Patreon Mini-Devlog #1

I'm sure you've thought about it, but I'm wondering about combustion chamber shape. will it be possible to import a custom combustion shape model, that the fluid simulation will simulate? Things like turbulence from inflow, flame propagation etc, can all change so much based on the shape of the chamber, placement of valves, spark plug etc. I suppose this would be a lot more complicated than the tube stuff, so maybe a future idea...

Matthijs de Rijk

I don't think generating blocks will add any benefit to engine simulator. If people want to have 3D engine blocks for aesthetics they can just model it in blender themselves, or pay someone to make a custom model for them.

Matthijs de Rijk

im curious how these physics would work with forced induction. honestly would love to know if your still looking to work on that in the future with this physics engine.

Brendan Colmyer

You should for sure allow for ways to make aftermarket aspiration, such as turbos, root, twin screw, centrifugal, and electric superchargers.

Nate Booth

it will be awesome if all the components can scale, for example in a dorito engine, a 26b is a doubled 13b but if you want to use for example a 2000cc single rotor it will work?

Sergi Canaleta

nice

Adam Larcher

Neat. Wondering what support there might be in the future for extra components being loaded in (things like mufflers, super- and turbochargers, air filters, and other things which may influence particle flow), since those would be difficult to generate procedurally as well.

dung

Nice!

Didrik Esbjug

Great Job! just subscribed and looking forward to supporting you in the future!

Tristan Lundquist

awesome! looks insane

Beacrox

Loving the progress!

larsloveslegos

awesome

Lucas rossi

This looks great! Seeing cursed engines like that Gigantic single cylinder engine in 3D would be awesome!

Strikkies

This looks fantastic. Hope you get things to work!

DDev

I like the idea to keep the visuals more concept focused rather than getting lost in details of real engines. looking fantastic!

Kai Ramiel

I'm with you there, seeing a two-stroke with rotary valves moving and controlling the intake flow would be so cool

Carl Linden

I love the flexibility of what you could make in the open source version of Engine Simulator, it would be amazing to see what you could do with polished 3D assets, which I assume would be fully procedural.

Thanks for continuing work on this project. I would love to see 2 stroke engines too but I realize that I am in a minority to say the least.

Jabba Jubba

That will work to! Do you think its possible to be able to export samples at certain rev ranges etc? This could be game changing for the Assetto Corsa mod community but we need a way to draw the sounds into fmod.

Caleb Dauphinee

Not sure about fmod but exporting to BeamNG is something that I've been thinking about it. Exporting samples (like .wav files) will definitely be a feature

AngeTheGreat

I cant recall if I read this somewhere so ill just ask again, are there any plans for exportation to things such as fmod?

Caleb Dauphinee

Cant wait to use this to make fake engines for my fantasy bi-plane ttrpg - i like the minimal aesthetic. Breadth of engines > common engines rendered nicely. - could i request radial spinning engines ? maybe even on a lil more money?

Ida 8858

I'm implementing as many optimizations as I can for the steam release but it's not always trivial to offload computation to the GPU and it really depends on the problem. I'll provide some technical details on this once I have some progress to show

AngeTheGreat

Are you going to use GPU computing power for fluid simulation? Unfortunately, on a 12-cylinder engine I struggle to run the simulation using only one CPU core, a gpu might help.

Alberto R.

Looks very nice, do you think you could make it so it can output a sound recording of the engine and then the exhaust sound?

Azerrty

Love all the decisions you've talked about so far. Check out windy.com for a good example of displaying flow at least in 2d.

Chris Fischer

Maybe release different types of engines as a DLC? :D Meaning that it's understandable that for the moment 4-strokes are the main focus but after that's fine and dandy you may try to make it work with diesel's or wankel engines. At least that's something I'd really like to see in the future.

Mateusz Ładosz

Sounds good to me :D

Mateusz Ładosz

I don't think it'll ever be possible to implement a full real-time CFD simulation like the ones that you get in engineering applications. The version I've implemented is heavily simplified but I've found plenty of engineering sources that use similar approximations and it works fairly well at the macro level of the entire engine. It obviously wouldn't be suitable for designing cylinder heads or making detailed engineering decisions but it works for things like flow through runners. You can find the implementation on GitHub if you're curious to see how it works. It's a work-in-progress right now but with current hardware limitations I don't imagine it getting significantly more detailed than it already is, just improved and optimized

AngeTheGreat

It's just from what I remember from my engineering school times, to actually simulate fluid dynamics a lot of computational power is required. I was mostly working with FEA module but if I remember well to simulate fluid dynamics is basically the same. Meaning that to get like 40 iterations of particular simulation you would leave that machine with dual 20-core Xeon's doing the calculations overnight and you would get your result the next day. No idea how that works with current version of your Engine Sim but I assume there's just a lot of approximations just to make the result "good enough" which I'd say would be a decent approach for the visualisation part as well. After all that's planned to be a game that's supposed to run on majority of consumer PC's and laptops instead of just on specialised hardware if I get it right.

Mateusz Ładosz

I guess this all depends on how you define "actually" simulated. The airflow is already simulated in the current engine simulator, but just isn't displayed anywhere. I think it would be a genuinely useful debugging tool but also interesting for players to see the effect of things like intake runner size (which is already simulated now). So, it's half eye-candy and half useful/actual simulation output.

AngeTheGreat

If that whole airflow visualisation will actually be simulated and dependant on engine's construction rather than just being an eye candy sort of a thing, I will be absolutely impressed.

Mateusz Ładosz

I'm really glad you're thinking of this as a tool rather than a game. Looking forward to improvements on the audio side of things.

Melonenstrauch

I have some ideas for this but I'll have to do a bit more testing before I comment further. Thanks for the suggestion!

AngeTheGreat

I'm planning to add something similar to this though I need to do a bit more research/testing before I can commit to anything specifically

AngeTheGreat

The graphics that I showed in the video are actually pretty similar performance wise to 2D graphics. It's a very simple scene for most gpus to render. I'm also planning to have the engine run in a separate thread to avoid any competition between the graphics and engine simulation

AngeTheGreat

I'm planning to at a later stage of development after work on 4 strokes is complete

AngeTheGreat

It may be worthwhile to make 3D/2D/Audio Only toggleable, so that older systems might be able to handle the computational load better.

dung

I’ve asked this question moment ago on YT, but I’ll leave it here for the others: are You planning to include different intake types and mufflers/catalytic converters, as they have great impact for overall sound :)

Jacek Dębski

Looks really good ! Tho I think it would be better to used that as a procedural 3d render to check or even create your engine, but keep the simple 2d visuals when it's actually running at full speed to avoid spending too much time debugging fast moving 3d objects. Or just cap the rendering speed at 1/10th of the real speed to see exhaust pulses and check the timing, but that's about it

YellowLight

Hi!! There would be a rotary engine? Like the 13b on Mazda RX-7 FD

Riccardo Mariani

Looks epic

Levis

Looking good! I also support keeping it minimalistic and functional in terms of looks. I agree that it's much more in line with what the current Engine Simulator is in spirit, and also keeping the graphics simple will help with optimization.

Blade Skydancer

I am excited to see that a 3D visual of the engine builds may be possible for the game and also support keeping it minimal in terms of rendering what really doesn't need to be rendered.

John Crowell

This is awesome!

Didrik Esbjug

That is fucking sick

Jamie Kelly

Oh this is sexy

viperfan7

That's the plan!

AngeTheGreat

3D air flow visualization?

Snowe