Slot Cars

Slot cars are user-made functional personalized and special cars on Roblox only a selected group of people - depending on the owner and/or creator of the slot - are allowed to access.

Description
Slot cars have unique visuals and stats/tuning depending on the owner's preference. A functional slot must include a chassis and a car body of any sort, which can either be built with bricks and parts in Studio, using OBJ models imported from other sources, or user-made models imported from 3D graphics software, such as most notable software Blender. Users can make slots for fun or to be sold to other users. Slots can either be shared publicly for other users to use and copy or made for private use as well, depending on the owner and creator of the slot.



History
Slot cars first surfaced the Roblox community around 2009, when Roblox first introduced the VehicleSeat to Roblox Studio. The VehicleSeat was virtually the only control system available on Roblox for some time. Although it featured unrealistic and clunky physics, it was one of the most advanced features of Roblox at the time and helped provide an available chassis for slot creators and Roblox automotive companies. Since OBJ and 3D graphics importing wasn't a feature on Roblox as yet, a majority of cars were built by bricks and parts.

It wasn't until October 9th 2012 when developer Zephyred first released a more advanced chassis family; the OpenChassis. It served as a replacement for VehicleSeat and featured virtually realistic driving physics, a realistic steering radius (rather than a chassis using all four wheels to turn 360 degrees), and other advanced features that made VehicleSeat obsolete.

On May 13, 2014, Roblox released OBJ Exporter. Users could now import and export Roblox models and 3D models to Roblox Studio and any 3D software. At this point, users could finally create and import much more realistic car models. Fast forward to late 2010s, many advanced chassis were made that rendered the OpenChassis obsolete. However, a most notable chassis that stood out from the rest was A-Chassis 6 (AC6). AC6 was much more advanced than OC and many other chassis and was developed by SecondLogic and his group InSpare. It is the successor of InSpare's previous chassis SS6 and featured much more realistic driving physics and suspension, power output, gear shifting, tuning, and more tuning variety. The AC6 quickly rose to fame and replaced SS6 and OpenChassis, rendering them both obsolete. The AC6 is the number one choice of slot creators and still being updated and used by slot car creators today. As of 11/04/2020, A-Chassis development was discontinued with only support for issues. The current chassis version is 1.14. update 4.

Construction
Construction of a slot car can be both complex and simple, depending on section of construction. Parts such as inserting a car body to the chassis and inserting rims to the chassis wheels can be quite a simple process. However, attempting to put the correct position of parts and meshes, and inserting plugins and scripts can be complex and challenging, especially for beginner slot builders. Instructions to make a perfect slot car can be shown in YouTube channel Flaron's playlist. Constructing a slot car should not include an errors and everything must be checked and proofread. If an error occurs when attempting to build a slot car, the results will be unfavorable to the slot builder and may have to restart to check for and avoid any errors.