![]() One of the most effective features that can be built into front suspension is the tendency to move back as it moves up. Because of these factors, it needs to be light and soft and capable of giving and resetting very quickly. It isn't normally the primary power source of the vehicle. It has the full mass of the car pushing on it when it hits bumps. Your front suspension is responsible for the hardest part of getting over an obstacle, getting your center of gravity on top of it. Your front wheel should be the first thing that hits a bump. All the same principles apply to more complicated systems, though. A low center of gravity can be achieved without harming the suspension by using small weighted blocks in the frame and keeping the rest of the car as light as possible. On the other hand, making all of the lowest parts of the car very light will raise the car's center of gravity and give it trouble on hill climbs and generally be more likely to land on its top. If a quarter of the car's mass stops going forward and gets redirected upwards every time the front wheel hits a bump, it isn't doing much good. The point is to cruise over bumps without influencing the momentum of the car. Making your wheels and other suspension parts heavy will give you very clunky and sluggish suspension that, to a certain extent, defeats the purpose of suspension. Unsuspended weight is the amount of mass that isn't on top of your suspension. Build it right, and it will let you zip over huge bumps like they aren't there, or even help your car get over obstacles that would normally be impossible. ![]() Build it wrong, and you'd be better off without any suspension at all. The design, angle, and placement of a torsion bar can have as much influence on its performance as the spring. You put the wheel on one end of a stick, you hinge the other end of the stick to the body, and you use a spring or something to hold it in place. So you read the above about how piston-based suspension is fragile, and now you're thinking, "OK, so how the hell can I make suspension without some kind of piston?" Your best bet is torsion bars. Increasing the frequency that Algodoo runs at can help this a lot, but it increases lag and may cause many scenes to work differently. Building bulky pistons can help this problem a lot, but they can never be indestructible. Anything that relies on collisions to hold it together is going to break if it gets hit hard enough. Or, slower but more powerful forces can simply push one object through another. ![]() Because of this, sudden jolts can move one part outside of the other in just one time step, and no collision is registered. Algodoo runs at only 100 frames per second. It's the only real problem, but it's a killer. The long and short of it is that piston-based suspension breaks. Every car and every design has its own optimum damping properties, and what works for one course may not work perfectly for any other even on the same car. If the damping and spring strength are too high relative to the mass of objects they're attached to, the physics will also freak out and vibrate and/or explode. Too much can make it kinda sluggish and hard. Maxing out the damping on the springs in your suspension isn't always a good idea, though. Suspension usually needs pretty high damping, unless you want your car to bounce a lot. You'd probably want extremely low damping in clockwork, where efficiency is extremely important. ![]() Damping is essentially how much energy the spring dissipates. If you're attracted to a game like this, you probably know what spring damping is, but not everyone does and not everyone knows how to use it best. It's primarily intended for people who have already built at least a few cars, though. I'm hoping this guide comes out useful to a wide range of skill levels. If you're looking for tips intended for slowly crawling over extreme obstacles, there probably isn't much of value in here. This is a guide, constructed of many generally stand-alone articles, on how to construct suspension that will help a wheeled car zoom over bumps and various obstacles quickly and efficiently.
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