Controlling wheels attached to a rotor suspension

We all had that issue at some point when making a wheeled vehicle on planets:
it is a nightmare on rough terrain.

The most ideal solution would be to suspend the wheels with rotors so they can adapt to the terrain:


But the problem is that it is impossible to directly control the wheels.
That would be nice if you could do that. Would allow so many great possibilities when building land-based vehicles.

On a side note:
This is a vehicle I quickly threw together for the sake of demonstration

As I couldn't drive it normally to do some stress testing, I attached a bunch of thrusters and gyros so I can somewhat drive it.

The result was a substancially increased stability at any speed, the ability to smoothly traverse terrain a normal vehicle couldn't handle and much less odds of flipping over after doing a jump.

Oh, and during all these tests, none of the rotors exploded. Not even once.
After some jumps a wheel popped off (I probably smashed the suspension it belonged to), but the rotor was still fine.

 

We could really use a way to link Remote Controls as extensive parts of another vehicle.

What do I mean by that? You now have the cabin-vehicle (the main one) and 4 wheel-vehicles "connected" (like through a connector) to the cabin-vehicle.
What I would like is for a control block to be able to "enslave" connected control blocks (be them large ship seats, a cabin, or a Remote Control). This way, we could have a minimal ship with only 2 thrusters and 2 rotors (assuming that due to that, the gyroscope would start to negate their movement).

 

I Agree with OP, NOT with Sapioit

This should just work across rotors, there is no real reason to expose the "this is a subgrid" logic to the player ... if you dont want stuff Controlled by the cockpit main control I would say it should be handled exactly like wheels attached to the main ship you don't want controlled (turn them off or uncheck steering or whatever) ...

Why? Well there is no separation between other subgrid parts like reactors inventory or sensors ... why would wheels be any different?

The only difficulty I forsee is figuring out which way to turn the wheels when you steer with wasd as the rotor moves relative to the controlling block ...

 

There is a disgusting thing in the Space Engineers "community".

When someone suggests something, the community suggests "but you can use this and that, and also this..." NO.

You want things to be as simple as possible, and be as smooth as possible (im convinced this is impossible by now anyway no matter what "BUG FIXES AND IMPROVEMENTS" are made).

 

Then why not have the cockpit or whatever is the default control for that ship have a checkbox automaticly checked which to decide if that should be the case or not? This way, you don't HAVE to hide everything from the player (engineer) because the player (engineer) would CHOOSE weither or not to see be able to play with those options? Sure, you might want everything on by default, but why not give our engineers even more mechanics to mess around with?

The problem is not to introduce features which restrict the gameplay by the least ammount, but to introduce features which increase the maximum possible combinations by as much as possible with as little features as possible.

 

Mathematically, getting all wheels to pivot such that the vehicle tends to turn left or right is trivial. The real issue is testing and QA for the wacky contraptions players will try to use.

Cockpits and RC Blocks know which way is 'up' and which way is 'left'. Turning can be accomplished by defining a vertical axis to either the left or right side of the vehicle and telling wheel suspensions to try to point at it (if they can, deferring to steering angle and obstructions). Whether the wheel suspensions are on the same grid as the control block only determines how successfully that happens.

 

nope...all simplier, you press A, AngularVelocity change, all wheels turn left(or right if inverted checked). that all.
there no left or up vectors.

 

So, how do you know which way is "left" when the wheels are attached to a grid that is rotated 37º from the controlling grid?

 

this is left for suspension, not for grid.
game already just do this.

i will try experiment with idea, when fix PC cooling, cuz without it y PC only make 2 FPS even in space

 

And that is part of the problem. Because if we would have access to some way to know when the player/remote_control tries to move in on of the 6 12 possible ways to move (w,a,s,d,c,Space,q,e,mouse_up,mouse_down,mouse_left,mouse_right), we could use scripts to assist our movement using connected grids.

 

where did you find a problem?
Left means left for wheels, simple.

 

Needing to have a wheel to access that data... or thrusters... lots of thruster...

 

Yeah, tried that.
(with the thrusters)
As far as the driving experience was concerned...

It felt like driving a spaceship without flight and steer-able wheels on ground.
You could get somewhere, but over time it feels horribly awkward.

I can put the car on the workshop if you want.
(just be careful that the plattform you're building it on is on an even surface our the car will roll away)