[ODE] Suspicious suspension

[Nate W]

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Steve Yates wrote:

> Thanks Nate, that buggy looks great! Would that kind of suspension work well 
> on 'rough' terrain? By that I mean in an off-road vehicle type game.

It works OK on the rough terrain I've been driving it over, but if you're
working on a game I think the hinge-2 method would probably be greatly
preferable, mostly because it will take less CPU time.

> I haven't a clue where to start with vehicle suspension, although I have 
> been staring at the screenshot trying to reverse engineer your buggy!!
> 
> Have you any advice for me to get me started? (if you could give me at least 
> some of the source code that creates your buggy I'd be so happy).

Most of what I know about suspension came from building radio controlled
car kits years ago.  The car in the picture was built in Juice, an editor
that I wrote shortly after ODE was released.  So, there's no "source code"
for the car itself.  The Juice source is available at the web site
(http://www.natew.com/juice/) but it probably won't help much if you just
want to build better cars.

If you download Juice you can examine the car from whatever angle you
want, push it, pull it, drive it (if you have a joystick) and you can look
at the data file that generated the car.  The Juice file format is
basically XML so it's not too hard to understand.

Juice doesn't support hinge-2 joints though.  For help setting up hinge-2
joints, you might look at Si Brown's Freefall buggy demo, his source is
available too: http://freefall.freehosting.net/downloads/buggydemo.html
The demo has flat ground with obstacles, and the car's suspension works
really well, it has great "personality" when you steer it hard or bounce
off of things.

-- 

Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com/