Arcade racing physics

[MrKii]

Hi,

I'm trying (struggling would be a more accurate word ) to make an arcade racing game with easy fun controls but realistic physics when coming to impacts and contacts. With my past experience, I've reached the conclusion that making a realistic looking vehicle is not that hard, but really hard to make it run at high speeds without making it extremely difficult to control by the user. (from my point of view/experience, I'm in no ways telling that this is impossible, it's probably just that I'm not skilled enough in this field).

Yesterday I realized that GTA 5 is using Bullet as a physics engine, and I couldn't start wondering how can a realistic physics simulation like Bullet be tweaked to produce such unrealistic driving physics (albeit very fun and playable, something similar to what I'm trying to achieve) like GTA. Is there any bullet example which shows something close to this kind of arcade racing physics?

Thanks!
MrKii

[Basroil]

Check the vehicle examples in the download code. There's a few other examples like raycast vehicles that might help too.

As for the control at high speed, same goes for old cars actually. Newer cars sometimes have velocity dependent steering, which means you need to turn the wheel more for the same turn radius at high speed. A ton of games also use this same idea, which makes high speed control easier. You should also consider speed dependent stiffness in the suspension too, for the same reasons.