Friction Detection

As a roblox developer, it is currently too hard to detect the amount of friction between two parts. It may be able to be done using advanced mathematics, but ultimately the calculations would be unrealistic and not an option for a regular user. It would be nice if roblox implemented an API to detect how much frictional force is acting on an object, and where on it that the force is acting. This way, devs can add sparks, skid marks, and other cool things of this nature.

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Provide more use cases. It’s what the engineers look for when they see posts like this.

Go ham. Every case you can think of, type it out and let them know why we need this feature.

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The main use is in car chassis’.

How would this even work, every part has friction forces on it as long as another part is touching it.

All you need to know is the material of the two parts/terrain, and use the PhysicalProperties API. Surface area does not affect friction, so as long as two objects are touching, at all, you can know the amount of friction acting on the two parts.

If you want to make sparks/skidmarks/etc, it’s less difficult than you might think:

  1. Use raycasting to get the material
  2. Use PhysicalProperties.new(material).Friction to determine the friction coefficient of whatever you hit
  3. Multiply by whatever other friction values you have
  4. ???
  5. Profit
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