You might think that a rally car is basically just the street car version with perhaps a bit more horsepower and a roll cage installed. The truth is that it’s a lot more than that. A rally car has to be designed and built to withstand huge forces and loads without breaking or spinning out of control. If you tried to drive a regular street car the way a rally car is driven the car body would quickly buckle and deform and wheels maybe get torn off. It would probably not be a very pleasant experience for you as the driver either.
One of the most important parts in a rally car is the suspension and it’s no ordinary suspension. The suspension is the link between the wheels and the rest of the car and it has to be built to absorb the huge loads and forces thrown at it when driving over very rough roads and not to mention those crazy jumps you no doubt have seen if you have watched some rally videos.
The suspension physics in Rally Shift 2 also has to be able to handle the same kinds of simulated forces and loads as the real world rally cars. We want to make the physics in Rally Shift 2 as realistic as possible and getting the suspension to behave right is one of the parts in the physics simulation. Just like in the real world, if the suspension is broken or for some other reason doesn’t work properly, the road handling of the car will suffer and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to keep it under control. The goal for the game is also that the player will be able to make adjustments to the suspension to achieve optimal performance for the type of road and conditions at hand just like in real world rally.
The video shows the car suspension physics so far at work and it also contains a hilarious example of what can happen when there’s a bug in the suspension physics. The suspension physics is not by any means finished and we will continue working on it to improve it and make it work better and also to simulate real world rally car suspension as realistically as possible.