RACE

Over the Thanksgiving holiday this year I decided to dive into vehicle dynamics simulations Racing games are some of my favorite to play and I recently watched this talk by Wassimulator at Better Software Conference. I opted to use javascript so that I could easily publish it here and spend zero time worrying about layout.

Following along with the talk I implemented a simple engine, tire model, and physics loop with plots for each item. I then implemented a 0-60 and quarter mile simulation to start to test my model.

The trickiest part was adding the wheel dynamics feedback loop. Cranking down the step size and switching to runge-kutta 4 got the simulation stable. Not a satisfying answer and definitely something I plan to come back to and understand more fully.

I’d also like to build an optimizer to use genetic algorithms to find an ideal vehicle setup.