Ok so I’ve created a new project from the Vehicle template, and I’ve been watching a few different vehicle setup/tuning videos, but either I’m not finding the right ones, or I’m missing something. I’m trying to make a reasonably realistic driving vehicle, but it feels like the default sedan leans waaayyy too much, accelerates a bit slowly, and most of all, slides way too easily.
I’ve used a screenshot of an intersection near me in google maps, and got it pretty close to scale in the editor, and driving on it, the turning radius seems pretty good (as far as I can tell with mouse/keyboard). I then went to the specs of my vehicle on the manufacturer website, and it had the gear ratios, and putting that in made the acceleration and top speed quite a bit better. But it didnt have the max RPM, or the myriad of other details that the vehicle movement component has. I’m not much of a car guy (for the gear tunings/ratios) or that great at physics (which could be problematic…), so is there a website somewhere that I can refer to get some of these values? Or some sort of guide that could better point me in the correct direction…
Unfortunately there’s not a perfect car simulation list for UE4. What you want is like a list where you pick the car model and have a perfect simulation - you won’t get that. Best you can do is “trial and error” tuning. A real car will behave different depending on the tires, tire temperature, road material, moisture and so on - so it’s difficult to replicate accurate real world physics with a few numbers. For “max rpm” most cars have an electronic lockdown at somewhere between 6000 and 7000 rpm to prevent engine damage, try something in between. If the car accelerates too slow you can also play with the mass (weight) of the car, make it a bit lighter. In the end you will have to try out loads of values - even if they don’t reflect the perfect values of the real life car you will keep them if they make driving in your game more realistic - the end user can’t see the gear ratio in your game, he can only play the game and get the experience like “this feels pretty realistic”, so don’t focus too much on numbers.
But is there no documentation on “this setting affects this” etc? Epic’s vehicle video tutorial very lightly touched on a few of the settings, but even the guy doing it seemed fairly unsure of what did what.
I feel there’s no real documentation for it. If i remember right it also had some bugs like if you stop the vehicle it’s at 0 rpm - which obviously doesn’t reflect a real engine being “idle” (typically it runs at like 750-800 rpm idle), so you have to work around that (Like add a custom variable and call it REALrpm and add 750 to the current rpm). The videos give you a basic idea how you can quickly make a halfway realistic car - to make it perfect it will require your fine tuning.
