does anyone know of any replacements for the wheelcollider class in unity? they're absolutely loving terrible to work with and are a pain in the ass to tune right because you change one value a tiny bit and all of a sudden you get a plane instead of a ground based vehicle
Sorry, as far as I know there are no good replacements.
i'll try looking at that when i get home but if its using the default wheelcollider class then it is already flawed as wheelcolliders absolutely hate low-mass objects so much that they actually launch them into unity's farlands. wheelcolliders also incorrectly apply force/slip to the wheels too which isn't good at all
Yes, they are a pain, but when everything is tuned correctly, they work just fine and rarely have issues. The problem is getting them there.
If you wanted to, you could hard-code your own, since really all wheel-colliders are are just fancy raycasters. However, I think this would be mostly pointless. Instead, I would do the following if I were in your position.
1. Copy the wheel collider settings/scripts from the default vehicle into your own and get some sort of working setup, no matter how badly it performs.
2. Map all the relevant properties (i.e. mass, spring force, damping, etc.) to GUI sliders.
3. Play with the slider values until you get the setup you want.