Splitting the hatch?

After I saw the video "Splitting the hatch" on twitch I rememberd a post a while ago about tearing vehicles apart. If I remember correctly, tdev or gabester said that its possible to split a vehicle in half. But in the video it wasnt fully splitted. So the question: Will it be like in the video or will it be improved?

 

It's not possible to split a car in half for now, but anyway at that speed you don't split a car in half, so there's nothing to improve...

 

Ok, thank you for the reply

 

I'm actually pretty sure that on the live stream they said they got it working properly

 

I saw it several times in the stream footage, but I think that by far the most noticeable time was when you rolled the Pigeon for the first time. It was missing a good half of its roof, and the fact that it was missing textures and an interior (as far as I can see) only made the damage more visible.

 

I don't really think that it's going to look very good if we're able to split cars in half, I mean look at this:

That's not very realistic...

This is realistic:

And to be honest, I don't think that we could see it like this in Beamng.

I think it's more likely that we'll see the first car in BeamNG, but that looks just stupid.
Not to mention that I bet cars will just randomly split in half sometimes... Ofcourse I thrust the developpers to make it as correct as possible, but still, it'll look rather silly if you crash into a wall and the car splits in half...

(Please keep in mind that I know nothing about programming, so I don't even know if things I've said are (im)possible.)

 

You played with Mechano when you were young? Or K'Nex?
You could compare BeamNG with that... Cars are made out of actual constructions, nodes and beams. Nodes are points with mass and collision, beams are "rods", that cannot collide, but they can break and deform(and they have spring and damping, but that's beside the point here). Every beam is attached from one node to another node, just like in Mechano all the metal plates(which you can deform/break) are connected between 2 screws. So basically, in theory it is possible to sheer all the beams in the center of the car straight through and split the construction in half...

Problem is, there's a visual mesh over that which deforms depending on the positions of the nodes(or the screws, for mechano)... So basically, the mesh bit between the 2 parts that get cut apart wouldn't know what to do: It would simply stretch between the 2 parts of the car normally, which is what happened in Rigs of Rods.
The way I understand, in BeamNG, they simply delete that mesh part between the 2 halves of the car, but they have a problem. If they enable that on the car body, it also deletes parts of the visual mesh even when the construction isn't broken in half, so like, it just deletes part of the mesh when only a single beam breaks... So then you sometimes end up with a roof that has a hole in it because 1 beam in there broke, even though the whole car is still in one piece, though a bit deformed... And what they want in an ideal situation is the nodes(the mass points, or screws) to break in 2, so that you could cut the visual mesh in 2, rather than deleting a section between 2 halves of the car... But that sounds very hard to do...


Judging from the videos on Twitch, I'd say it works pretty nicely as it is. Might not be perfect, but breaking nodes in half and having it still be stable sounds like a lot of work with not much extra result...

I'm only going by my experience in Rigs of Rods though, but I assume the whole node and beam system can't be that different in BeamNG, just massively improved in every possible way...

@Gabester below: Ah, yeah, that's sorta part of what I wanted to word in the above piece of text, but failed

 

That's not the point.
The point is that we can't even do what is shown in the first picture right now.

They won't split in half randomly.
The idea is that, when beams are stretched x times more than their length they will break, or if a force greater than y is applied, they break. When they break, they will "disconnect", being able to do both what is in picture one, but it will look like picture 2. Right now, cars would look like in picture 1, with the sheets of metal stretched out across the gap. And you cant get that from crashing the car.

 

is it possible to limit the strech of beams and nodes ? the biggest problem for me is that if you crash a car with just a little piece of the car the part is getting stretched way too much. so it would look much more realistic if it would break or atleast stop streching. sorry for my bad english i hope you get what i mean.

 

Shouldn't be too bad to make, and it should probably be the default thing- Maybe do some tests if you haven't? (I was originally thinking of RoR there, when things spazzed, but I don't think that happens in BeamNG, so my point is probably invalid)

Also, just as a question now that I think about it, what will the properties of plastic be? Since it cracks, but if you can't make a mesh split then you can't crack plastic, right? Does it just stretch(right now) or do you not even have plastic?