From the Depths - Tutorial 6: Land Movement

hey everyone my name is Karl and today we're gonna be doing another from the data tutorial this time on the basics of land movement so first off let's take a look at the components that enable land movement oddly enough all of these are under the air tab there is no land tab there's water and air and all the land stuff is an air on this right side of the screen over here so yeah the water tab is all water the air tab is mostly air and then there's this kind of weird thing over here for land that's stuck in the air tab alright so let's start taking a look at our components here first off we have the mach wheel and each of these is going to have both a normal component and a mirrored component which of these are going to use is going to depend on the side of the vehicle that you're placing it on the orientation of them is such that you can't just turn a normal wheel around and expect it to work in the same way at least not with the default settings so they have mirrored versions of each of these and they basically are just the same component copied and well mirrored from side to side so the first thing we're gonna take a look at here is a mach wheel now the mach wheel is a wheel that doesn't exist I mean it's there but it's not doing anything there are no settings on this wheel it doesn't move you can't really do anything with it this is literally just here for decoration all there is to it next up is power wheels so power wheels are a component here that lets us exert power or control authority in the forwards back direction or forwards back relative to the wheel if you put these sideways they're gonna let you translate side-to-side but you probably aren't going to want to do that in the vast majority of cases in any case the wheels are just there to let you drive forwards these do not let you turn directly you can easily use tank style steering with these that is you can drive one side forward and one side backwards and have that differential steering that we've talked about before depending on how far away they are from the center-of-mass that can be more or less effective the powered wheels however are primarily used for forward and reverse thrust now you can see here they have a top speed of infinity that means they can go infinitely fast but they only exert 150 max force and they only consume 5 power apiece that's not a lot of power and that's not a lot of force compared to our jet engines which exert even in small version 500 force forwards so the wheels are definitely not very powerful and you are limited to 20 of them that's another limitation of the unity engine that from the depths is built on actually you cannot have too many wheels interacting with the terrain on the same vehicle so these are limited to 20 in fact I believe all functional wheels are limited to 20 on the vehicle you could have as many MOC wheels as you want but the only ones that are actually going to be contributing to your power and turning are these two and they are limited to a total count of 20 on the vehicle very important to remember all right so taking a look at the user interface for wheels this is slightly more interesting in fact I'm going to move down to one of these dat ones down here these are slightly more interesting than the typical first or components we've looked at so far for one thing our presets and filters have a drive wheel preset and a tank wheel preset in any case the presets here are a little bit different than you're used to seeing and if we take a look over here in the detailed wheel configuration menu this is considerably different than you're used to seeing so this detailed wheel configuration here lets you set all sorts of parameters about the wheels now for the most part you're going to want to set these the way you want and then you're gonna want to use the copy to all wheels button just to force those settings to go to all the wheels on the entire vehicle there's really not too many use cases for having wheels set differently on different parts of the vehicle unless you're talking about maybe a front wheel that you want a little looser of a spring force on so it doesn't have a tendency to bounce you up into the air when you start running up the hill or something along those lines so yeah for the most part you're gonna want to set these and forget them well what are these settings so the damper bump force up here as best I can understand it is what happens when the vehicle sustains air runs over some sort of a bump what happens when there's a rapid change in the travel of the wheel every wheel has a certain amount of travel defined by the spring length here if this is zero your wheel will not travel it will not have any spring associated with it and as you move this out you get more and more distance up until the point where as you can see here in the background this is looking pretty goofy back here this field that I'm editing so I tend to leave that around one meter and the damper bump force is basically how much we damp the force that gets pushed back into the wheel from the terrain so if I travel over a bump this damper bump force is going to dampen the amount of force going into the spring from the terrain the damper rebound force by contrast is how hard or rather how fast we push down against that so usually these if I grab a hold of this and placed on a new wheel usually you can see these are at three and three that's fairly sane and I don't think there's anything wrong with that default setting for the most part when dealing with wheels for the most part the default settings are okay the one thing that I do like to play with is the max spring force now the max spring force is going to give you springiness or the amount of force that the wheel can apply pushing downwards once it has been bumped up words by the terrain and the weight of the vehicle pressing down on it so if you think about a spring if you compress that spring by putting a bunch of weight on it like if you have a vehicle sitting on top of a wheel that's got a spring between the wheel and the rest of the vehicle you are compressing that spring now the max spring force is how strong you're going to make that spring so if I set this really high the vehicle is going to barely travel downwards and when the weight of the vehicle is resting on the wheel and it's going to for the most part respond very quickly to changes in terrain that would push the wheel up and it's going to push right back down so a fairly high max spring force don't necessarily just have that automatically but play around with it see what you like these are all trial and error for most vehicles there is no right or wrong answer except the answer that makes your vehicle work so I'm not even going to pretend to give you specific numbers that are going to work for you you're just gonna have to experiment with these based on what you know about them and find your own way all right so it looks like to me the max spring force interacts with the spring length that's kind of important because it means that the spring length if you increase this you can see the back of the vehicle lifting up very slightly or as I decrease this over the length of the spring the vehicle is slowly lowering so it looks to me like the spring length is actually giving me some degree of upwards force all the way over the travel of the spring now what that means is the max spring force is not necessarily multiplicative width but at least has some influence on the spring length too we're having a high spring length and a max spring force that is also high will provide more total force than say a 1 meter spring length with a high max spring force and vice versa all right so the next settings are for friction and side friction force friction is the amount of friction you are going to give in the forge backwards direction of the wheel so if I'm looking at this wheel like so it's the amount of friction that I'm going to get in the forwards and backwards direction and that's critically important for most wheels if you do not have forwards friction against the ground you do not have any way of exerting forwards thrust so if you turn this down you're effectively just turning this into a mock wheel it's not going to do anything anymore whereas if you set this all the way up to one you have full friction against the ground if you move the wheel or spin the wheel against the ground you're going to travel forward and if you if you're on a hill and the vehicle is rolling backwards correspondingly it's going to rotate the wheel as you can see very slightly happening in the background here another setting year is side friction this is the side to side friction of the wheel and setting this too high or too low can have pretty negative consequences if it's too high what you get is any force sideways on the vehicle has a tendency to roll the vehicle because you're applying effectively a force ye friction on the bottom of the vehicle which is going to be below the center of mass most likely so if you get some horizontal velocity going and you have the side friction set all the way up then you run into a scenario where a sudden explosion or anything that forces the vehicle sideways like a harpoon or anything like that can tip the vehicle over not necessarily what you want likewise if you have it too low the vehicle will just slide down any Hill sideways like you will not have any sideways control whatsoever if this is zero on all wheels and I set that like so you can see this vehicle is now just drifting sideways like it's on ice and all interesting that's not necessarily what you want so yeah be careful with that one I would recommend having that at least at 0.5 probably more for most vehicles all right now for something everyone's probably interested in track configuration tracks are basically just a series of wheels that are tied together and associated with each other and what this is going to do is produce a kind of band around the wheels in the pretty much downwards direction of each wheel and it will basically just draw a line around the wheels and try and produce a tank trade looking thing around the entire wheel set so if I just hit the automatic add all tracks button it actually does a fine job right here you can see I've got pretty much what I intended for tank tracks on this vehicle just kind of right there it just did it so that's nice and you can see they're kind of conforming with the ground as I go over this very slight slope early it does a pretty good job just automatically run off the bat now if you want to set these up manually you can do so if I remove all the tracks here you can see the currently selected wheels you can see the button or the the if I hover over these wheels it's giving me a selection window so if I do it create new track here and I just go ahead and let's see I can drag this window here and shrink it down a little bit so we can see everything and what I'm gonna do is just use middle mouse button there rotate everything and select and I'm just gonna add the selected wheel to the track and I'm gonna select another wheel and select wheel and I'm just going to continue and iterate through this and pick the wheels that I want so if I'm doing some sort of a half track thing where I've got tracks on the back and wheels up in the front for steering or something like that I can do that here so another thing about steering tank tracks typically are just going to that's absolutely that's just yeah tank tracks typically are going to use differential steering you're not going to use a typical turning wheel with a tank track that just doesn't usually work out real well so what you do with that for the most part is have a forward back on the left side of the tank and on the right side of the tank and then you would use yaw rotational movement on both sides see in this case if I went to yaw right jános right this tank track on the Left needs to be all the head forwards and vice versa on the left so in order to do that again we would just take a look at the drive wheels the wheels up top here with a tank tread or tank track configuration are going to be inverted from what you would expect so as you can see here these are red red means bad this is incorrect if I set these up correctly Oh in fact I can just click the tank wheel preset here and get the exact preset and one on all of these it looks like the tank preset is setting y'all right and back control whereas the drive wheel preset only sets the forward back so if I use the drive wheel preset it is forward if I use tank wheel preset it does forward and y'alright so definitely use the tank wheel presets if you're planning on using tracks otherwise the drive will preset it does a fine job another thing of note here these preset buttons this is something that I haven't been dealing with and other tutorials yet but I if you note on the tooltip right click lets you add presets to it to each other so if I have a drive wheel preset and I just want to add the tank steering to it I can just right click on that and get the alright out of that if I left click on it in this case the wheels on tenth and the tank wheels are similar enough to each other this isn't terribly useful it's more useful in the other movement tutorial areas the wheel configuration settings apply to both wheels and to tank tracks very important the tank track is mostly visual the wheels are still what's controlling the movement you need to be very careful about that and be make absolutely sure you pay attention to it alright so the wheels here are doing their tank track thing we've got five up top five on the bottom so we've got exactly 20 wheels on this vehicle that are operating only ten of them are interacting with the ground but I would not rely on that too much I don't know how all the unity the engines limitation works for tank therefore drive wheels I don't know if these drive wheels up here are going to be considered as actual wheels because they're providing power to the tank track or not so yeah I don't know if those are going to be considered as wheels on the vehicle or not anyway moving on the last component to cover will last too early there are our turning wheels and then there's the sticky foot the turning wheel just to go over this quickly is what looks like a normal wheel but when you give it a yaw control it's going to try and turn left or right like a car tire so helps if I yeah put that on the right side of vehicle or in this case the left side of the vehicle if I was to give us a y'all left command you can see that turning left if I give us a yaw right command I can see it turning right it's really all there is to those wheels the more of them you have the more rotational control authority you have and that's really all there is to it one trick with those is you often want one at the front and the back of the vehicle and that is because unlike jet engines very often the front wheel or the back wheel of the vehicle will not be in contact with the ground when you're going over slopes or Hills and what that means if is if you have a turning wheel at the front then you go up a slope and the front wheel comes off the ground and suddenly you have no turning anymore so you want to make sure that the turn wheels that you probably have one of those at the back at least usually you'll want one at the front and at the back all right so the last component here is the sticky foot and this is a very complex component yeah really when you get down to it there's a lot of things going on here I'm just going to show you what it's for because the actual vehicle setups that make use of the sticky foot are quite complex and I'm going to leave it up to your own creativity to experiment with this for now I've got an experiment in in the works that's kind of a two legged Walker project but the bread boarding on that is turning out be very exciting shall we say it's going to be a lot of fun getting that to work anyway so the sticky foot is pretty much what you would think of a MEK foot is being it's a foot that on the bottom sticks to the ground that's really all there is to it there are a few different settings on this one though the clearance is how much distance it can have between it and the ground before it starts to stick so if I have this at say 5 it will look five meters below it for the ground when it's determining whether it's stuck to the ground or not the stickiness by contrast is how much it's going to stick to the ground how much force it's going to exert when sticking to the ground if you have too much of this it's gonna look like you're trying to walk through glue it's just going your foots going to stick to the ground and you're barely gonna be able to pull that up no matter how much forshay observe on it but plays if it's too low then you basically don't get any force out of the foot it's not really sticking to the ground it's just sliding along it so onto the forward friction in backwards friction sections these look familiar from somewhere and what these are is basically a indicator or a drive system that lets you determine how much friction you're going to apply in any direction that's interesting because it lets us very precisely and very intricately control when and how much for our force we're going to be able to apply by means of pushing off against this foot if you think about how you walk your feet have friction with the ground and that's what lets you move or take a step if you think about walking on ice it's very difficult if you're walking on a perfectly smooth sheet of ice to whop take a step forward because as you take the weight off of one foot and put it on to the other and then try and take a step forward Newton's laws things come back comes back to bite you and you're exerting a force backwards on that foot which then proceeds to go backwards as you're trying to push your body forwards so and if you don't have any friction here then you actually or if you have negative friction and you're trying to take a step forwards with the foot that's on the ground having no or negative friction that foot is going to slide along the ground and you're not actually going to get any propulsion so you need to be pretty careful about using this and there's some very interesting tricks you can pull using breadboards and AC B's and all sorts of things to get this to work but for now just know that you can set the friction up if you want to and use a spin block with a foot on it to propel yourself along the ground like if you have say for spin blocks along the side of the vehicle with feet on the ends of them or on the end of a stick and you just set the friction forwards friction to one and you spin those at full rate of speed you're gonna get forwards movement out of it and that's pretty much how it works worth noting that wheels do not move you very fast anymore so the ways to move fast these days usually involve either sticky feet or mounting a jet on your vehicle or some sort of propeller system anything works early as long as you're getting more force than the wheels can apply because the wheels really put out a pretty abysmal amount of force alright so we've looked at forward friction backwards friction is more of the same it's the exact same thing really all it backwards friction is doing is saying yes if I'm pushing forwards with this foot against the ground that is if I'm trying to push the body of the vehicle backwards by placing pressure against this foot is it going to slide along the ground with zero or negative friction or is it going to stick to the ground and push off against it with positive friction so that's how these two tabs work really the implementation details on these are very complex and not something I'm going to get into in this tutorial for sake of time I will come back to this I am going to take a further look at how to use sticky feet and I am going to build a walker and show you how it's done but that's going to be the subject of an entirely separate video probably a more of a research and exploratory format and less of a tutorial alright so when we're talking about land movement there's a bunch of things we have to consider I'm gonna go ahead and select a smaller block here just to get the line of sight better you'll note that I have a gap under this vehicle and that I have wheels attached to the very bottom block on either side that's actually fairly important for this vehicle because it helps me avoid getting high centered from the depths terrain is very rough in most scenarios there are mountains all over the place if I start traveling forwards here eventually you'll probably run into some and it's just a huge pain because these yeah the the mountains that you can see off in the distance are very very difficult to deal with and it couldn't stop us here because it looks like my turning is off oh oh I see what's going on here remember how I had set that slide force to zero earlier or that side friction to zero let's um let's back that out yeah moving on the basic problem with traveling over a mountain is that we have a very large hill that can have a point on the top of it and if that point is narrower than this vehicle the vehicle can essentially get high centered so consider if I had a flat bottom on this thing and not no spring force or spring length here those via air those wheels are going to be running right along the ground they're barely going to be lifting this thing off the ground at all and I don't want to rub against the ground because that a doesn't let me apply forwards force via the powered wheels and be a provides a lot of friction against the ground which is just going to make me come to a stop if you combine those two things not being able to apply force and coming to a stop in just the wrong way you have vehicle that's high centered and is basically just dead in the water or on the land as the case may be it's not going to be able to move ever again it's stuck and that's not good so you want to avoid that at all costs the easiest ways to do that are to use something like a u-shape like this and it doesn't have to be this exact shape or this exact size really this is mainly just designed to show you how that in general is done it's yeah more of a demonstration than anything and you can avoid getting high centered by adding more spring travel distance that does help with it because you're riding higher off the ground and you can avoid it by just generally making the underside of your vehicle higher off the ground which means that there is much more room under here so you are less likely to get something coming up underneath your vehicle and making you get stuck on it the other thing that you need to avoid is getting wedged into something now that's a much more difficult task if you notice here that I've got these wheels on the very back of the vehicle and the very front of the vehicle like on the very front block and on a very back block those help me avoid getting wedged into something if I run into a cliff it's just a sheer cliff coming straight up from the ground these wheels on the front will still be able to apply forward momentum because they poke out very slightly beyond the front of the vehicle and that's just due to the size of the wheel it will be able to exert a little bit of force from the front and it will push downwards and forwards so that will help me start tip it tilting the vehicle up and getting it to more or less follow the terrain much better now since these wheels don't apply a lot of force I'm going to need some external assistance if I start trying to climb a cliff even with this tiny little vehicle but yeah you can generally get away with some pretty some pretty crazy stuff using just wheels if you want to so the reason I've placed this wheel this far forwards and also up a little bit is to help prevent that wedging scenario now if I'm not on a cliff this front wheel might not even be on the ground as you can see there it right off of the ground in most cases until I come across a little rise like this at which point it is in contact with the ground and doing work and if I want to make it do work at all times on this specific wheel what I can do is increase the spring length since this is one meter higher than the others I can change that to a two and come over here and change this one also to a two and now if I start traveling forwards and I get to a spot where that would normally not be on the ground you can see that this is in fact on the ground now and it only comes off the ground with the entire front of the vehicle comes off the ground so that's a way of giving yourself a little bit more padding on the front you can mount the wheel a little bit higher and use the spring travel distance just to gain yourself that extra little tiny bit of momentum there or rather of distance that the wheel can travel that's a way of preventing yourself from losing momentum when you end up running into a steep hill all right so we've taken a look at the wheels or taking a look steering we've taken a look at the tank treads and if you've taken a preliminary look at the sticky feet that is pretty much all there is the foot movement or rather land movement and really the handling the terrain itself is mostly just going to be a matter of placing wheels frequently placing them in the right locations making sure that the underside of your of your vehicle won't get hung up and making sure the front and the back of your vehicle won't get hung up on terrain that's really all there is to it as far as advantages and disadvantages well you can see from the movement of this vehicle that the disadvantage of this is that you have to deal with terrain terrain and from the depths like I've said it is very steep in places it's not even present and a lot of the base campaign so building a tank a dedicated tank is probably not your most cost-efficient move it's only going to be able to operate in certain theaters and when you start looking at the map and from the depths if i zoom out here and start looking at say well for one thing all of this water this this there's so much water here there's so much water and it's just not really gonna do you much good when you try and build a tank and nine tenths of the entire map is water you just can't really do anything with it plus if you add to that a lot of these tiny little islands here if you look at those those are mountains they're steep they're steep as all get-out and you're not really gonna be able to drive a tank over those if I come up here and look at some of these areas this looks like lava but actually won't hurt a tank it's just that the terrain here is steep enough and rough enough in a lot of cases especially over here this normal area this is just a nightmare these the terrain over here is so rough you're never going to be able to drive over and effectively so tanks have to deal with terrain and depending on what campaign or situation you're playing that is a huge issue however and this is a big however tanks can have basically infinite weight especially if you start using jet propulsion or propeller propulsion to give a little bit of extra speed now if you add too much weight to your vehicle the tiny amount of force that wheels apply is not going to be able to propel you very quickly but if you get doing very quickly using jets or using propellers or ion engines or anything like that really if you get going with those you really don't have to worry about the low speed or the weight of the because if you remember the Jets are going to accelerate you the only thing holding back the Jets is drag and you're really not going to have weight as a counter to that it's just going to take longer build up and nurse' so when you get right down to it you're not really slowing yourself down by adding weight if you're using jet or propeller propulsion you're just making yourself accelerate slower that means you can't go up a steep of cliffs or hills but yeah anyway the point of all of this is tanks really don't have to worry much about weight so if I make this entire thing out of heavy armor that's fine it will work just fine if especially if I have some sort of air propulsion helping me out that's a very distinct advantage of the tank and land vehicles in general you can armor these things just out though out the wazoo it you can put layer after layer of heavy armor of stacked metal and alloy and stone and wood and just throw go crazy with the armor all you really have to do is make sure that the armor isn't going to impact your ability to drive so your armor can not be heavy enough to overcome the spring force exerted by the drive wheels across there's travel length and as long as you pay attention to that you're fine just do whatever you want to you really don't have to worry about much of anything in terms of weight so that's really it for tanks that's really their only advantage to my knowledge there's a lot of interest in the from the depths community in tanks and there's people out there that are a lot more experienced than I am with them there's a number of tank based tournaments that are run on a regular basis and it's they're a load of fun I would highly recommend that anyone looking to learn more about building tanks go look up some of those other from the depths tank tournaments on YouTube there's some awesome ones out there and I might drop a link to a couple of them in the video description so that's really it for now and hopefully I'll see you in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Kharel

Views: 1,328

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: Gaming, From the Depths, Tutorial, Tanks, Land Movement

Id: s3X49uf0o2Q

Length: 33min 10sec (1990 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Fretti90]

Im gonna be honest, i have not watched all of these but i will for sure. Its great to see you making these as tutorials is always in demand in FtD.

Keep it up! :)