on just flat ground, but I can't get the newton physics right..

I need my car to move into a direction, but I have this annoying sliding effect on the world, I require max friction, that allows me to instantly change direction based on rotation.. Also is there a way to define a better collision shape then those defaults, the rectangle would the best choise but really it can't handle curves, the back will keep bouncing against the wall and such.. any tips? Thanks

Another issue is when using AddVelocity, I don't mind the player going over lightspeed, but that's just too fast, is there a way to limit the vehicle speed?