I’m looking at creating a racing simulation game with UE4. I’ve looked at unity but it just does not compare to UE4 visual quality. I have to commend you on that, it is stunning and what you can do. But back to the point, I’ve looked around on the Answerhub and have read the question and answers about vehicles and see that you are improving on this within UE4. But I have to ask what direction are you going with it. As I stated I’m looking at creating a racing simulation game that will be directed at the hardcore racers.
Will I be able to import each mesh and join them together and add hinges instead of bones?
Will I be able to add slip curve for tires, as a animation curve?
Will I be able to create a mesh collider or import a mesh or meshes turn it to a collider and use that collider for another mesh (like in unity)?
Will you allow empty actors, so if I allow players to build their vehicles. In a hierarchy the empty actor will be visible and all its children will not be until the blueprint says show child? (eg wheel on a car is a empty actor(parent) and depending on which rim a player buys the blueprint will say make rim(child) visible. and the same with the tire).
Will you allow engine Torque animation curve?
Will you be adding drag coefficient, lift/dowforce coefficient?
That is only a few questions that I know the Phys X engine can do but aren’t available at the moment with UE4.
The last thing I will say is, looking at what UE4 and the Phys X engine can do with the game level environment, shown in the content example and Hourences game Solus, if you could use that in vehicles you could create realistic vehicles from boats, cars and planes.
Some of the things you mention are already doable and some are very game specific. Collision is made inside the editor with Physics Assets pretty easily, and you can use the same physics asset on other cars as well. Body part modifications are easily doable too with Blueprints, but i dont how to do the rims(since they are a part of the wheels) so you may want to ask around in the forums for more information.
As to the other physics related stuff, you have the source code and all the vehicle code classes are there so you should be able to make anything you want with them if you are a programmer. If not then you should get one if you really want to do a racing game at simulation degree.
Thanks Jacky for your reply. as you could tell I’m not a programmer. the only game stuff I have done is modding to Rfactor. I’ve only had UE4 for a couple of weeks now and I’m doing a lot of research and learning. yes I did find Collision in Physics Assets but trying to do something that is round it struggles. the most sides that I found it was able to do was 32 which was very round for the wheel and all it did was bounce on every edge. for the collision for that wheel to be round it would of needed a cylinder with at least 60 sides. but I’ll do more research on that. I have found some tutorials that have helped but there is a lot that I haven’t seen in a tutorial. But when it comes to coding and blueprints, I’m still trying to get my head around variable, floats, integers and the other things. after I posted, I found things like Interp Curves and float curves. So I’ll just have to learn more about programming. If you know a good place that has good tutorials that will help. thanks I just have to keep doing my homework while practicing to use UE4.
Also I forgot to mention that when I do create collision mesh from mesh I get a error every time. maybe its a bug in the UE4 version 4.1. it didn’t matter if it was a cylinder shape or car shape. I may need to ask Epic Games dev.
We have many improvements to vehicles planned for the 4.2 release. One of these is an exposed vehicle drag where you can specify the drag coefficient of the car.
Slip curves and many others are already exposed in the WheeledVehicleMovementComponent, but 4.2 will reorganize a lot of this to make it more accessible.
We are exposing more of the PhysX functionality, torque curve being one of them.
Thank you Ori for your reply answer. 4.2 is sounding great, I’m learning more on what EU4 can do and what I can use with every tutorial. Keep the tutorials coming
Ori, Why Does Colliding with other vehicles give unexpected results , the vehicle jumps and rotates for no reason. I am using 4.7.2
Is this a bug? Because its very unrealistic that vehicle at 10 kmph if collided with other vehicle will spring off and fell away like some bomb has exploded.
You can reproduce this bug easily, in vehicle starter kit add 2 vehicles and then collide them.