I'm working on a little InSim project, and for it I need to know the coordinates of the wheels. Specifically the front wheels. As far as I know, the X and Y coordinates that the CompCar packet contains is for the center of the car, right?

So I can obviously check each car and see how much the offset is from the center to the wheels and use the direction of the car to calculate the X and Y coordinates for the wheels, but I was wondering if there's an easier way to do this, or some kind of list already. So for example someone else that has done this before.

Thanks in advance!

There's "centre of contact patch" in the carinfo file, along with a heap of other interesting things. They're given relative to the reference point returned in CompCar.

It would seem to be setup dependant though - you'll need to set a consistent camber/castor at least.

(Are we planning a drag-staging system? This 'we' is planning on tinkering with a staging system too, but not ready to start yet )

Interesting, thanks! So I can use this to export the values, and hardcode the difference right? Would the setup really matter? I don't think the position forwards or backwards does change right?

Yes correct! I'm working on a little drag InSim right now. I plan to make it as realistic as possible with pre/full staging. I'll have a look at that carinfo when I find some time.

Are you also working on an InSim, or just brainstorming?

Quote from Bose321 :

Interesting, thanks! So I can use this to export the values, and hardcode the difference right? Would the setup really matter? I don't think the position forwards or backwards does change right?

Yeah, the MCI position is the reference, the contact patch values are offset from that. Camber would move the patch left and right, but I'm not sure if castor would move it backwards and forwards. If the point that castor adjustments rotate around is the centre of the wheel we're good, but I don't know if that's the case or not. It might even be the case in some cars but not others.

We should be able to tell from a few test setups and repeated exporting of carinfo files, otherwise it's a question for Scawen, I think

Quote from Bose321 :

Yes correct! I'm working on a little drag InSim right now. I plan to make it as realistic as possible with pre/full staging. I'll have a look at that carinfo when I find some time.

Are you also working on an InSim, or just brainstorming?

Currently just brainstorming, but the urge to stop thinking and start building is growing

This is one of two problems that has been keeping me on other things so far. I've got a polygon area system in my insim framework with functions for enter/leave, I thought using overlapping areas for pre-stage and staged would be easier to code around than lots of insim checkpoints, and make it easy to include deep-staging too.

The other problem is a lag between sending the light control packet and the lights actually changing. It's about 0.7 secs (IIRC) on my setup, but I don't know enough about why it happens to be sure that it's a consistent lag for everyone or if it's dependent on the client's processing power (I suspect LFS is swapping the model, or recalculating something to do with lighting).

I'm currently planning to use insim buttons for the lights instead, but it'd be nicer to be able to use an object on track.

Sounds good. I'm also mainly going to use buttons for the lights. I've got the start lights added, but haven't checked their timing yet, good point about that. I already thought they were a little slow, so that could explain it.

Maybe a good question for Scawen how that's handled.