[SCRIPT] [RELEASED] - Ground Vehicle Effects
-
So today has seen some definite progress in state management. After adding some more debug helpers to colourise the actual particles, I tracked down a couple of conditions that were slipping through the condition checks and things now seem to be detecting correctly... or as near as they can be given the types of checks I am doing. All this multicoloured stuff really proved its worth today as I was able to instantly see the slightest shift into a different state by the colours of the lines and effects... makes things so much easier.
I am still using the wheelspeed parameter, which although it has been discovered to be unrelated to what I am doing and as such unreliable, I don't have any other options. But the end result is that the car can now be classified into one of six states based on how various parameters are being read, forward velocity, lateral velocity etc... even controller input levels to a minor extent.
After getting that working, it became apparent that my material structs needs some close attention as scale and alpha values are just not right for this mod in their current state. They were fine in the Helicopter effects but for this, they need a bit more substance in some cases, and a bit less in others. So that's going to be my next point of focus, 56 material types and about 15 material structs need to be adjusted. I will probably adjust scale, alpha and colour values while I am dealing with it.
Timing still needs a bit of fine tuning, at full speed about 36 particles get spawned into the pool, so if I reduce the spawn delay a fraction, I can probably push that up to around 45, which leaves about 15 for any transition change buildups to happen. That should be plenty given the states you can transition into.
I do still have the problem caused by the delayed appearance of the effect when skidding but after looking at how the particle evolves, it's just not going to be fixable. It isn't an instantly appearing effect, which means there will always be a delay before it hits full size. I had thought about predictive spawning but that's a real high-risk road to take.
The important thing from my perspective, is that even though this is having to accommodate compromises, I still like how it looks... and while ever that's the case, it will keep moving forward.
-
Just to give a break from the walls of text I have been posting, here's short video showing how much help all this multi-coloured stuff is. If you notice in the first high shot when I am driving down the airfield (about 0:26), the colour switches between yellow and purple. If you watch the text display at the same point, you can briefly see the wording change as it switches from a driving state into a drift state. This is really hard to see when you're trying to drive. But these colour changes let me see it really clearly, no matter how quickly it happens.
The colours are basically:
Cyan - Two-wheeled processing during a burnout.
Purple - Midpoint based processing, where any amount of lateral drift is taking place or the wheels are spinning.
Yellow - Normal driving mode, using a randomly shifted midpoint.If you notice just above the bonnet at the start after Trevor gets in, you can see the heat-haze effect I created for Vans123. It's really subtle but heat-haze is a subtle effect, so it works quite nicely. I have to disable it if the car flips because it's the exhaust effect from the jet planes.
I place it pointing downwards from a point just above the engine dummy but when the car is upside down, the effect is about as high as the aircraft hanger at that airfield.
So I disable it when the car is flipped, which works okay.
-
Aaarrggghhh!
The potential of this mod is going to be absolutely murdered by the handling of addons for this game.I am just going through my addons to see how many are incompatible with the wheelspeed thing (still only 1 so far thankfully) and to see how they all work but the handling... jeez. I got into a 70's muscle car, set off down the airfiled, applied the brakes ready to drop into a skid and within what seemed like 10 feet, the car had come to an almost complete stop. It's a car from the 70's... it probably weighs the same as 10 elephants and would take as long to stop as the Titanic... slight exaggeration maybe... but it certainly wouldn't stop like an F1 car.
There's a huge number that seem to go from 0 - 60 in about 1.5 seconds with no wheelspin, they turn like Scalextric cars and they brake to a stop in about two car's length. Some cars are great with this, like the AC Cobra, the Subaru BRZ and a-n-other that shall remain nameless... but so many of them are just
It's reminding me why I don't drive the cars so much in this game and probably why I kept turning this mod idea down. It kinda makes me think that instead of all the details I am concentrating on to make this seem just right, I should have just spawned the particle at the same size, in the same colour in the exact same way, no matter what you were doing.
Sorry... it just drives me crazy when you see your hard work unraveling before your very eyes.
/rant over
-
@LeeC2202 Well your script works well with vanilla vehicles no? That should be the first thing you need to be sure. Then, if vehicle modders want their vehicles compatible with your script, they should be who adapt them, no?
-
@Reyser said in [SCRIPT] [WIP] - Ground Vehicle Effects (Working Title):
Well your script works well with vanilla vehicles no?
It's funny you should ask that because I keep meaning to get my car addon-creator/data-extractor tool to run all the handling.meta files through a brake reduction process. Even the vanilla cars stop too quick for me.. but in all honesty, I haven't tried that many vanilla cars yet. It takes digging through several menu levels to find a vanilla car but just two button presses to spawn an addon, so I always take the easy option.
I suppose the saving grace is that unlike the model files, the handling files are not locked, so they can be changed. I know for sure that the people who make the cars won't adapt them. What I am tempted to do, is find out which vanilla cars some of the addons are based on, then edit the vehicles.meta files to use the vanilla handling instead.... presuming the vanilla vehicle works okay that is.
-
@LeeC2202 Yeah I'm sure too, sadly. And yes, seems a good idea find vanilla compatibles with a correct working handling for your script.
-
This post is deleted!
-
Seems like Lee vanished. Sad to see as the work done was amazing.
-
@Anonymoused281 shame too seemed like a great guy and he was great at this stuff only released top notch work.
-
You guys still can find his work here.
-
@Reyser thanks. Spent a few hours last night checking this forum and the main mods area search bar to find them, but came up empty. 👍
