3D Theory - Example - Car Racing Game - Straight line movement

Movement in a line

On this page we are looking at the situation where the steering wheels are pointing straight ahead. In the next page we will go on to cornering.

car move

Orientation

Since the car is driving in a straight line, we only need to model its movement in 2 dimensions. In two dimensions there is only one direction of rotation, the orientation of the car can therefore be represented by the angle: theta. (we will model any rocking of the car on its springs separately so it is ignored here).

However, we want to update the position of the car in every frame, to derive this from the angle theta would require the calculation of sin(theta) and cos(theta) in every frame. It is therefore more efficient to store the orientation of the car by a two dimensional vector [dir]. This is a unit length vector which points in the direction of the car, so,

[dir] = [sin(theta), cos(theta)]

This can be represented as a normalised complex number as explained on this page. This will allow rotations to be combined by multiplying complex numbers.

Position

First lets assume that the velocity is constant. Since we are traveling in a straight line we can use the 1 dimensional (scalar) equations of motion and multiply them by the direction vector to give the position in 2 dimensions:

[s] = (s(0)+v(0)*t)[dir]

where:

The time t, is the time since the start of the simulation, if the frames of the animation are generated at a constant rate then, we can just increment t by a fixed amount each frame. This will add a fixed 2D vector value to the position each time.

Now lets look at the situation where the car is accelerating or decelerating, it will then follow this equation:

[s] = (s(0)+v(0)*t+ 0.5 a*t2)[dir]

where:

So how do we represent the status of the car, in the program, so far? That is, the values that might possibly change in every frame, I think we need to hold the following structure:

public class carStatus {
	vector2d s // position of the centre of mass, integral of v,
	vector2d v // velocity, integral of a,
	vector2d a // acceleration, depends only on forces acting at the time.
}

In this case these values are scalars, however the next page covers turning, so we will eventually have to store each of these as vectors.

Forces & Torques - Starting & Stopping

As explained already, we are modeling the movement of the car separately from the suspension of the car, the suspension part is explained on this page. We need to relate this to the motion of the car, discussed on this page, the forces are related to the acceleration.

The engine generates a torque on the wheel (a torque is a set of forces which tends to cause rotation). This causes a linear force on the axle which tends to move the car forward. The acceleration of the car produces an equal and opposite force (F = m*a) acting on the centre of mass of the car.

car forces

Since the inertia force is laterally displaced from the driving force, this tends to produce another torque, which tries to rotate the whole car. This will tend to increase the downforce on the back wheel and decrease the downforce on the front wheel. In an extreme case this could rotate the whole car.

car forces wheelie

On this page we have explored movement in a straight line, on the next page we extend this to cornering.


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