Ford Probe GT 95'

Mihela816 · May 1, 2011

Hello fellow Racer fans, I've been working on this project off and on since October or so, figured it was decent/working enough to post up and get some feedback and maybe some suggestions as to how to fix a couple bugs that have been really bothering me that I just can't figure out. The polygons show too much so the car looks like a disco ball, and something is goofed up with the suspension so that the car starts bouncing side to side when you get it up to speed and it will flip over when you turn.

http://www.racedepartment.com/downl...2913-69f304a0a240b448b5b82f189a24c0eb1a3af19e

Stereo · May 1, 2011

The polygons are a problem with whatever you used to export it - would need more information to specify. I think that might be an issue with the .3ds format?

Suspension's a problem because of the center of gravity.
car.cg.y should be lower - setting it to -0.2 makes the car more stable. Right now it looks like it's at the exact center of the car (at the nullpoint) - I believe 35-40% of the height of the car is a better guide for where the CoG should be.

Mihela816 · May 1, 2011

I kind of thought it was a center of gravity issue. I rented a sod cutter yesterday and forgot to put the blade down in the back of my truck, and the first corner I took it acted just like this car!
In regards to the model, It was originally a .3ds model, that I imported to 3D Studio Max 2009, exported to .ase, and exported from modeler. I'm not really good with the modeling aspect. I have another model a fellow Probe enthusiast is working on so this model is really only temporary.
Edit: I re-uploaded the car with some tweaks. Stereo, thanks very much for your help. Oh, and ignore the terrible engine sounds, I need to record new ones, these were from a video and they kind of suck.

Harey · May 1, 2011

I tried the car out, performance wise, it feels about right (I had a room mate back in school who had one and he beat the snot out of it) the sounds, are terrible sounding, really tuning the normal around might help that problem, and the looping issue I found a simple solution just the other day, day the piece you want for the engine, make a copy of it thats reversed and put the reversed one on the end of the original, that will fix the worst of the looping issues. (I was just working on sounds for one of my cars so its still pretty fresh in my memory). I didn't really try it in a turn, but when i went to brake I swear it seemed to have a bit of a tug to the right (could of just been me though).

the model looks really nice, apart from the polygon issues which it does appear like an exporting problem. I'd grab Zmod 1.07b, so you can find a format to export into Zmod then export to Racer. Not sure what formats you can export as, or what formats Zmod will import though.

Mihela816 · May 7, 2011

I uploaded the latest and greatest version. Added some stuff, started using the new model, and got rid off the awful engine sounds.

Harey · May 7, 2011

Well most of the body does look to have the disconnected poly issue, with the exception of the hood. I do have one question, are you going to make like a stock Probe GT?

Mihela816 · May 7, 2011

There will be a stock and then a KLZE turbo. I'm trying to make it somewhat realistic.

Mihela816 · May 14, 2011

Well I got the object separated and correct materials on them, but I don't know how I did it. I used the detach function in MAX 2010 to seperate the elements and mirrored everything again and got it looking nice but when I exported into modeler only the roof and quarter panels appeared, and only after I hit "center to origin". I have no idea how I got the model to show up because it was late and I neglected to save. Has anyone ever had this problem before?

Mihela816 · Oct 9, 2011

I uploaded my latest work. The car is substantially better to drive than when I first posted it up. The sound and model are still in progress but I'm happy with the physics so far. I'd appreciate any feedback if anyone thinks it needs tweaking. I updated the download link in the first post if anyone wants to try it out.

Cosmo° · Oct 9, 2011

Not sure how to sugarcoat this one, the car needs a clean start physics-wise. The dimensions are not correct, masses are not in the ballpark, centre of gravity position is out of range, car.ini is a outdated and quite messy (31kb of qlog data from loading the car up only once)... it doesn't help if the steer.lock is set to 180° by default (I corrected it for my second test run), you can't judge the handling at all with that setting. I could say that the car rolls over quite easily, rides harshly and has little body control... but I think the problem is not the actual setup alone, it's the fact that car.ini is in a state where you're not in control over what happens.

My suggestion would be to head over racer.nl, have a look around the documentation for car.ini to see what kind of data you want to search for, how to use it. Then go on a research session or two and collect as much data as you can. Check out a clean, modern day release like the updated Murcielago in the v0.835 default package, for example, and see how car.ini should look like in basic terms (what has to be there, where, what's obsolete, what are the sign conventions). That's when you can start a nice setup process for real.

Hopefully this wasn't more feedback than you were looking for, but I think it's better than telling you to keep going like that. You can always post questions here on the forums, it's not like this kind of feedback means you should give up, quite the opposite

twister77 · Oct 9, 2011

Cosmo° said:
.. I could say that the car rolls over quite easily, rides harshly and has little body control...

That is how 1995 Ford Probe GT drives in the real life, LOL..

Mr Whippy · Oct 10, 2011

Haha

Mihela816 · Oct 10, 2011

Cosmo° said:
Not sure how to sugarcoat this one, the car needs a clean start physics-wise. The dimensions are not correct, masses are not in the ballpark, centre of gravity position is out of range, car.ini is a outdated and quite messy (31kb of qlog data from loading the car up only once)... it doesn't help if the steer.lock is set to 180° by default (I corrected it for my second test run), you can't judge the handling at all with that setting. I could say that the car rolls over quite easily, rides harshly and has little body control... but I think the problem is not the actual setup alone, it's the fact that car.ini is in a state where you're not in control over what happens.

My suggestion would be to head over racer.nl, have a look around the documentation for car.ini to see what kind of data you want to search for, how to use it. Then go on a research session or two and collect as much data as you can. Check out a clean, modern day release like the updated Murcielago in the v0.835 default package, for example, and see how car.ini should look like in basic terms (what has to be there, where, what's obsolete, what are the sign conventions). That's when you can start a nice setup process for real.

Hopefully this wasn't more feedback than you were looking for, but I think it's better than telling you to keep going like that. You can always post questions here on the forums, it's not like this kind of feedback means you should give up, quite the opposite

I definitely appreciate your feedback. I originally based this car on another, older front wheel drive car for an outdated version of racer and kind of patched it together. However the documentation on the racer website is in about the same state as my car, patched together and often inaccurate for the newer versions of racer. I will have to take a look at how some of the newer cars are implemented and see make changes accordingly. I will polish this car further, I ain't done yet.

Mihela816 · Oct 20, 2011

I have released a major update. Try it out and see what I can do to improve it, I would definitely appreciate it!

Cosmo° · Oct 20, 2011

There are some improvements, but also some important things that stayed iffy. Since I had some time today, I went over the file to clean it up a bit, set a few vital numbers and put some comments in for you to check out. It's not meant to work like this, rather give you a decent base to work with and compare with your previous file version to see what's changed. Feel free to post questions of course.

Most importantly the CoG position is set to represent the 63% / 37% weight distribution and an estimated 0.500m height - that means the body mesh isn't aligned properly yet (I left it like this on purpose, so you can fix it yourself [via modeler.exe -> translate in y and z axis] - great way to drive the point home, CoG position is just so fundamental you have to do that first).

You also need to specify some damping data, it's currently not present in car.ini.

Mihela816 · Oct 24, 2011

Thanks Cosmo, that's exactly the kind of help I need. Some of this stuff is pretty murky in the documentation, your edited file gives me a better idea of many of the things I didn't understand, or didn't even know existed in the first place!