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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

I liked the talk, but it was given very much from the perspective of a game developer and not from the perspective of an engineer wanting to simulate a car. (Unsurprisingly)

There is actually a lot of literature on how to simulate vehicles, which would be quite a bit of help. He also mentions BeamNG whose approach is very weird if you actually want to get accurate vehicle dynamics. Their ongoing tire simulation project seems even weirder and as if it was done by people who actively tried to ignore standard approaches for modeling tires.

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> There is actually a lot of literature on how to simulate vehicles, which would be quite a bit of help.

Could you link some? I'm interested in this topic but have struggled to find good resources

Look at what cosin is doing with FTire and Fraunhofer is doing with CDTire.

Why do you say beamngs approach is weird? They seem to take a bottom up approach and I think it's a decent way to do it.

Because they are a German company who gets some American lab to do some standard tire parametrization tests.

Germany has two state of the Art companies developing tire models and their parametrization and instead of relying on the decade of research and experience in that area they are ignoring it all and are going to some company around the world to get any data at all. This is just totally bizarre, they likely could have saved themselves a lot of time and money by just hiring a couple of guys from that sector and just implementing well studied approaches or just worked together with world leading experts in that field.

>They seem to take a bottom up approach and I think it's a decent way to do it.

If nobody else had ever done tire simulation, sure.

Could it be those companies are not interested in working with a small video game studio? In case they usually work with the much larger actors of the auto industry.

Or maybe they're operating at a level of fidelity much higher than the game needs? If they're working on simulation e.g. for Formula 1, they might be doing full fledged numerical simulation (FEM etc) rather than simplified models for real time games.

I'd be curious to know more though, what else do you know about this?

Tire simulations vary wildly amongst car sims. There certainly are many approaches to modeling tires, and many variables that can affect it. Beam is pretty good, I think they’re trying new stuff and it’s paying off.

Given the fact that right now they are in the process of parameterizing their tires I can only assume that their fidelity is significantly below the state of the art

Beam has been out for a while, they have decent tire models already, this is new research.

I’m sure you’ve driven it, so you’d know that it’s not the best but it’s no slouch.

> Their ongoing tire simulation project seems even weirder and as if it was done by people who actively tried to ignore standard approaches for modeling tires.

That makes it much more valuable for me, than simply copying what everyone else is doing.

I already have basically every other sim, purchased on Steam and installed.

I can just jump into them, and for example enjoy AMS2, or LMU, or iRacing tire models instantly.

>I already have basically every other sim, purchased on Steam and installed.

You do not have the "sims" I was talking about, which are the ones used in automotive industries and who are using tire models which are certainly more advanced than what is found in any game.

>I can just jump into them, and for example enjoy AMS2, or LMU, or iRacing tire models instantly.

Which is the difference between a game and engineering software. In a game the tire physics should be fun, in engineering Software they should be accurate.

I want a game like Autoduel (old apple2e game), but 3d with real physics.

That game was like Carwars pen and paper roleplaying.

That closest I've seen was Interstate76 from 1990s.

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