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Why is the center of mass on the Nova so high over the ground? As in, why does it tip over so easily? Shouldn't the tank be next to impossible to tip?

TL;DRThe Nova's mass is actually low, and tipping comes from overly high collision impulses in the physics engine, which the team has begun improving and plans to work on further.

Richard TowlerVehicle Gameplay team

I don't. So, the tank has a lot of mass and the mass is actually quite low on the tank. - Not according to this person. - Yeah, well it is physically But one of the problems that you have in physics is So in real life there's a lot of dampening with collisions Because you're hitting terrain, you're hitting objects that move And the collision in a kind of output kind of varies a lot Whereas in a physics simulation you can have quite high spikes of collisions Because it's two interconnecting solid objects And we need to do a lot of work on how the ground vehicles feel and interact Because that's not how real life collisions happen But that is the output of the physics engine And basically that causes the vehicle to react in a way What makes it look like it doesn't weigh very much Or it gives you a really high impulse so the vehicle can roll over And it isn't that it doesn't weigh very much or the center of mass is too high It's just the collision impulse is so high That it's got the force to kind of tip the vehicle over But that's definitely something we're working on And we've already done some work on the suspension physics for the ground vehicles When you hit rocks and stuff If you had the old physics and you basically reduced the dampening The vehicles would flip over 13 times But now we've kind of really worked on the ground vehicle collision physics When you hit a rock like this for example It just kind of rides it, it doesn't go like this And that's something we've worked on the first stage And then the next stage that we'll be working on the general output of the physics engine To not generate these really high impulses that are just not accurate But it does create a perception issue, we are aware of that.

Star Citizen Live›Ask the Devs - Vehicle Gameplay·
Published on this date.15 Sep 2023