Unity 5 - Cloth Contraints - unity3d

I'm trying out the new Version of Unity 3D (5.0.0.4f) and figure out whats new, whats possible now. My experience with Unity 4 free is also just a little.
Anyway I work with the "new" cloth component and have some general questions to different funkctions. The documentation brought no knowledge to me. So I would be thankful if one of you could explain me the different points in an accessible way.
First question touchs the constraints. When I edit the contraints (of a plane for example), there are two options to activate. What are the differents between Max Distance and Surface penetration. max Distance is clear to me but i don't know what the second option does.
Seceond question: I have an tablecloth positioned over a sphere. In playmode when i move the sphere up and the tablecloth react correctly. But the sphere ist temporaliry visible trough the cloth. Its look like a graphicbug then, but ist there a way to prevent this?
So I hope my questions a clear enough to understand. Thanks a lot for your educational effort.

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Unity3D Wheel Collider - Friction Curve? Alternatives?

so I've been trying to see if I can make use of Wheel Colliders for the past several months now. As much as I've managed to figure out more and more things about how to set them up properly, there's some things I've been noticing that seem impossible to avoid:
Even if your friction sideways stiffness is lower, there's a chance that your car will continue to "spin" or "rotate" in the direction you were steering if you JUST hold down your input long enough to get the car beyond just rotating. I've noticed this will happen, whether for example the "SteerHelper" or "TractionControl" functions are doing their work or not. This will put a dent in ensuring smooth turn movement. Now, I don't know if maybe this is just due to realistic car physics (I mean, I can picture the car skidding in scenarios where they lost grip of the road for sure), but it just feels kinda glitchy. Sometimes, even when I'm not turning, the car will start to turn a little to the left or right and then gradually seem to "lean" that way in terms of applied torque to the rigidbody. I've seen many suggestions for trying to stop the rigidbody from doing this. Here is one way I'm trying to work against this:
rb.AddTorque(-rb.angularVelocity * 2);
However, it seems that the car will still "spin" more than intended. What would be ideal is to be able to MAYBE allow the car to turn a little extra after the left or right steer buttons were released (maybe more or less depending on the vehicle), and no more than that to ensure there is maximum control to give the engaged and maybe arcadey game play I've been going for for a long while.
It's been difficult to adapt an ideal friction curve value that would give the most ideal feel of a drift turn, especially a more arcadey one. I'm not trying to go for wide turns that slow you down, I'm trying to go for tight (yet controllable) turns that allow you to preserve most of your speed. I find that especially at higher values of stiffness, as I know many people have observed in other posts, that again, the car will turn back an extremely high amount sometimes (you drift left enough, a force is turning your vehicle way to the right). It's sad, because I've wanted to be able to say I've "mastered this beast" and used it for my purposes, but I don't know if that's really a good practical expectation for anyone. I even worked my own alternate friction curve values that would be used in the controller:
But I guess as some people say, you can't polish something that's broken? Moving to the third point...
I've read so many posts that show how to adjust a vehicle's center of mass, or to add more colliders in different spots to correct it, using scripting to add an offset to the center of mass, etc. So many tips that say, "lower the center of mass, you'll find it" and I give that a try. When the center of mass is too low, my car can get pretty shaky on the terrain (not that it hasn't in the past, but it's often been things I could correct, like the weird initialization of the attachedRigidBody of the wheel colliders themselves in the beginning, etc). High enough, and of course, (even when it's lower sometimes???) the car will just start spinning in the air on either multiple axes or specifically the forward z, when you drive off a ledge or bump into something with a high enough speed. It just seems inevitable.
I've been trying to give my benefits of a doubt. I like to think there's a correct way to use this thing, and that I'm just not familiar enough with Unity3D physics concepts. However, it just seems more and more that I'm investing too much time in a broken component - or, maybe I just never got the best grip of physics.
I was about ready to try just convex mesh colliders around my tires, and just abandon the idea of gripping physics altogether, but I'd love to hear suggestions to either address anything I've mentioned above, or just a more ideal package to move onto. I've glanced at packages like Vehicle Physics Pro, but I do want to be sure I'm getting something that makes sense.
Full disclosure: I'm in the middle of trying to make a game that feels incredibly similar to F-Zero, but with wheels.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions you can provide.
(Maybe not an answer per se, but hopefully helpful.)
Note Unity also suggests to possibly give the car a constant downward force via script. It might be telling that such workarounds are officially given, one would think proper physics would, well, properly work without them.
There's some assets you might want to give a try generally:
One is the Unity Asset Store asset called Arcade Car Physics, and it's free. I've tried it and it works (but not sure if it works for your needs). It's using Unity's native Wheel Collider plus extra scripts.
Another is the Arcade Car Physics github project. It has nice plane stabilization and more, and works well. It's not using the native Wheel Collider.
Then there's this asset called Vehicle Physics. Instead of native Wheel Colliders, they've create a fully custom wheel system so that it would be more physically workable. The asset is not free, but they offer a free demo executable where you can drive around different vehicles, and that works quite well. (I haven't yet bought this asset myself.) As a downside, some reviews mention there's some complexity in setting this up (and I suppose future support for this custom Wheel Collider hinges on the company continuing to exist).
Good luck!

Unity - Randomly generated Worms like destrucible terrain advice

I've been looking online for some guidelines for this and have had no luck.
I'm having issues with the destructible part of my terrain.
I currently have a script which fills in a 2d array with 1's and 0's and then continues to create a mesh and collider from this array.
The trouble I'm having is that I have no idea how to detect a part of the mesh which was hit with an explosion and then almost cut the explosion from the mesh. I'm struggling to find any hints on how to modify a runtime generated mesh.
All I've been seeing online so far are 3rd party assets, but I'd like to avoid using assets as much as possible.
I'm not asking for someone to provide me with a solution, rather, point me in the right direction.
I'm sorry if this explanation was lacking, but in short, is it possible to modify a mesh at runtime and if so, how?

Pass spotlight's light to the other side of a mash

I have a spotlight in front of a mash:
And I would like to see the circle of light also from behind the mash. I would also love to have the light a bit diffused like lighting a piece of fabric.
Any tips about how to achieve this?
Thanks alot!
TL;DR the effect you're trying to achieve is not possible in the manner you're trying to achieve it in.
You've essentially got two or three options here. And you may want more than one of them.
Set the mesh to not cast shadows. This is pretty much the straight forward solution. It's not going to change the...texture of the light ("make it more diffuse") but it will mean that the light will illuminate other objects behind it.
Use two lights. One light will illuminate the mesh and only the mesh. You'll have to use physics layers for this, and layer masks. The second light--which is more diffuse than the first--illuminates everything but the mesh.
Along with #1 and #2, there's a thing called a cookie that might come in handy.
There might be a solution involving custom shaders. Not having explored this in the past myself, I can only say "it is a research direction I thought of." Research it. (Note: Shaders are complicated and Hard).
Writing your own lighting solution. This is probably the most advanced topic I can suggest. By which I mean "this will solve your problem, but keep in mind, there's about 40 years of research already been done to come up with the models we have which don't solve your problem." We only started to get subsurface scattering as an option in the last three to five. Now you want subsurface scattering to affect the light cone for other objects. Sooo...have fun with that.

Drawing continuous lines on Xcode/Unity

I am making a app which draws continuous lines like a snake using Unity and SKSpriteKit (Obj-C) in Xcode (I’m making 2 versions of the same app in both):
http://i.stack.imgur.com/qA1zk.png
http://i.stack.imgur.com/484kj.png
http:// i.stack.imgur.com/QTEkC.png (Apologies for the image posts. I can't post an image/more than 2 links)
If you’ve ever heard of a game called Curve Fever, what I’m doing here is quite similar to it. I’m controlling the direction of the end of the line with the arrowkeys, whilst the end of the line automatically moves forward every frame creating an image like the one above.
However, from the 3 screenshots above, it is quite obvious that my program isn’t very efficient - every frame, I add a circle sprite to the SKScene in the place where my moving sprite is, which is why, after a while, there are over 1000 nodes on the screen, and the energy impact/memory/cpu is very high… Not ideal.
So now I’m looking for better ways of drawing the line on the screen without drawing thousands of nodes.
A while ago, a friend talked to me about how he made a similar app in GameMaker (which I have no knowledge of how to use). When I asked him how he rendered the line, he said he created something called a “surface”, and when anything moved on that surface, the old position of the sprite would still stay there - which would create lines if a circle moved across the surface.
He was rather vague about this, and I tried to do some research later, but with no success. I couldn’t find anything relevant about continuous lines, surfaces and GameMaker, Xcode or Unity.
If someone could come up with a solution like my friend was talking about, for Xcode/Unity - preferably both (or if someone could tell me what he was talking about for GameMaker), then I’d be grateful, as this would optimise my game and reduce the severe lags I get after around 30 seconds.
Also, I’d be grateful if anyone could suggest alternative solutions to this, too.
I'm using GameMaker but I have no knowledge of Xcode or Unity. I can't help you directly but I can explain GameMaker surfaces.
Surfaces in GM are objects where you can draw on instead of directly drawing on the screen. Later you can draw the surface to the screen. The main advantage of it is that you can store a surface and for example draw it again in another tick, while the screen is redrawn in every tick, or that you can change it over time.
Surfaces are basically just bitmaps where you draw on. That means it wouldn't be hard to do the same in any other environment. Most other libraries/APIs call it canvas.
In your example you would draw one circle to the bitmap in each tick and then draw the whole bitmap to the screen.
A related topic is destructible terrain as it is discussed here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/6721/implementing-a-2d-destructible-landscape-like-worms

NetLogo: Unwrap World in 3D

I have what I think should be a very simple problem. In 2D NetLogo, I can easily "unwrap" the world by checking the boxes in the Configuration Window. However in 3D, these check boxes are not accessible as they are in a light grey text. Does NetLogo 3D not allow unwrapping? or is there something I'm missing?
According to http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/3d.html :
You'll also notice on the left side of the Model Settings that there are options for wrapping in all three directions, however, they are all checked and grayed out. Topologies are not yet supported in NetLogo 3D, so the world always wraps in all dimensions.
If NetLogo 3D development were still moving forward, this would certainly be one of the highest priority fixes. But NetLogo 3D currently isn't moving forward, and hasn't been for some years, for lack of funding and/or interested open source developers. Know anyone with money or time on their hands?