Remote control cars for VRChat players are the latest amazing user-made innovation in VRChat, and creator Chris B. is not just content to make them amazingly physics-based, but she even shot this pitch-perfect Saturday morning cartoons-style commercial-but-with-furries to promote them too. As the ad mentions, they run on VRChat's internal Udon scripting system (specifically, the C#-to-Udon compiler); and as you can tell by the way they move and bounce, the cars make use of Unity's existing Newtownian mechanics which is also part of VRChat:
"Unity's physics engine has a lot of really neat features that are under-utilized in VRChat," as Chris puts it to me. "Stuff like ragdolls are perfectly possible, but nobody does them for some reason."
More on how she made her cars' physics so satisfying:
"Hinge joints (built into Unity's physics engine) have a motor feature, and my script simply adjusts values on the motor. I also tweaked how the weight is distributed through trial and error to make the bounciness feel really satisfying. Funny enough, Unity has a 'Wheel Collider' built in as well, but I honestly couldn't figure it out. I ended up using sphere colliders for the wheels instead."
The cars only come with a starting track, but no other game systems; Chris expects other VRCers will create those.
Try it out for yourself at the RC Test Lab! https://t.co/KewzauLd4j
— Chris B. (@1029chrisB) June 29, 2021
"I wanted to keep cars grounded in reality, like an actual toy," as she puts it to me. "There's no toy that'll properly record a race's results or something. Kids just line up their cars and do it by eye, ya know? The cars physics and the fact that they need to be picked up if they flip over is apart of that philosophy too. I want them to feel real."
Since putting them on sale on Gumroad yesterday for $4 Canadian dollars (about $3.25 in USD), she's already sold 25 copies.
As to why she's selling them to the VRChat community, as opposed to offering them for free as many other VRChat creators do, her answer is sensibly succinct: "I'm almost broke! That's it."
Much thanks to Patchouli for the tip!
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