Hi. I’m a noob at game development but have research quite a bit “how to” in making games and made a bit of haf working simple games out of it. (only the logic behinde the games, real bad ones)
Jalopy, My Summer car, Car mechanic simulator are quite a unik style of games where the player take apart cars to fix, mods and drive them around. Most of this is made with sockets but some parts like the suspension needs to be animated and rigged. Now that’s the part where I’m confused 
How can the player remove the suspension parts/wheels actually in any of this games? What tricks is feasible to apply in making it work smoodly? I kinda believe it’s hard yet easy? I’m not trying to make any of this games named above. But only naming them to give a idea how it can look like.
When removing a wheel what I acually believe happens is that the wheel mesh and hitbox is replaced by a empty non colliding “wheel” and empty mesh. With that a prop spawning for the player to move around making it look real and seamless. ( Jalopy most likely uses this and very well indeed )
My humble ide is when removing the suspension shocks or springs on the car it changes the stiffness or something of the suspension animation only to act, making the parts not visible for the player but acually still stuck to the vehicle. But I don’t belive it’s that simple. Or what do you think? Is that even something to try and make? Hidding the full suspension with the parts only being a trigger to activate hitboxes and the mesh the player can see? Or is there a faital flaw with that outside of a hitbox spawning and collining with something making the vehicle flip out? Is it simply about changing out a mesh and hitbox enuf to make something like this work? This ide surrounds the hole animation aspect and why I ask about it here. It’s not just to use sockets due to it being animated.
When playing My summer car and figuring out how it works I find it looking like the game was based around snapping physics constraints !! everywhere !! explaining the poor peformance and funky physics even on a GTX 1060 w/4.6Ghz 6700k running from a 1TB SSD :C What I mean by that is how the props you hold in your hand quickly snaps into places and not really socketed. It’s like the hole building aspect is strong magnets holding the car togheter. It got to be super peformance hungry way of doing it. I doubt it uses animation and only pure physics. But I don’t know.
What do you belive that knows more about stuff like this? I don’t know of any outher game but My Summer Car that’s this advanced and involved. But I find it most intriguing and a awesome first project for a non real car guy that like to mod / drive cars XD
It makes sense doesn’t it? Insted of making one of thousands mediocre racing games I’m trying to… Do something I have no clue about.
PS: I know that the games I’m refering to is made in Unity 5. But why can’t UE replicate it? But how I still don’t know exactly.