Hi, i started building a more realistic suspension for the tank:
Features:
ToDo:
This is the current state of development:
Looks good! Can you tell us about your approach?
Sure, please keep in mind, it is still beta state:
How to:
The 4 lower wheels are suspended, the smaller front one just helps not to get stuck with the nose of the tank.
I used low friction material from the tutorial for both, tankwheel and tankbody.
I spared the small wheel in the rear of the tank, because most of the time the tank touches the ground with the fuel-tanks firrst while colliding backwards.
Use a 260DP collision on the tanks body and just scale it to fit between the tracks.
Reduce force vector ( found on the tracks_mesh ) to aprox 25…(was 40… in the tutorial)
Tanks body has linear damping of .8 to limit speed and a small amount of angular damping
In the code you need to:
Thats it.
And here is an issue with this approach so far. maybe someone finds a solution:
I can add rotation to the wheels (the only part touching the ground) but they do not make the tank move…it looks more like 2 forcevectors nearly equaling each other regarding in a very slow opposite movement.
I have not found a solution for this yet.
Maybe someone has an idea ??
Thats it.
It took me a whole evening to get it running and setup, good luck.
> MAJOR UPDATE
The physics embedding in UE4 is somehow difficult, especially if you work with staticmeshcomponent.
For instance: Constraints jsut change behaviour if you use the initialise function in c code, they act suddenly like loose shackles instead of joints…so i got rid all the blueprint embedding, i just kept 6 sockets with 6 very small static meshes as placeholders for the initialise function.
All the rest is done in
C++ CODE
now. (if you listen closely, you may hear a fine “TAADAAA” here lol)
Here is my current state of work:
Features:
Each wheel(socket) calculates a progressive spring rate depending on the hit result, suspension inbound travel and suspension max inbound value.
An additional damping is applied when the suspension has high travel velocity to avoid too much bouncing of the tank after jumping
The calculated force is scaled with a cosine function and a small magic threshold by the impact normal from the HitResult and the rotational offset of a normailzed up-vector, rotated by the tnaks current orientation and then applied to the related socket.
Since i did not get angular movement into the tank (roll & pitch) just by adding force to different socket positions as i wanted to, I calculate an angular force impulse for each wheel(socket) by position of the soket and suspension inbound ratio and apply it to the tank.
I am quite happy with the result so far, it needs a bit more tuning etc though.
Next step will be adding friction to the ground and calculating it into the tanks movement to get rid of the ApplySidewaysForce function, which is right now in use again.
> MAJOR UPDATE
…another one…lol
Features added:
Here is the current state of development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CajXglC_MKE
And this is for the community:
Rotaing something on a rotated object is …hmmm…tricky.
Here is the solution (so spare your time…it took me hours to get this working properly, even though its down to 3 lines of code finally):
//Set the .Roll of the wheel
FRotator WheelSpin = FRotator(-ForwardSpeed + LastWheelRotation, 0.0f, 0.0f);
// Combine Rotator with the ComponentOrientation …order matters: Orignal Orientation * NewRotation
FRotator FinalWheelSpin = FRotator(FQuat(GetComponentRotation())*FQuat(WheelSpin));
//Set the new WheelRotaion
WheelVisual->SetRelativeRotation(FinalWheelSpin);
Quaternions…i do not understand them but i found this in the UE4 maths… and it works!
More to come…
Wow, that looks great! Do you know how you could add a track to the wheels, possibly? I’m just curious
@expertsummer328:
Sure…a complete visual working tank track is the goal combined with as much physics as possible and necessary.
A minor update…
Todday ( after work) i started refactoring my mess and succeded…code is readable again, no function filling more then a screen, unnecessary stuff removed and documentation and variable names make sense now.
@Ben: if you ever read this, i really changed my style in coding, way more refactoring and variables with names that provide understanding of the code in months too…thanks so much for your refactoring lessons
In Addition i added some…
Features:
A short current state of progress video:
Stil to come: track visualisation, just looking into splines for realization
Awesome job carrying-on the project while we dream up the next section, a shining example to others.
Thanks for sharing!
Amazing work L-tec. Looking forward to getting through to the end of the battle tank section so I can attempt to implement this suspension stuff. I’ve spent quite a bit of time fine tuning my own non-suspension movement system, and I think I’ve reached the limits of what can be achieved there (by tweaking numbers, colliders, location to apply forces and hacky wheel touching ground workarounds). It works quite well and creates the sort of game play aesthetic I’m after (including drifting tanks in violation of MrT edict)… but no matter what I do, I can’t get it to not snag while going at a fairly tangential manner up a hill (i.e. not directly, but up the diagonal), as well as other little oddities that would prove frustrating to a player not looking to solve a design and coding puzzle.
Once I get it to a presentable state, look forward to showing it off to you guys. I made an awesome Mega and mini turret pair. A mega turret the size of a battleship turret and a mini turret that sits on top of the mega turret to pepper the player with smaller projectiles.
Some progress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GixZ-u2yTXA&feature=youtu.be
Features:
Actually i am calculating the tiles direct under the wheels and do some interpolation maths for the connecting ones to place and rotate them correct.
This will be replaced by using a spline, filling it with hitresult for each tracktile and then place the track meshes along the spline. This will finally allow me to do the circular movement of the track tiles too.
Yet a long way to go though… 
I keep you updated.
Minor update
Took me hours to understand splines, Bookwom style in Unrealdocumentation, Answerhub and Main Engines source code.
But got it finally working, makes life way easier with the track tiles 
New Features:
A video of the current state of progress:
I keep you updated…
Update
This is turning out awesome man!
@RyanPalmer: thanks a lot mate.
This is what i got to work this weekend:
Looks abit similar to what you have seen before, but instead of ugly replicating Meshcode, i have managed to make my first C++ procedural Pointer-Array based Meshgeneration, Animation and Positioning method.
In addtion, the spline is now a real loop. Sounds easy, but gave me a hard time to implement correctly with hours of viually debugging the whole method. The Bug-Solution was in one of the last lines of code, a very very nasty typo error interferring with the second spline. But at least, i solved it, one more bug is wiped out, learned a lot about splines and had some fun too.
So now, with a second spline, i spawn 96 tracktiles like nothing, in addition its now about 350 lines less code, all refactured and pretty readable.
For me, this is a major achievment in coding with UE4.
Just for fun: A 100 tracktile whirling centipede whatever…lol
@Ben: I found a major bug in the Tankmovment for AI Tanks. I am not sure if it was mentioned before. I will make an extra thread/post for it the next days, sorry for the delay, but i need to get some sleep, work starts early tomorrow.
Solid stuff! I shall have to investigate these splines…
Thanks L-Tec, for the initial how to you posted a couple weeks ago.
Was actually kinda hard to figure out… but wouldn’t have figured it out at all without what you posted there!
Few things for anyone else trying to implement a basic physics constraint style suspension following along with L-Tec’s pointers:
Don’t parent the wheels to the constraints. Constraints and items that they’re constraining on should be on the same level.
Set the components to constrain to via component name (drop down box, then fill out the text box… no selection menu, no drag and drop - just click on the components, F2 to rename, ctrl+c to copy and ctrl+v into the constrain text box).
The wheel object should only be scaled uniformly. Scaling it non-uniformingly creates a strange bug where it disregards the collision mesh… i.e. you can’t use a sphere and scale it into a disc. Unfortunately.
Most importantly, the wheels need to be set as physics enabled. Counter intuitive if you haven’t been told - because doing it with non constrained objects will cause those objects to fly off from the tank! In retrospect, that makes total sense, because those objects aren’t constrained.
The other bits can be played with to your hearts content, because it’ll actually work… if it doesn’t, then tweaking those numbers won’t do diddly squat! 
Update
Complete spline track working now.
Everything you see is spawned procedural, Number of Wheels, Number and width of tracktiles to use per side, Position of Front and Rear Wheel/Sprocket is settable, suspension is settable with almost all values via Blueprint.
Next to come… maybe traction and friction or other stuff not sure right now.
I will keep you informed.
@Zaptruder: Cool that i gave you an initial hint how to start, looking forward to your creations
I’ve uploaded a new demo! Features the bouncy suspension from your first post - works reasonably well, although I see from your posts, I have a significant journey ahead of me to implement moveable animated tracks. Give it a shot, let me know what you think 
Your track updates are looking pretty mega btw. Glad to see that I wasn’t the only person taking the line trace approach to determining collision.
