Now in the game, some bug fixes and a bunch of new gears!

Hi / lo gears

There are now two versions of every bevel and crown gear, a “hi” and a “lo” version.  The only difference between these two versions is where the gear is positioned along its central collar (i.e. either offset high or low along it).  This effectively allows for half-unit increments for where a gear can be attached to an axle, as can be seen in these examples.

This gives a lot more flexibility for how various combinations of gears can be used with each other.  The high / low naming is a bit confusing I know but I couldn’t think of a better naming scheme, I might change it if I can come up with something better.

Differential gear

In order to allow the outside wheel to turn faster than the inside wheel during a turn, rather than have a solid driving axle, most vehicles use a differential gear to split torque between the driven wheels.  I’ve now implemented this in the game, it works in exactly the same way as the differential in a real world vehicle.  You have to build it up by attaching axles and the planetary gears to it, as can be seen below.

Just like all the other gears, it works in a fully physical manner, so its behaviour just naturally matches that of a real world open (i.e. non limited slip) diff.  If one of the driving wheels isn’t contacting the ground it will spin up without the vehicle moving; both wheels have to be touching the ground for the vehicle to get proper drive.

Next up

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking I’d have to overhaul the part pairing system to allow for certain kinds of part pairing relationships (e.g. axles and gears pairing with the differential at different attachment points).  Well fortunately that turned out not to be really necessary, only some fairly minor changes were required.

However, the differential gear did show up a tricky bug with the way I’m snapping the orientation of parts to each other, so that’s what I’ll be looking at fixing next.  I’m also gonna put together some videos soon to demo how to use these new gears.