[ASSETS] [OPEN SOURCE] Tanks, tracks and N-wheeled vehicles

Thank you!

This year started with a funny incident - my CPU water-cooling system started leaking and water went on videocard, motherboard and potentially PSU. After replacing cooling system I’ve found out that my PC doesn’t work anymore, so I had to replace some other parts and eventually re-install OS and the rest of the software. It took almost 4 days out of my vacation :smiley:

Anyway, back to work. Today I’ve submitted update with some small changes here and there, forgot to mention some of the on GitHub:

  • update A_Tracked_Vehicle with a fix provided by Tooner; Thank you, Tooner! Tracks animation is much smoother now.

  • after proper conversion of vehicle momentum into force, friction should be calculated more correctly now and generally is a much larger force than before

  • values for MuX and MuY went down, they look a bit more like real life friction coefficients

  • I’ve added wheel’s torque as a part of the force taken into account for calculation of friction; results were not too visible, perhaps power output of the engine is not realistic (too small) or default value of “Tread and Transmission Mass” is too large; this effects steering as well, probably there is a bug somewhere around taking into account mass of tracks and transmission in calculations; I’ve set Tread and Transmission Mass for both M113 and Ripsaw to much smaller values and handling was greatly improved, which is a good thing but I need to understand exactly why

  • removed some weird coefficients from the steering differential and now as you turn left and right the power should be translated more proportionally; steering only left/right will provide an equal but opposing torque on tracks, if both left/right and forward/backward are pressed than one track goes into neutral and second one get’s twice the normal torque; this gives at least two turning radi in addition to neutral turn; steering at high gear is still difficult as vehicle is mostly rolling forward, you need to brake to loose some speed to do a sharp turn

  • found interesting bug where Ripsaw starts to jitter when standing in place; apparently at some configuration of position of center of mass relative to suspension handles, suspensions and friction start to play “tug of war” which leads to both horizontal and vertical oscillation of the vehicle; slightly lowering center of mass removes this behavior; most likely it’s just a general stability consideration where suspension root should be higher than vehicle’s center of mass

  • Aerosled’s suspension is slightly re-balanced and fixed constraint of back-left ski, which was apparently on the other side of the vehicle

I was looking into some other issues and wanted to improve suspension setup for A_Tracked_Vehicle. Unfortunately, architecture is not so flexible in terms of re-factoring code and interchanging big parts of logic. I need a better architecture and component based approach look like a good idea. Next step would be to check if there were some good developments in 4.1 and 4.11 regarding component and check why my Moment Of Inertia for transmission is effecting vehicle that much.