Octodemy

Raycast Car series 2 - Acceleration [preview]

Added 2025-05-04 11:43:03 +0000 UTC

The next step is all about making our car move.
We'll start by refactoring the wheels to their own class to help us customize the car later.

Then we'll add a simple acceleration and deceleration, and make use of an acceleration curve for a gradual acceleration and deceleration over speed to simulate a transmission.

We'll also go over very specific problems and glitches that can happen, and we'll improve our code to fix them.

I also found a very annoying bug in Godot's RaycastNode which was messing the whole physics calculation by getting wrong values at high speed. We'll fix that, and they car suddenly behaves much better, specially in loops and ramps.

Then, we'll be making different size wheels just to see how the car behaves.
And talk about a few tips you can do to improve the car.

Video Progress

As usual, the video ended up much longer than I was planning, so I'll have to cut some problems and fixes our car still needs for the next video.

We'll still be using our green car in the tutorial, and we'll save changing it to its real mesh for the final video.

I've recorded the videos right now. But I still need to write, record the voice and edit the video. So it might still be a few days till the tutorial is up.

But that's it

I'm learning a lot of new things trying to make this car work the way I like it.
I'm trying not to make it too complicated, but we'll see how it goes at the end.