Potential Energy

Today I started to add handling of potential energy. That means that the car soon should loose speed going uphill and speed up going downhill. Adding that part to the formula evaluating the car state to find the current speed was easy, but I still haven't calculated the slope of the car. Where I need it I have the transformation matrix of the car and I tried to calculate the slope from the up vector. But now that I think it over again I think it would make more sense to actually store the height and use the height differential with the difference traveled (which I know as I know the time which has passed and the speed of the car in that time) to just calculate it.

It may sound more complex, but I believe it isn't. The problem with the up vector is, that I may not use the component to the side of the car, as that will not change the cars speed. So I first have to calculate the "real up vector" before I can calculate the slope. Or now that I think about it some more, I could probably also use the car direction to calculate the slope, it at least doesn't contain any rolling, so it might be easier. I will decide next week what to use, in any case it again is useful to describe what I tried to do to think it through from another perspective again.