Vehicles without wheels possible?

Development World Creation
1

Hello community!

My problem is maybe too specific or weird, I still write to you in desperation (and for the sake of my student project).
I am working on a racing game and I created things like the Road Generator (as seen in the december livestream), the map and everything already. Just to face a major problem:
My vehicle doesn’t want as I do.

The vehicle is not a car, but a spaceship. It doesn’t has wheels, it’s not even formed like a square, but like a pyramid.
I have huge troubles with integrating the mesh, simply because I either have the right bones (at one point I even plainly connected the bone structure from Sedan with my object in desperation), but the ends for the wheels just went into nothing, thus producing errors or whenever I at least was able to make my object kind of controllable, it just starts twitching all over the map because of it’s unusual pyramid shape that made it fall half through the road.

I then thought, maybe the flying template would give more satisfying results.
And while my ship no longer fell through the map…it pretty much went through everything else. The road has borders, but the engine ignores it and sends my ship out into outer space, so to speak. Also pretty bad: when moving left or right, the ship goes down, leading to it sooner or later also leaving the road. The road isn’t even straight, but goes up and down and since the ship doesn’t seem to care about colliders in the least, the ship will probably just move through the road when it goes up.

I have to say, is my first time working with UE, I had only experience with Unity and RPG Maker regarding engines so far. Not even to mention that I am not a programmer, though that job fell on me in my group and I try to somehow solve .
So if anyone has any idea on how to make work, I would be very grateful.

To summarize what the engine should do:

  • allow triangular characters without wheels to move
  • have them respect colliders
  • have them NOT move up or down by players command (keep them on the ground like a car)
  • have the possibility to move them left and right without going up or down (and please not so lazily slow like in the flying template)

I really don’t care, if you tell me, which tutorial explains such a thing; if you tell me where and how to modify one of the templates; if you give me anything to put in the game or whatever.
I really just desperately need help and hope, someone here can provide me with some.

2

I haven’t tried but in theory, if you make a vehicle that sits - say - 1 foot off the ground (with the origin point on the ground) it should hover. If you add bones that represent wheels without adding actual mesh wheels it should act like a car that’s floating. There’s also a Spaceship example in one of the free projects as well as quite a few flying vehicle tutorials, projects and videos listed here.

3

Though I have not created anything similar I have seen work that includes both hovering type moving actors and spaceships so without a doubt is it possible.
It would most likely get solved fast if you are possible to share your project (I understand if you dont want to, it might even be “to large a project” at point?) but it helps to understand how your system is built and thus allows
people lurking the forum to tailor the “correct answer” to your specific needs :slight_smile:

4

Here is one example of a hovering vehicle :slight_smile:

5

My prototype is similar. I started with the vehicle template, but just disabled everything to do with physics and bypassed all the default movement keys. I just do the turn/speed/acceleration calcs myself and in event tick call SetActorLocationAndRotation to move the player myself.