(please excuse me if this is not the correct place to ask this)
Hi all,
I'm the main developer of Motorsport ( www.motorsport-sim.org ), a
wheeled vehicles simulator (aimed at racing cars, but not necessarily
exclusively focused on that). I'm rewriting the sim from scratch, and
while i'm at it, i'm reconsidering my choices of third party libraries
to use.
I've been told that FlighGear people were interested in including a
car simulation on it too, so that's why i'm seding this email :-)
If possible, I'd like to get some questions asked (sorted by
importance, more or less):
- Well, of course the first one is: are you really interested on a
possible contribution/modification of flight gear like this?
- What does the FG physics engine currently feature?:
- Types of collision shapes (meshes, spheres, boxes...)
- Automatic computation of their masses/inertia tensors?
- Constraints between different rigid bodies (prismatic, revolute,
fixed, ... joints).
- Aerodynamics simulation... how does it handle it when near the ground?
· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_in_cars
· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuser_(automotive)
- turbulences produced behind bodies ("smoke angel" in planes,
but i'm more interested in reduced drag to other cars, the so-called
slipstreaming effect).
· and of course, effect of wind on regular car body shapes and
wings (close to the main body, or up to about 1 meter above it).. are
aero properties calculated on the fly based on a given shape trimesh,
like IIRC X-Plane does?
Leaving physics aside...
- Adaptability of the FG game engine to smaller scoped objects. Will
there be problems in increasing ground textures resolution? If needed,
will I be able to see a screw in 3D, or maybe the FG LOD system can't
be tweaked for that due to design? Etc.
- Possibility to add an arbitrary number of "inputs" (car door lever
attached to joystick axis #2, upshift paddle attached to mouse button
#1, etc.) and "outputs" (telemetry of cars, on-screen display of
G-forces on the center of mass of the vehicle, relative angles of
gas/brake/clutch pedals, engine rpm output to a secondary screen,
...).
- Possibility to make those inputs clickable in the render window
(click-n-drag the gear shift lever with the mouse, or pull a door
handle, or whatever).
- Possibility of detaching visualization/sounds from the physic simulation?
Those are the main questions i can think about. Sorry for the long
list, feel free to only reply a few of them, there's no hurry...
Thanks a lot for your time (whether you managed to read everything or
not ;-)
Regards,
--
Saludos,
Bruno González
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