Help with Animated Shifter in Beam Exporter

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So, I use AutoBeam Animation Generator, which is very helpful for making animated fixtures, but there’s a missing element in it, and I don’t know if its missing in the exporter itself or if AutoBeam just doesn’t have it yet, but how can I make a manual column shifter?

AutoBeam has Automatic, H-pattern and CVT shifters, but what’s sorely missing is the column shifter, loads of older cars have manual transmissions but shift gears with a shifter on the steering column, and I don’t want to have to kludge a gated shifter onto the dashboard which would not only be strange looking, but would still be the overcomplicated mess that H-pattern shifters currently are, what I want is a column shifter that sits at a certain position for neutral, can go up one position for reverse, or down one position for first gear, then down another for second, down another for third, and so on. There is also the sequential shifter option which AutoBeam doesn’t have but the BeamNG Exporter does support, such as:

~prop:84,gear,0,30.0,0,0,0,0,0,1.00,0,1~

But that only causes the shifter to move forward and then back to center, as its a sequential and not a standard manual gearbox. Using “gear” makes it sequential, “gear_A” is automatic, but from what I can tell there is no “gear_M” that would allow the prop to move across a range of positions to represent each gear. If there isn’t a function for this kind of manual, then there really should be, because its far too common to not be included. And to simplify the labyrinthine gated shifter, “gear_H” could be for the H-pattern shifter, and come in multiple types for ones with reverse and first in the same gate, ones with reverse and fifth in the same gate, or ones with a separate reverse gate, and it could index it automatically based on the transmission in the vehicle and move the shifter along both axes of rotation or translation.

At the moment, if there’s some way to use the Transform Calculator in AutoBeam to make a manual colum shifter, if someone could walk me through it, that would be greatly appreciated, and this thread could stand as a guide for anyone else wanting to make one.

Edit: To clarify my question, I’m asking if there is an animation function in the BeamNG Exporter that I can type into the description of a vehicle to animate a fixture so it acts like a column shifter. If I can’t, then where can I find a list of every possible animation type the BeamNG Exporter currently supports so I can experiment with it?

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AutoBeam Animation Generator is a community-made tool, we do not provide any support for it. You will have to get in touch with the tool’s creator for this issue.

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Oh I know AutoBeam is a community-made tool. From what I can tell, though, there either is no documentation on a column shifter animation function that may or may not be in the BeamNG Exporter itself, or there is no such function in the Exporter to begin with. So my real question is if such an animation function exists in the Exporter, as that’s a question that pertains to Automation itself. Perhaps I ought not have ended my initial post with a question on AutoBeam, that’s my bad, but the core of my issue is not having any way to make a column shifter due to it seeming like the function doesn’t exist in Automation. Given the prevalence of column shifters in history, having it be missing feels strange.

Should I edit my initial post and its title to clarify?

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Okay, so for the time being, I figured out a solution to the shifter animation, and also found a lot more besides.

All I needed was to use the “gearIndex” function and reduce the degrees to represent each step of the shift lever, so for my 4-on-the-tree vehicle what I had to do was set the shifter at Neutral position, define steps of about 7.5 degrees for the total throw I wanted, and set the Min and Max values on the animation steps to -1 and 4, respectively, as Neutral returns a 0, Reverse returns a -1, and every gear above returns a 1 through 4, or up to a maximum defined by how many gears the gearbox has. I tried to figure out how to make a custom gear display, but linear motion on 6 characters is far more difficult, the column shifter only needs one “gearIndex” line to work, though it does briefly snap back to Neutral position for each shift due to how Beam simulates the Neutral shift between each gear on manuals.

On a related note, the official BeamNG documentation page has all manners of outputs, many that AutoBeam doesn’t support yet, and I ended up using loads of those to add cool behaviors, such as an airplane-style altimeter given the vehicle I was making has an aero-style V12 motor. Someone is probably going to make their own electrical load gauge so they can watch the cranking amps when starting the car. Might even be me doing that XD

I think for now I can consider this case closed, really. I dug in and found my own answer!

Edit: Actually, the question I’d have now is if there is a non-standard function in exported Automation vehicles that represents whether a front and/or rear locking differential is locked or not, returning a 0 or 1. I figured out you can use “modeRangeBox” for high or low range and “mode4WD” for 2wd or 4wd mode in vehicles with a 4x4 drivetrain, I set those to a pair of labeled levers on the dashboard so I can see what mode I’m in, and also “lights” or “lights_state” for the low/high beams two-position lever, but I have two levers for the front and rear differentials and was hoping Automation exported vehicles have a return on the state of the diffs that I could use to animate those. I guess I’ll never know without more digging!

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Good stuff!

Something to keep in mind is that the exporter and our Trim Description Command system (and by extension, I imagine the Autobeam Animation tool as well) can only access systems covered by BeamNG’s electrics system. Anything more than that requires manual jbeam editing outside of the tools we provide.

2 Likes
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Ah! That makes sense. I had just started looking into how I can add things to the Electrics System of the vehicle on BeamNG’s side, so its nice to know I was looking in the right direction. If I’m right, that means I can make a “dummy” prop, rename it in the Trim Description Command to the new electrics value I’m gonna add, and have it animate the way I want. Fingers crossed that this ends up working!