State of wheelzz

So, as we all know, wheels are not very cooperative. I'm curious as to what the priority at keen is in regards to fixing the wheelies. Also how do people who enjoy wheeled vehicles and constructing them find ways around current issues. Is this how wheels are going to be forever? Be interesting to here some vents from you guys, and thoughts on workarounds or what's going on.

It is so annoying when you spend ages designing something (like this for example https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=868970037 ) and then it doesn't work a week later. (built that boy a week before beta launch, before the downfall of the wheelz. It would drive very well but now the wheels just jam up on nothing, test it yourself if you don't believe me and have a look at the wheels position which have plenty of room). I've got so many other designs which were amazing and worked very well pre beta but now can't really move.

Be nice if a dev did a cheeky touch base about this, and whats the go.

Cheers!

 

I've often heard that there are problems with wheels but I've never encountered any (wheel)-bugs since Beta (playing on Stable Branch).
So I wonder what exactly is the problem?

 

i've encountered many wheel bugs over the years. for example, sometimes they just lock up and refuse to work for no reason (often on game load). sometimes they just disappear, as if something killed them, except the wheels weren't even touching the ground (i park them with landing gears on pistons). they're generally very unstable and flaky to use, good suspension/power/friction settings are very hard to find, so much that i've never actually managed to build a wheeled vehicle that can be useful in any context without constantly trying to engineer around their wonky physics by strapping engines and gyros onto what's supposed to be a wheeled vehicle (at that point you might as well just fly and not bother with wheels in the first place).

not only that, but last time i used wheels (which admittedly was like 6 to 8 months ago), the speed limiter didn't actually work the way you would expect - after hitting the speed limit, the wheels would just stop working, instead of actually trying to limit speed, which led to you rolling downhill with no way to stop other than hitting handbrake and risk flipping over.

overall, my frustration with wheels is so great that i'm long since considering to write either a gyro-based stabilization script, or a traction/suspension control system of some kind.

 

I've got round the issue of not being able to drive in a straight line by having my "light" vehicles at around 20,000kg with a gyro at the front and back. There is still some yawing but nowhere near as much as before.

I recently built a mobile base (large block) but the wheels seemed totally useless, even at 100% power they would not move it. I have previously built heavier mobile bases and had no problems. To get round it I had to cheese it with thrusters.

I can manage to build wheeled vehicles but setting up the suspension is a pain in the rear, it seems to me that the settings either have too much of an effect for a 1% change or are randomly being ignored by the game.

 

Problem i face mainly is that the wheels either pull you to the left or right while driving or they do not move ( well they jitter but physically not rotate) and are getting locked up, have a test of that thing i linked and let me know if it moves for you which i doubt it will haha. Screenshot some of your working designs, i'd be interested in seeing how the body frame and wheels are connected. Seems like the wheel collision box is 2x the size that the actual wheel is.

 

Regardless of any buggyness they have, the default settings are absolutely ridiculos. Whenever I make a vehicle using wheels the first thing I have to do is move about 3 of the sliders to the opposite end of the bar to get an even slightly stable suspension. I think large amounts of supposed buggy behavior is simply down to terrible wheel settings.

An auto calibrate button on wheels would be nice, where it detected your grids mass and put the settings to something kind of sensible.

 

You can't adjust the settings without the vehicle vaulting 50 meters into the air or slamming itself into the ground. If you're building something like an ice skimmer where a portion of the vehicle hangs below the wheels if you totally bottom out the suspension then your vehicle will destroy itself... especially on game loads.

The settings have to be tinkered with just to get the suspension system to work (which wasn't the case weeks ago). If your strength, dampening, and height offsets aren't exactly coordinated the vehicle won't raise... no matter the mass. When trying to lower the vehicle it's either up in the air or slamming into the deck. There's no in between.

 

they take some getting used to and alot more wheel setting tweaking than simple flying.
but driving with them is an fun and reward enough experience.
and its unbelievably cheap on the power....like a simple solar panel can drive a 4 3x3 wheeled small ship

they're slow to stop and very....as someone said....Jerky to the left and right at the moment.

but thats miles better than what they were like before the fancy block update...
long story short wheels would noclip with the voxel ground for a moment then fix itself...resulting in the ground ship bouncing awfully or stright up exploding because you were going 80 mph or so and when you sunk into the ground the game treats it as a direct collision.
the bug however has since been fixed but here is my example down below.

as for wheels now i prefer them this way..

firstly make sure their construction model all face the same way...don't want one wheel facing up while another faces down.....makes tweaking harder..

set power and friction to 10%
SLOWLY...SLOWLY...adjust strength or else the ship will bounce into the air
set the suspension travel to about 80% so that the wheels facing downwards or set to 20% ether one
set damping to around 50%
add a gyroscope for mid air/high speed turning.
add gyroscopes control override so you can continue in a straight line or prevent unwanted left-right jerking motions
add a handbrake option onto the toolbar can be found inside the cockpit controls...or i think pressing P turns it on.....spacebar also works.


wheeled ships work best on desert sandy biomes/ice lakes because the land mass is smoothest.
they tend to have trouble going up hills or even keeping the handbreak on..increasing power allows them to scale hills quicker....but its more dangerous because higher power can make the ship violently and sometimes uncontrollably take off.

 

I think part of the problem people have with wheels is that they have the expectation that a million kg crawler should be able to bomb around terrain at 200 km/h. I mean our speed cap of 100 m/s translates to 360 km/h if you're even at half of the max, you're still going well beyond regular highway speeds in offroad conditions....

And they can be kinda buggy so that doesn't help...

 

i think part of the problem is some people make assumptions about other people. there's a difference between "i can't drive a million ton vehicle at 300km/h" and "wheels don't work properly".

 

I always assumed wheels were a poor engineers choice for getting around at the start. O.o

large wheeled ships are awesome but extremely slow to start off.
meanwhile small wheeled ships are zipping easier to control but..............alot more crunchy and squishy.

I like to think of small v big wheeled ships like this part in termiantor 2

 

https://forum.keenswh.com/threads/suggestions-regarding-suspension-block-and-wheels.7382291
That thread quite old now but very relevant.

 

I suspect some of the wheel issues are only apparent in certain places on planets. ie, it might have something to do with the alignment of the planet's voxel grids. They never work well though - the best I can say is some places are 'less worse' than others.

Having well-tuned suspension helps, but does not make the issues go away. Adding gyros helps quite a bit, but that's a stupid hack of a workaround that shouldn't be necessary (especially in high-grav environments).

Some of the issues are (1.175dev):
- vehicles pulling left or right (the stupid hack helps with this, but again, shouldn't be needed) despite having perfect balance
- inconsistent traction. Traction rapidly varies between 'almost none' and 'nearly infinite', resulting in rollovers in gentle turns for low-slung vehicles with a low center of gravity (plus bad, jerky handling even when not flipping over).
- wheels sinking through the ground, especially on ice lakes near mine holes. It's as if the ground there is actually saw-toothed in shape, when it only looks slightly ripply to the eyes.
- non-local players often see wheels as not being connected to the vehicle's body. Multi-grid anything is as ever, still a disaster.
- The suspension design is moronic (this has always been an issue). While the design might reduce unsprung weight, a proper design like an a-arm or multilink system wouldn't ground itself out (this is especially noticeable for the 1x1 wheel)

Some workarounds:
- spamming gyros to overcome handling issues (hooray for stupid hack workaround band-aid solutions)
- setting dampening to 100% while doing strength/height changes (would be better if the game eased in settings changes instead of slamming 'em in at full strength instantly)
- setting speeds really low until gyro spamming becomes practical (I keep the max speed at around 45km/h for a semi-risky drive. I'd set it lower, but damn beard-face can run at 25km/h or so, or jetpack-skate at around 140km/h)

Wheels definitely need work. Lots of work. Calling them 'adequate' is stretching the word a bit too far, methinks.

 

oh come on.
what are you meant to do when you get airborne from a sudden bump in the road and your ride would have flipped if not for the gyrscope?
always need that bit of air control.

 

Everything is part of the problem and I even said wheels are bugged...

Certain things can inflame issues, driving at 30 km/h and 300 can have radically different results. I'm by no means saying they aren't completely fucked, just some people (not you specifically) make it worse by driving in ways that you wouldn't expect in real life.

 

install dukes of hazzard horn soundblock

hit a bump on the moon

go almost into orbit.

play the dukes of hazzard horn sound

crash and die with no burning because that doesn't exist if it did it would most likely kill sim speed even more.

 

I do not see someone complaining they cannot drive a million kg crawler at 200kmh rather they cannot drive a 9000kg which for space engineers is featherweight buggy in a straight line without resorting to cheesing it with gyros. We USED to be able to do so AND drive the million kg crawler before they changed the settings for wheels to make them apparently made of greased ice with as much power as an asthmatic mouse.

 

I wonder how large majority of these big wheel bugs happen in higher velocities.

 

Yeah, sure, if you're driving like the Dukes of Hazzard. Of course, if we had better physics, you could control your flight with careful throttle control on the ramp. A bit of accel during the jumping phase brings the nose up, slowing a bit will bring the nose down, and holding steady should generally result in a level jump. With the randomized traction in SE, there's no guarantee that will work at present.

Anyhow, that doesn't excuse the fact that you can often find yourself in that sort of jump from perfectly level ground. Well, allegedly perfectly level ground. Maybe the real problem is that the ground is actually more like sand dunes and it's the rendering that's wrong. I doubt it though.

I probably would still put gyros on ground vehicles designed for low-grav of course. I love catching "air" on the moon (or whatever that is; at 0.25g it's obviously not OUR moon, which has gravity of about ~0.1657g), and the crazy jumps there definitely require some sort of auxiliary control system.

 

my guess would be it has to calculate alot more while a larger ship is in motion.

calculations for it moving,the weight of it all, the wheel settings,how much the wheels should go down and up, tire collision with the voxel ground.

 

Using wheels for mechs is kinda easy because you just have to lock them firmly in place and you dont get same random twitches from 100% friction as with normal driveable vehicles.

I guess it is because:
A: suspension is done by leg joints which means the wheels will always properly connect with ground. Despite being locked by suspension trawel. This might be minimizing the twitches caused by suspension themselves.
B: so small area is toiching ground at a time gyroscope turns become easier

Then we have the drawbacks of mechs...
--- Automerge ---
But owerall suspension wheels work pretty well for them.
My current running speed record with suspension wheel mech is 200 km/h

 

Well for a start my issues are already explained. Have a read back. Nothing to do with high speed over steering. Designs that use to be able to drive and effectively, now can't.

 

That's called putting cheap rims on a vehicle you're trying to race with.
--- Automerge ---

SE has had a problem with movement for some time. When you're traveling through space in a large ship, it's not nearly as noticeable. But movement has gotten pretty zig-zaggy rather than fluid. It feels like you're tracing the edges of a grid rather than flying directly at a target. Your vehicle pulls to one side because you're not traveling in a straight line, you are traveling along the edges of a grid to approximate a direction of travel.

You can see this when you're flying with the character in space. Place the crosshairs on a target that's 50 or 100 meters away. Then fly to the target without adjusting your course. Did you fly to the target or did you some how veer off? This is especially noticeable at very low speeds.