Lorne Devlog - 03

Week 2

Car control / gears

I wanted the gear changing in our cars to be manual so that the player would have more to think about during a race and the game would be more interesting. I came up with the idea of using the right analog stick as a gear stick and the right bumper as a clutch pedal. You hold down the ‘clutch’ and use the ‘gear stick’ to pick the gear you want, then let go of the clutch. The controls were nice and intuitive and I just needed to program the gear system.

I wanted the gear system in the car to be quite realistic to match the suspension. Some of the things that I wanted to mimic from a gear system were: Accelerating from stationary faster at lower gears, needing to use lower gears to get up steep hills, higher gears to have a higher top speed, engine braking. 

The main problem that I had was that to take off or move uphill faster meant that I needed to apply more force to the car. But if I was applying more force to the car it would mean that it would be faster in all situations and the lowest gear would be the fastest. 

My solution was to have a power store, kind of like a flywheel, and the engine would add power to it and the wheels would take power away and use it to move the car forward. The higher the rpm the more power the engine would be putting into the power store. The higher the rpm and the lower the gear the more power the wheels would take away from the power store and apply it to the car. Once the power store got too low the wheels would start applying a reverse force to the car, this would give each gear a top speed.