Problems with vehicle model

Here's a picture of which bone correspond to which wheel in the model. As you can see, all the base_rig_wheel bones that end with the number 2 is bound to a wheel.
The bones that end with the number 3 are bound to different sections of the treads in order to define how they deform when driven over terrain.

In the picture I'm looking at the left side, the right side is completely identical in structure and order, with the first bone at the front.
It's probably better to redo the rig completely since I hacked it together from another one which might be why the axles are messed up.

 

Id say that's a good idea. Just duplicate the rigging by hand from scratch. Otherwise you create artifacts.

 

Your right. Scripts set the physics for vehicles.
Modeled wheels are just cosmetic.


Also physics wheels have a setting in the scripts for
radius

So making the physics wheels smaller could help.

I also noticed most of Empires vehicles use
$attachment "wheel_fr" "base_rig_base"
not
$attachment wheel_fr "base_rig_wheelR01_1"
missing quotation marks.


$attachment "name" "parent bone" offset orientation

 

The quotation marks are not needed as long as you don't have spaces in your parameter. As with almost everything coding related, whitespace is the default separator.

 

Yes but source tends to have issues with so many things it's best to use quotations when ever possible to be on the safe side.

Good example is

Source uses _ and will see wheel_fr as the front right wheel.
So for source the only 4 valid entries for wheel_ .They are letter codes
fl "front left"
fr "front right"
rl "rear left"
rr "rear right"
$attachment wheel_fl "Dummy04" 0 0 8
$attachment wheel_fr "Dummy03" 0 0 -8
$attachment wheel_rl "Dummy01" 0 0 8
$attachment wheel_rr "Dummy02" 0 0 –8

using
"wheel_fr" = source sees as a name of the bone.
using
wheel_fr = source sees this bone the as front right wheel.

Normally you would want the propper way of wheel_fr
but something tells me since Empires nf_medTank.mdl
uses "wheel_fr" there is probably something in the code that they originally
changed when porting to source.To make the vehicles from battlefield work.

Now where it gets tricky is with axles vs wheels.
From source code not sure what Empires has it set to.
VEHICLE_MAX_AXLE_COUNT 4
VEHICLE_MAX_WHEEL_COUNT (2*VEHICLE_MAX_AXLE_COUNT)

So if coded to have a max number of axles like 4 and you have 10 wheels you just exceeded max wheels by 2.
So the solution is your wheels that exceed 8 (2 wheels * 4 axles) They don't need to be wheels. They are just bones. That move with the parent bones the wheels.
Well more like follow the path of the "parent" wheels.

 

To be honest naming the bones the same way as the hard coded controllers is just dumb and should be avoided whenever possible. Even if you can kind of escape them with quotation marks, it should not be done. It just makes the Quake C code a lot more confusing.

Now the thing with using more wheels than the maximum allowed ones is actually fairly easy. The amount of maximum wheels allowed doesn't limit the meshes nor does it limit the bones. It only limits the amount of wheel controllers which the engine code can access and thus the amount of sequences you can specify.

In one sequence you can actually put anything animation wise that you could want. There is basically no limit.

 

Please make sure passangers exit to the side as well if you could.

 

That would break the ejector seat concept...