Well its end of term now and I am busily spending some of my time working on the Formula 1 OpenSim project. Having cleared down the Mars base project from last year I converted the terrain to a 1m high flat island that covers the sim just short of the boundary limits so that we can have plenty of room for those different race tracks. One reason that I chose to have a particularly flat terrain though is that although the vehicles (Formula 1 cars) will appear to be grounded on the tarmac, in reality the script will be sensing land, so keeping land at a constant height should make for a smooth ride.
Choice of materials has been an important consideration in this project. For instance, the wheels of vehicles do not actually have to turn, you simply simulate rotation through rotating textures, and so you need the wheels to be made of the lowest friction material available, and this is glass! I also found that the crash barrier are also very sensitive to material type, and after a few tests found that metal gave the best results. I have had a good numbers of test drives around the circuit, tweeking and evaluating settings of the vehicle script and am happy with performance so far, though how things will work out with all my students driving at the same time remains to be seen.
One feature of the project that I particularly wanted to implement is the ability to log data i.e. driver details etc to an external web database. I had my first attempt at this today and it seems to be working just fine; please see the screen shot from my phpMyADMIN Sql query. There is of course some ground still to cover, excuse the pun, but things are looking particularly promising for this years project right now, so please stay in touch for more updates.
Vega
