Then we should get an Alfa convertible added to LFS to show off just how flexible cars can be.

Anyone who owns an Alfa Spider should try this:

• Park your car on uneven ground
  
• Open door
  
• Attempt to shut door
  

Quote from spookthehamster :

Anyone who owns an Alfa Spider should try this:

• Park your car on uneven ground
  
• Open door
  
• Attempt to shut door
  

haha


Flexible chassis are an eventual must-have for LFS. It would really differentiate the road cars from the GT cars (at the moment, the only real difference is their relative power and the increased suspension options of the race-cars). It would also have a real reason for including soft-top versions of cars, which are often significantly flexier (is that a word? It is now ) than the standard cars.

Quote from blakehoo88 :

Men should never tell women, that their place is in the kitchen, that is where the knives are!

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I dont see how this is relevent to chassis flexing? Stop posting crap

I suggested this a few years ago and I was inspired by TEREP (predecessor of 1NSANE). It was able to simulate 5 cars with tens beams each and do 320x200 sw rendering on something like Pentium I CPU. RoR's simulation run at 2000!!! FPS. I doubt that lack of FLOPs is an issue. Even graphical representation should be feasible, it's not much different from skinning.
What I think would be real issues about simple mass-spring structure:
It affects the whole physics too much, requires massive changes.
- Center of gravity is distributed to nodes -> complicates making cars
- Realistic moment of inertia is difficult to achieve for the same reason
- Desired chassis stiffness hard to achieve as well

My idea of workaround:
Each suspension mounting point gets a 4D vector. V1, v2, v3 are coordinates that define direction in which the mounting point moves under load. Vector length (or v5) can represent spring constant and v4 damping.

Maybe even better idea: What has already been suggested, the front/rear end rotating. Rotation limited to axles. Visualization possible.

hahaha visible chassis flex massive panel gaps
could be interesting with tweak etc LOL