While spending hours of (admittedly very entertaining) testing of my vehicles, I have noticed a strange sliding problem.
Context:
I take control of a vehicle and drive it around, and then I spawn a new vehicle and possess it. At that point, the previously owned vehicle is handed over to an AI controller, which simply slows it down to a halt, then applies the handbrake and puts the rigid body to sleep. All of this works just fine.
But (here’s the mysterious bit) in some cases the mere existence of the previously owned vehicles in the map (lets call them OLDs) seem to affect the handling of the new vehicle that I am now in possession of (lets call this one NEW).
The most obvious effect, which manifests itself when there is a handful of OLDs in the map, say 3 or more of them, is that my NEW vehicle tends to slide around a bit on the ground, somewhat randomly varying in direction and orientation, as if it were standing on ice all of a sudden while being affected by a soft but erratic force field. The effect is only barely noticeable while driving the NEW at a decent speed, but if I stop somewhere to admire the scenery, as it were, it gets very obvious.
I have no idea what is going on of course, but from a non-expert’s point of view it seems like there is some crosstalk going on between different instances of the same vehicle blueprint, if that’s even possible.
The only clues I can provide are:
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It does not seem to happen if the OLDs are instances of a different class (vehicle blueprint) than the NEW, although I haven’t double-checked this lately.
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The physics asset and skeletal mesh in question are both nice and sound, and normally there are no problems whatsoever related to performance, frame rate (range ~35 - 40), collision or overall handling. In short it behaves perfectly except for this special case.
So, it seems to me like a bug in the vehicle movement component, but I’d be delighted to hear any ideas for things I can check on my end to find a possible solution.