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User Name: tim.gift Plan Last Modified: 03/07/2000 13:55:19 PST
Real Name: Tim Gift
Nickname: Slacker
Title: Technical Director
Job: Programmer/Designer
Project: Starsiege TRIBES
3.7.00
Mostly more vehicle work...
- Added separate convex hull collision for the vehicle
body and wheels.
- Added basic object mounting support. You can now
mount players onto vehicles. We'll also use this
feature to mount other controllable objects, such as
turrets.
- Resolved some problems with the wheel physics. I've
switch over to using a tire deformation model to
produce wheel forces. For a while I was producing
forces directly off lateral and longitudinal tire slip
velocities, but this approach would not converge at low
speeds, causing the vehicle to drift and not come to a
complete stop (especially on the sides of hills, where
the sum of all the wheel forces would not exactly
oppose gravity). The sliding was very annoying, and I
wasted a bunch of time trying to get the forces to
converge :( Anyway, the new approach works very
nicely, though I now have two more state variables for
each wheel (lateral and longitudinal tire deformation).
I also increased the rate at which tire forces are
integrated to remove some final suspension and friction
weirdness: wheels now integrated at 120Hz, though the
rigid body physics still runs at 30Hz.
I've collected a stack of reference material, but
the following three were the most usefull:
"A Generic Multibody Vehicle Model for Simulating
Handling and Breaking" by Michael W. Sayers and Dongsuk
Han
"Shear Force Development by Pneumatic Tires in Steady
State Conditions: A Review of Modeling Aspects" by H.B.
Pacejka and R.S. Sharp
"A Robust Lumped-Parameter Tire Model Developed for
Real-Time Simulation" by Peter F. Noronha (SAE paper #
980243)
I also had some conversations with David Keammer, Chief
Technology Officer at Papyrus (NASCAR Racing, etc.).
The approach I'm using now is a little different from
what they're doing, but he was nice enough to give me
some pointers :)
- Tested the 6 wheeled tank. All the suspension and
new wheel force dynamics seem to work fine with 6
wheels.
- Added particle emitters to the wheels. They
currently emit smoke particles when a tire slips.
- Switched the way the vehicles are controlled.
Vehicles are Control Objects which have special
properties; including Soonest-Possible transmission of
state data to clients, Move processing and
client-server synchronization. Once you took control of
a vehicle, you basically dropped control of your player
"body" (itself a Control Object). This is how Tribes 1
works, but for T2, we wanted to add the ability to
free-look the player's head while controlling a
vehicle, so I added the ability to control other
Control Objects through the player. Because of the way
we process and synchronize client/server Move
processing, this turned out to be an interesting
addition :) The end result is that the client can now
always control his player, and the player can filter
the moves it forwards to it's Control Object (though a
client can still control a vehicle directly). Since the
player doesn't have to be mounted to an object to
control it, you can be standing on the side of a hill
controlling a vehicle down in the valley (an RC racing
mod comes to mind :)
- Added the player free-look. You can now free-look
while controlling a vehicle. The player's head moves
independently of the body, so you can see pilots
looking around :)
- Also took a four day weekend trip to Catalina Island,
CA.
Off to CGDC Thursday.
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