Animated Vehicle Suspensions

By QuadraticFour

Why so static? Currently, road vehicles behave less like 4-ton steel peoplemovers, and more like 5-gram matchbox cars. This mod sets out to breathe a little life into road vehicles by giving them simulated suspensions. With this mod, traffic will pitch and roll as they go around turns, brake, and accelerate.

This is a purely cosmetic mod: it animates the body without changing vehicle handling, speed, capacity, or the transport simulation. That means it should be compatible with mods that do modify vehicle attributes. Since this is a cosmetic mod, you should still be able to earn achievements with this mod installed!

NOW WITH LEFT-HAND TRAFFIC COMPATABILITY!

Vehicle support

• Single-body vehicles: the body pivots around an estimated center of gravity (usually the center of the vehicle).
• Tractor-trailers: Otherwise known as semi-trucks or semi-trailers. The tractor and trailer move around their own estimated centers, with inverse trailer pitch. When the tractor pitches down, the trailer pitches up!
• Articulated buses: Similar to tractor-trailers, except the front section pivots around its estimated center of gravity, while the rear section pitches inversely around its rear axle.

Compatible NPC cars and player-owned road vehicles are discovered automatically, including modded vehicles. Native animations, such as doors and lights, are preserved and move with the vehicle body. Vehicles with custom animation controllers or unsupported model layouts may be skipped; compatibility with every workshop vehicle is not guaranteed.

Certain vehicles have been excluded for now, which includes the NPC Horse Carraiges, Droshky, Stagecoach, L`Obeissante, Small horse carriage, Horse carriage, Horse carriage with barrels, and Steam Truck. Certain mods which add older equipment (think 1800-1900) may not be automatically excluded and thus exhibit suspension behavior.

Tune and Tweak

You can configure the mod before loading in the settings panel for the mod, or click Suspensions during gameplay to adjust the same controls (it's at the top left, next to the layers button!) You can adjust the following controls during the game to adjust the suspension experience:

• NPC update rate: between 1 and 20 requested Hz. Higher settings can improve NPC vehicle responsiveness, at the cost of some performance. If you're experiencing issues, try turning this down.
• NPC physics culling radius: between 100 and 1500 m. NPC vehicles will only respond to physics if they're near at the specified range. If you're experiencing issues, try turning this down.
• Suspension stiffness: between 50% and 200%. Lower settings give more lean and a softer response.
• Suspension damping: between 50% and 150%. Lower settings allow more rebound; higher settings reduce oscillation.
• Discrete NPC suspension: If you're experiencing larger performance issues, try enabling this. It uses a simpler, discrete suspension animation model for the NPC cars. While visual fidelity is not as good as the continuous model, it should provide a more stable gameplay experience.

The Damping and Stiffness sliders only affect vehicles using continuous suspension. Player-owned vehicles (Trucks and buses, basically) will always use continuous suspension. The NPC update rate and physics culling settings only apply to NPC vehicles, since there are usually many more of them in the world.

This is a highly experimental mod! Your performance depends on the visible vehicle population and your hardware. While The discrete mode removes a lot of the calculations for NPC vehicles, its effect on overall gameplay performance is still being evaluated.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS!!!!!!!

This is an experimental mod. So, there may be issues that occur. If an issue does occur, please let me know in the discussion for this mod page, and attach any relevant information. Remember, lower-end systems may not be able to handle the physics calculations, so your mileage may vary!

What's coming next?

I've got features in the pipeline! Most importantly, attempting to extend this system to rail vehicles, which includes things like carriage sway, chain slack, and carriage inertia. Of course, it's all subject to experimentation, so if you have any suggestions on what kinds of vehicle behaviors you want to see in rail (or any other) vehicles, don't hesitate to let me know!

Want to showcase this mod?

Go right ahead! Just make sure to credit me and link to this mod page. And, you're only allowed to say good things about the mod. (just kidding about that last one, fair criticism is accepted).