Wheel shake? How much power do you need to get that ? with esc off mine launches with a bit of spin and squat, but it runs straight to 214mph without shakes or shudders, even in the earlier 1500hp trim I used.
High power + mid engine= the front wheels shake during launch (if you clutch dump or neutral dump it)
I’d estimate around 800hp before that issue shows up
Well, I’m not seeing it in my 1360hp car, maybe a 24-25% front power split is enough to avoid it. Or the 4200lb curb weight.
It’s probably the latter. And also possibly depends on the geometry of the body. The less weight there is over the nose the worse it gets.
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Announcement: Troubleshooting and Things
Okay so this thing having been floating around for some time, I’ve noticed a few things that I should really make clear.
- These bodies are 100% not allowed for obvious reasons that there is no way in hell I’m including them in a “road legal hypercar mod pack” for Beam.
(these two are NASCAR bodies. Bodies with 0 doors will not qualify).
There are other bodies I haven’t listed here that also scream out “not a 2010s hypercar”. If you find yourself struggling with a build thinking "gee I wish a 2010s hypercar didn’t look like a 2010s hypercar why can’t they be more like this 90s thing I’m building, now that’s m u h c r e a t i v i t y you need to get your head checked and also pull out of this round. At least look up real world examples and ask yourself if you’re articulating those elements.
- A couple of the bodies (namely Aruna mods) are broken because they don’t have a passenger compartment or because they have borked Cd, for example:
has a Cd of 0.029. So it can’t be used because then you can make stuff like a 300mph car with like 500hp which doesn’t make sense on planet Earth.
Also please check your Passenger space before submitting, because abnormally low passenger compartments will skew your stats and if you’re trying to go for a luxury thing like a Chiron and you end up with a comfort score of 1 because you get a -99% nerf on passenger space, well it’s not going to do very well in the Automation round. To get around this I may have to make special exceptions if the entry is otherwise good enough, but that’s more work so choose wisely.
- People are asking me if they can use this body:
I’m inclined to say no, because while we can suspend a degree of disbelief, it’ll be a real trick to convince anybody that this is anyting road-legal and can, in the old Top Gear rule, “clear a speed bump”. If anyone can convince me though, you’re welcome to try.
- This body has a longstanding problem where the mesh is asymmetrical.
The car exports and performs perfectly fine in Beam, but the mesh itself is asymmetrical and fixtures on certain parts therefore do not stamp properly. This is a problem I’ve tried to fix by jigging the nodes so that the wheels align with the mesh…
…but that’s not going to lead to good things. Therefore by all means submit entries using this body but beware that the fixture stamping may be an issue, and also that one may simply have to wait until this body is finally fixed (it’s been a known issue for over 1 year *edit I can’t read dates lmao) before we can use it as a proper Beam mod.
- I’m going to have to change the way I get people to submit models for the Automation judgement. Here’s why:
Some people (one person) has broken their Automation model by making a wing out of something like 4 wing elements, thus ending up with an Automation graph with about 1.3 tons of downforce on the rear which stuffed up all kinds of things especially when exporting to Beam because the wing they had in the front was actually larger than all the wings in the rear combined. This caused that user all kinds of consternation because they thought the car was an oversteery mess (it was) so they ended up making the front suspension stiffer than the rear (despite the car being mid-engined with a 60:40 weight bias) which ofc didn’t solve the issue because the real problem was that the car weighed twice up front than in the rear at 300km/h…
…now this is not a problem because I can change the lift coefficients and stall angles manually in the .jbeam file. So don’t worry about the export, just make the cosmetics to your heart’s content. But for the Automation simulation, if it’s becoming a problem make a mule test trim with only enough fixtures to show me what the car should be doing in Automation.
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There is a big limitation in the way we can implement animated active aero: the animation of the fixture only includes rotation of the entire fixture. So you can only use fixtures that will allow rotation of said fixture and not look silly. We can get around some of this problem by saying well maybe it’s just flaps or hidden flaps (see: LaFerrari’s flap system) or using non-aero fixtures and we can designate them as aero fixtures later.
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Suspension tuning is currently a bit silly as the Automation export rolls around too much in Beam. If that is still an issue I will literally just increase the spring rate values myself in the .jbeam. Don’t sweat the small stuff and just make it behave right in Automation.
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I am very likely to change the acceptance criteria for what defines a “hypercar” as per Automation. I’m also going to expand it beyond what the real world traditionally calls a hypercar. So criteria I will probably specify relate to:
- A prestige score of at least 50? because these are exclusive cars
- The ATT lap time may be relaxed slightly if it achieves a composite of other criteria including comfort and top speed. I don’t know yet.
- Can include up to 5 seats for those crazy super saloons, if you can get them fast enough.
- I am probably going to also include an emissions limit because real world emissions laws
- I also am very likely to relax limitations over how many entries you send, but include a gambit. How does this sound: you can send in as many entries as you like but if more than 2 of your entries get binned in the first round, I will bin all of them without exception
Furthermore I am likely to only select one of your designs to take into Beam. So you can’t just send any crap you like and you should choose wisely.
With all this said I am now opening my DMs to prelminary entries for about 2-3 weeks.
During this time you can DM me with previews and your ideas for what kind of 10s hypercar you plan to send in. I will provide some brief feedback including a score out of 100, where 100 is “I will accept your car as is past the first round”. Once again be warned that this is the hardest part so don’t be surprised if you get a disconcertingly low number that is not 100. If you look like you’re really struggling I may even suggest you find somebody else to help you style your car. After all, the fixture system has its limitations and this is kind of asking you to transcend them.
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Oh fuck. I swear every body I choose seems to have an important issue. Is only the 2.3m wheelbase one assymetric, or does the larger variant have the same problem too?
Also a question about how you’d judge comfort in cars that are not “bare interior, track ready”. Are you going to look only at comfort score alone or at features? Because due to how automation dislikes stiffer suspensions you can end up with a car with sport/basic with 0 comfort, and a car with sport/premium 0 comfort. Yet they are definitely not the same, are they? Hell, sometimes you can reach 0 or almost 0 comfort even with luxury entertainment. And I’m not talking “right on the sportiness line stiffness” suspensions either, sometimes you hit 0 much earlier
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Only the 2.3m wheelbase afaik. This means that successful entries using this body will need to wait until the mesh is fixed before being made into a fully fledged mod (including my Kelpie and Armada).
Yeah this is actually cheesing me off pretty bad rn esp given the suspension conversion in export issue. In this case I’m going to have to recalculate the scores myself from the detail stats page and cone up with an adjusted metric.
There are also a couple of broken bodies where no matter what you do eith the aero it refuses to behave reasonably. Don’t know what to do about that.
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Concerning the comfort issue: Since automation ignores adaptable suspensions other than a stat boost, could I suggest that cars with fully adaptable suspensions can submit two suspension modes in spring rates, damping and ARBs? One for track mode (capable of dealing with the G- and downforces) and one for comfort mode. Since that’s pretty much the modern solution to this problem of track suspensions ruining all comfort 
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I think InnocentJoker has been able to program separate suspension setups that can be activated using hydropneumatic or something like that in Beam.
So if you have Active Springs selected then sure I guess so.
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A question for everybody
So I’ve been hearing that with the appropriate engine swap you can do electric in Beam and it’s easier now than it used to be. In fact now with the release of that E-SBR it’d be pretty easy to port numbers and sounds over because that’s the beauty of ripping stuff off in Beam.
This said I haven’t tried it yet. So I don’t know how it’ll turn out.
Someone asked me if this is the case should we open the round to electric only vehicles? Hybrid unfortunately isn’t going to work out so well due to technical difficulties in Beam though again if you allow some BS you could just play the sounds and pretend that the car was in full attack mode all the time. I don’t think this is particularly satisfactory.
There are pros and cons:
Pros
- greater design diversity
- greater variety in engineering
Cons
- more difficulty figuring out what a fair conversion is given Automation only does ICE
- hybrids impossible to make work properly which is kind of half the point
- risk of getting two dozen BS “muh minimalist electric hypercar” entries that’s basically a 3 fixture wonder.
I’m leaning towards “maybe in another round where we have the conversion down pat” but if someone can really convince me that I could take ONE car for conversion to the Beam round I may think about it.
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Beam only matters for the select entries that make it to the last round. Since EV’s can’t be made in Automation, many of the Automation stats wouldn’t be relevant to what you’d actually be driving in Beam. A participant wouldn’t have to worry about the engineering of their engine at all, a crucial part of a challenge, and mostly would have to focus on only on styling. This all considered, I wouldn’t allow electric.
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I agree with what Watermelon said, and since you’ve said this is a rather new idea i think it would be better if this was done later when people are more experienced and familiar with it, for a different challenge.
Also I think not being able to do hybrids is definitely the killing blow, considering just how many hypercars are hybrids and how EV hypercars are a more near-future idea rather than current to last 5-10 years kind of thing (in my opinion).
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I don’t think it would be worthwhile opening this round to straight EVs - and not just because they don’t exist in Automation: balancing them would be a pain in the tailpipe if they were allowed.
Yeah, I don’t think EVs are a good idea… yet. They’d be hard to try and make work in Automation. Like Lava_Cake said, hybrids would have been great and it’s a great shame they can’t work.
To explain a little more simply than Strop has said and what he means by “considerably easier” is that you can actually keep whatever engine you have in there (It’ll have to be a large engine with more of a “performance” turbo), edit the torque values, replace the sound and take away two or more gears (if you select Dual clutch 4 gear like I do and have really long gearing then it’s just take away two gears for a regera type thing) and then that’s pretty much it.
It’s alot less work than trying to fit the entire new engine in a car, moving the nodes around, creating values and hoping it works. It’s not perfect, but it can be done 100% Automation stock and that acheivement is pretty cool. I have an entire company based on it.
And also, just because electric cars “have no cooling” spoiler, they do doesn’t mean you cant just have vents for the asthetic, or for brake cooling, cabin airflow or just straight downforce. I’d like to see some EVs, I’ve seen some very cool ones in the past. I’m hopefully going to enter one.
If it doesn’t work out, then I guess there could always be a separate round for them.
Yeah I think it’s gonna end up being a project in its own right tbh.
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Even though it sounds like a great idea, given that it would give the entrants a lot more diversity in the design and engineering departments, I think it’d be a hard one to balance.
The area below the power curve should be equal to their ICE counterpart, but only in the part of the power band that gets utilized when going WOT and changing gears at redline, which would make for a difficult one to pull out.
Just for the sake of fairness and to avoid making something much more complex out of this challenge, I’d say it would be a good idea to discard the electric motor option entirely.
I think it’d be impossible to have a competition with electric cars. It’s possible to make those, as you said, thanks to the eSBR.
The impossible parts is in… how the hell do we know how much ET/PU/cost/power/weight/etc. they should have? It’d literally be people having to pull numbers out of their asses, or you having to pull numbers out of your ass for people’s cars. When you’re making a normal automation car everybody has the same engine designer and car designer, and it’s up to each person to know how to tune in those to get results. I see no feasible way of balancing electric cars, not even if it were all electric cars, much less with ICE cars in the mix.
I’d love to make something like a hypercar version of a Survolt but there’s just no way IMHO.
Hybrids in BeamNG would basically require coding your very own vehicle controller/powertrain/transmission. Basically, partially reinventing the wheel to get around the normal BeamNG powertrain limitations. But it is technically possible, just that it’d require some advanced programming.
This guy https://www.beamng.com/threads/overview-of-arcanoxs-hybrid-drivetrain.58363/ had to pretty much do exactly that. In any case, this is a type of hybrid that would be pretty useless for hypercars (hybrid + CVT like on a Prius or Volt, not “electric engine as some sort of electric KERS”). And even if someone made it, it’d be impossible to truly balance too, just like electric cars. Only worth considering only for something far off into the future, if someone does figure out and get around to making a hybrid supercar drivetrain
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Good news everybody!
I’ve managed to get active aero working. I have figured out enough that I can create flaps and wings and give them individual behaviour. Even better, I reckon with enough work I can go one better than hinges and can incorporate slidenodes such that flap behaviour can be a little more fancy. Furthermore as long as the fixture comes with at least one node and doesn’t automatically export integrated into the body mesh, I can make aerodynamically active fixtures out of nearly anything (within reason) and can (hopefully) combine objects so it might look half realistic at that.
Now I’m just trying to learn enough .lua to learn how to program the fixtures to work in more complex systems than simply “if going faster than x speed open part way, if braking and above y speed open all the way”. I’m trying to equip one of my cars with a DRS button and an automatic DRS cancelling system like what’s in the Mclaren P1.
Since I’m judging CSR right now I’ll give this stage of the project another week or so (probably 2 because I have wedding stuff to plan this weekend and I’ll be moving house in stages next weekend) while prospective entries are still being scrutinised. Once CSR is done I’ll possibly drop a quick teaser to show you the progress on my own test car.
EDIT: Just got one or two more problems to solve and then I think I’m sorted (given I’m not working on active suspension right now so I’ll just tune suspensions for race mode for those cars with active springs/dampers/swaybars). This FM3 is likely to open on the second weekend of February.
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