Vehicle Wheels

[Dan]

I've been playing around with vehicles in the editor today. I made two new four wheel vehicles and made sure that the pivot points were centered on the wheel and the wheels at 0,0. I can get the new vehicles and wheels loaded in the editor and they look and work great, but the wheels do not spin. If I swap the wheels to use the monster truck wheels, they spin fine. If I use mine, they don't spin. I've tried using different .phy files ( cylinder, convex hull, collision tree) and no change. I can drop the wheels in the world by themselves and they will roll down a hill. Any ideas?

[Dan]

Just to add some more clarification here... when I load in a sample vehicle such as the viperscout and load the driver script, all is well. When I change the model to one that I have created, it looks like the wheels want to move, but they are being blocked by something. Could this be a collision issue with the body object?

[Canardia]

You should leave some free space between the fuselage and wheel, so that the wheel doesn't collide with the fuselage.

[Dan]

I pretty much figured this out. I now have several vehicles working with wheels spinning nicely. Even an eight wheeled one and it's pretty cool. It was very easy to set up once I got the hang of the lua scripting. Eight wheel independent suspension and all wheel drive effect looks really good in game and feels very realistic.

 

The trick was setting up the wheel file correctly and phy files. I am still confused why some of my wheels didn't work though. In fact, with one wheel, when I applied it to the body, it was invisible, but it acted like it was there. I could drag the wheel from the library to the scene and everything was perfect, it just didn't want to show up on the vehicle. As far as body collision, I don't think that is an issue. They seem to spin just fine even if they overlap the collision box of the body object - just in case though I did make sure that there was clearance between the body and wheels.