Tracked Troubleshooting

[scotg 204]

I everyone! I was hoping to find some help from the community. I'm having trouble with tracked vehicles, and the first problem is with the land contact. I'm not convinced it has anything to do with the LOD landcontact, since that seems pretty straight forward. There's a pic of the problem in my dA gallery:

 

Well, that was supposed to be just a hyperlink, but it just displays the photo I wanted to show anyway.

Tank 1 has different sized wheels. However, it's all just an illusion, because I set up the memory points on all wheels the same size as the 3 covered wheels' center and bounds. Mass is also weird, because it's supposed to be a total of 10kg for the components, and 4 weight boxes evenly distributed for actual mass. That's how the sample tank is done. The 3 wheels and drive wheels move, but the front and back wheels do not, as expected for what I did (btw, is there a better way given that same-size wheels are not an option?). The tracks move, and even an AI soldier can drive it, somewhat. IT stays in that position while moving.
EDIT 1: I forgot to mention that all the wheels on this tank, except the front two, are dampened all the way up even though they don't touch the ground. When testing in buldozer, they rise and drop together.

Tank 2 is about 10 cm off the ground. I placed my character in prone on the far side to sort of make it more clear. The wheels do not move in Eden (although they do in buldozer). The tracks also don't "move" or damper. The tank is driveable; though it is too slow, turns too tightly, and stutters about every 3 meters as if tapping the brakes. Same size wheels are not a problem with this tank, but none of them move. Weird.
EDIT 2: This tank also has a similar mass set up as the sample tank, where 4 mass boxes distribute the weight. It seemed less important to mention that here, but I reconsidered.

Ok so... I know I'm gonna need to post more pics or screenshots of the LODs in OB, or maybe paste sections of my config and model documents. For the sake of retaining some secrecy on my project and also not posting unnecessary pics on the servers, I want to limit what I post to only what is needed. So, where shall we start? Any help is much appreciated!!

[scotg 204]

They're still not moving correctly, but at least both tanks are flat on the ground, now.  On Tank 1 it turns out to have been a mislabeled tank wheel: "kolo" was used where it should have been "kol" in a few places. This was necessary to make the larger wheels still roll, giving the impression they're active. On Tank 2 it turned out to be too little mass for the suspension settings in the physX portion of the config.cpp. Wheels and treads weren't moving because I had fat-fingered its name in the model.cfg file, thus it was trying to refer to a different model than what the p3d is named. It's good that the problem is partially solved; it just took going over it a fourth and fifth time before I caught these errors. Now at least maybe the answer lies more in someone's wheelhouse?

So, what remains of the initial problem? Well, on both tanks the movement is very slow, and turning while going forward stops forward movement rather than blending with it. On a simple forward direction, Tank 2 jerks as if tapping the brakes about every 2m. Its turning is too strong, and it doesn't stop turning once my finger releases the key. In fact, after I attempt to correct the oversteer by turning the other way, it will resume the original turn direction. Probably not relevant, but suspension/dampening is using the "Basic_Damper_Destruct_Axis" technique prescribed in the sample tank. I had to rotate the two points on X by 180 degrees to get the suspension moving in the correct direction. Although it solves movement for individual springs, it does nothing for the overall performance of the tanks (i.e.: there's still a jerky motion and hypersensitive steering). I'm still looking into it, but have not found anything helpful.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that getting re-acquainted with the tanks config guidelines and cars config guidelines, while informative, was ultimately unable to help me figure out the jerkiness. Also forgot to mention that tanks are leaning forward a little, but this time the tracks stay on the ground. The leaning forward effect is even worse when they are driving forward.