I would like to make a kind of Mario Kart (a little different though, but the base would be great) and therefore I'm trying to acquire the background required to implement that in Unity.

I've seen this video mentioned in many places and it's indeed very interesting, so I went on and tried to implement it myself.

First, with the car suspensions. The guy doesn't mention the damper (a notion that I haven't quite grasped yet btw), he just talks about applying a force relative to the suspension compression. Is there any way it could work this way, or has he just forgot to mention it? By implementing it without damping my car will "wobble" when on the ground, but then I don't know what constants I should use for the spring.

Cheers

Thank you for your kind comment Septopus  Glad to see someone tried that too

Yes that's what I'm intending to do, I like the self-taught process here. I have one specific question for now, it's "does it make any sense to implement a spring (suspension) the way he mentions? That is, only with a force proportional to the compression ratio of the suspension.". I've been toying a few days without it and the result is nowhere near satisfying. So I'm just wondering if that could even lead anywhere.

Hmm sorry for double-checking, but that "only way" means that having just a force that pushes the vehicle back upwards depending on the current compression ratio (== distance from the bottom of the vehicle to the ground) is enough?

The standard unity assets use damping, among tons of things. But I don't truly understand this concept, only the formula.

Thanks for the comments Sorry for the lack of reply, I'm actually working towards it, learning every bit one after the other. So far I've spent the last few days on the springs. I thought I had got it alright, but there's a problem with slopes where the simulation sometimes blows, and it doesn't even support stiff suspensions (k > 150) without oscillating badly, so I'm back at it

In the meantime I've got the acceleration and braking working the way he describes in his video. It feels awesome, because no standard car simulation gets anywhere close to that

A little demo of what I have so far

It's all coming up so nicely. I feel like a student again haha, trying many things until I just get it right (and leave no room for something fishy or not figured out).

I'm not completely blocked for now. I'll add the downforce (starting with a simple force parallel to the normal to the ground surface below the car, multiplied by the velocity of the car in its local coordinate system), then friction (so that I can push the engine much further, as it's currently almost free-wheel, and it can fight gravity better, allowing for fun, arcade slopes) and change the shape of the car collider obviously (sphere?).

Will keep you posted thinking about starting a project topic btw, if you have something for that?

On 11/6/2018 at 6:04 PM, Septopus said:

Another thing you can try is applying forces based on velocity, specifically dampening forces.  Iirc, my dampening system was modified or triggered by point velocity checks.  So if a corner's upwards velocity was over a threshold then the dampening would increase...etc..

Yup exactly! Thinking about doing exactly that. Like him I have a target suspension compression of 0.75 (well in my system it means the opposite of him, where 1 is fully extended and 0 compressed), so I'm thinking about increasing the damping a lot when we reach 0.25, this way the car body will never actually hit the ground. This is one of the things that are so easy to do when you do it your own way: I believe Crash Team Racing didn't even check for collisions on the bottom of the body, only simple sideways checks, and then restituting the same equivalent force to both bodies so that they split quickly, and for walls it's likely the same as they do in most FPS (one thing that I haven't grasped at all yet).