Why BeamNG is dying?

Development wise they have been consistantly hitting quarterly updates with a decent amount of content. Updates are't packed with content, but they never have been. However, Italy/Autobello was the first time we got a map and a car in the same update since what, Utah/Miramar?

As for the forum, it isn't that quiet IMO. The time approaching an update is always a bit weird for the forum activity. It seems to me that we've got a new wave of members though, I've noticed a couple new members this past week.

 

The Discord part I don't agree with. The BeamNG community on Discord isn't that great, about like the forums really. Constant drama among members, it's just childish. I quit caring about BeamNG drama long ago, and so should everyone else. It's not something anyone should spend their time on. As of today, the only BeamNG server I'm in is MFD, as they know how to moderate and keep things civil.

I'm not saying all parts of the Discord community is awful, it's just the awful side that shows. With that said, why do people even fight over a car game, it's just ridiculous. I left most BeamNG related servers because it's not something I'm gonna waste my time on, and get pinged in them over drama I don't need in my life. I've been a lot happier since I've left them, and I have no regrets. As everyone grows up, they'll realize that it's much better to enjoy the game, and not spend their time arguing with kids on the internet.

With that said, I love this community, but I am thoroughly disappointed that we can't just enjoy the game.

TLDR:

Everyone just needs to take a step back, and enjoy the game. Discord drama isn't worth it.

 

Could be that you are participating less so you get less notifications that way, or maybe you are participating to different discussions that are not so popular and previous discussions you have participated.

There is lot that affects amount of notifications.

 

Yep, it just depends on your forum activity. When I am active I get 30+ notifications in 24hrs, on a week when I hardly use the forum a get more or less 15-20 within the same time span

 

I honestly do not think BeamNG will ever be a cut and dried retail release like a GTA or Forza. It just wanders about experimenting
with itself and growing into whatever realms it pleases and we are all along for the ride. No stated goals, deadlines or promises of anything.
It is a strange, wonderful, yet maddeningly frustrating experience I've yet to get a grasp on. It's like an alternate universe where I can pop in and out here and there and then die of old age. I doubt this thing is dying. However, the fabric of spacetime does bend neatly around it.

 

progress has definitely slowed down tho ai hasnt been improved for a long time cant even do real circuit racing

 

videos like this ruin beamng drive.
personally, i wont think its dying, it's just some guys are trying to ruin it(like russians and shit youtubers)

 

actually i honestly think beam is doing pretty good. Everyone gets fascinated by every major or minor update, and it lasts a long time in my opinion.

 

HAAAAAAAAA
wow. thats.. amateur script . cringed a lot

 

i would not say the game is dying even tho i just joined... but if any thing is a stick in the mud for this game is the number of cars you can interact with at once. for any one with a "normal" PC they can put about 3 to 5 cars on the map...

if you want to play it like a "normal" game you need a Intel Core i9-7980XE 18 Cores 36 Threads or a AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x 16 Cores 32 Threads to put 30 cars on the map... when they made the game i think (like all of us) that they expected PCs to be 10 times more powerful that they actually became... (all tho they did... no one can buy a 10'000$ CPU like Linus Dropped ;P)

so now they have to make serious advances in the Engine to make it less heavy to do the same tasks and results. also they do not want to compromise in the car's coltris (wrote it wrong right?) ans poly count so a normal PC like mine will "always" be limited to 3 or 4 cars. (all tho some of the Automation cars i made can go as high as 10 before the same performance drop)

an other way than sacrificing the poly/coltris would be to use the CUDA cores of a Nvidia card but some people have AMD... AND also even the Nvidia owners needs 1 card for the cars, 1 card for the game so not going to work. (all tho 100 to 1000 cores depending on the Generation would do the trick)

so you can only go through so much jumps and wall crashes before you get bored and want to do something else. adding traffic makes the game interactive since you have moving obstacles and cops chasing you making a whole new dynamic of gameplay that still involves crashes.

like imagine having to drive the "car plow" through traffic while keeping it health enough to plow through the target at the end of a race with the cops! splitting open the way for what ever... in a goal fashion, it is fun many times as a challenge or game goal... scripting that by hand and doing it once... almost not worth it... (kind of like a comedian being the ultimate sacrifice of a joke since he is the only one not allowed to laugh at it since he has to deliver it... sad but true!)

right now if i add 1 police car, 1 offroad and a faster police car... i have no space for any other cars, ambulance and offroaders or muscles and economy cars... just 3 police... or add once type but they get useless outside of their terrain... (offroad or in speed or tight streets.) a minimum of 10 cars would be needed. (3 type of police, 1 ambulance for realism, a 2 light cars, 2 heavy, 2 sports)

(final P.S. do the DEVS find time to "play" the game or are they always stuck "testing" the game? cause testing is actually not fun at all!)

 

I've got to agree actually. I have a 6700k and it runs the game fine. however, after 1round 6 cars though, the game does get really slow really quickly. If i could have around 10 cars before the game gets slow that would be great.

 

Polys/Coltris aren't really what is slowing the game down, its mainly the physics being simulated at 2000HZ continuously.
The graphics engine also needs more optimisation.

 

well by coltris that i threw around without too much though i mean the whole Physics rig. like the beams that are keeping the car from collapsing on it self, the coltris looking for air to apply down corce and if a collision is happening... like the whole package... since the car does not go to a locked state until a force applied to it passes a threshold to ignore insignificant physics under. normal games would be like this game except know when a piece would lose integrity and dumb it down until the limit is breached to save CPU power. this game is always 100% emulating ALL of the physics hence why some cars when accelerating looks like they are made of jello! (i made a highpower Automation muscle car and it does that so other exported cars must also if the power is there.)

 

I'd never say a sandbox game like this is dying as long as it's gaining new content decently regularly, and things like driver issues and anything gamebreaking are being regularly ironed out.

I would say that my personal interest has waned some and probably won't be as high as it used to be until we get another racing focused update. Improved AI racing would of course be fantastic, but I'd settle for just online scenario leaderboards. You could have a disclaimer that no records will be saved between versions because of physics tweaks and unresolved cheating preventions so (most) people don't get upset about regular updates.

I think the majority of players would simply be happy to have more goal oriented gameplay and appreciate getting to see how friends did on scenarios and compete with them. It'd also probably give the BeamNG YouTubers that don't focus on crashes something to hook onto and build up another niche in the community.

 

Actually those CPUs are bad choice for 0.16 version of the game, it is not only physics that needs to be run, high IPC and clocks are what you need to be able to keep all those other cores busy and not waiting for stuff that is not using so much threading.

Few versions ago, before Italy situation was much worse, Threadripper could of be slower than i3 for example, it is much better in 0.16 already.

Chassis flex simulation happens in this game 2000 times in a second, typically racing sims might have like two triangles for chassis flex and under 400 times a second simulation rate, while AI cars for example have typically used simplified physics (in Raceroom AI cars are using same physics as player, that is exception among them), no other game goes even near to detail in chassis flex alone than BeamNG.

Usually structural stress is something calculated in cad software, here they do it in real time.

Graphics has been heaviest part though, or hardest for most computers to overcome, something many have had trouble to get their heads around with.

Put graphics to normal, no ssao and reflections, spawn only same color and model D15 on gridmap and you can run pretty many, if it would be physics, it would be equally heavy on every map. Well, also GPU comes into question, but with gtx1080 there is really no limits there.

But yeah, if optimizations are possible, surely more of those are welcome, especially new really many core CPUs becoming to gaming, it will be interesting to see how many cars people can run when game is 1.0

 

My new i9 9900k does 10 cars easy (on a 1000x1000 map) the only bottleneck is my gpu 1060 (my 2080 didnt arrive yet) so when i am looking at all cars at the same time the frames drop to the 40-50s maybe (medium graphics no ssao and dynamic reflections) but with gamergulls Traffic tool most of the time there are only a few cars in frame so the fps stay well above 60 (italy needs further testing tho) its already magical but i cant wait for my 2080...

 

Give me your computer or I'm going to find your house and wear your skin.
Just joking man, nice rig.

 

Difference between 1050Ti and 1080 is ssao, reflections and normal graphics instead of high, GPU rarely reaches even 80%. One thing you will likely find out is that your CPU will be reason why fps drops under 60, but your CPU load is not 100% neither your GPU load (at least when playing 1080p).

You can then hit J to pause physics and see load of each core to see which core runs workload that becomes limiting factor. WCUSA and Italy are whole different in this aspect though.

I would test HT on and off with 9900k to see if there is difference, but this also might be interesting test when you get 2080 https://www.beamng.com/threads/tokyos-shuto-c1-expressway.61259/page-2#post-1005643 I had there 4 cores vs 6 cores, map is quite CPU heavy.

I think that on high graphics at Italy's Norte it was only 5 cars or so that my CPU allowed me to have until dropping under 60fps, it is interesting how your CPU will fare, in 0.15 at least it was very clear how 1 thread was limiting before I could see much of benefit from extra 2 cores, but that depends from map and graphics settings and how much work your 1 core can do.

Well, this is just for the time when you find out your GPU is not utilized 100% and your CPU is around 50% load and your fps is going below 60fps, might save time for finding out why such happens. 0.16 is bit different, but I think I had same number of cars limit in Italy when I tested.

One thing I'm wondering though, if there is number of cores where without HT performance actually would be greater than with HT, that necessarily is not so, but I don't get much gains from HT, physics are such that they seem to have limited gain from HT or something.

You can run lot more one type of car than different cars, that is also another thing which can help if you want to run massive number of cars, use copy player to spawn half of the cars.

 

You know, maybe it’s because gaming rigs are becoming more expensive with time, Who then flip knows...

 

if i put 5 cars my rig crawls to 10 FPS, 3 car max to keep around 20 where it is playable. tho if i use Automation cars that are simple... some i can ply put 5 to drop at 20 FPS some i can put 7 and i did one that i could put 10! but BeamNG cars it only takes 3 to put the FPS at 20, drops at 15 with 4 and around or below 10 with 5. i have a G15 Keyboard and i see all cores at 100% with 5 cars, it hits 100% a bit at 4 cars and it hovers at 90% or more with 3 cars... tho with 1 car it stays about 45% to 60%.

i did an Experiment by going into task manager and clicking on the CPU check box (Set Affinity) and make the game run on 3 cores by disabling the first one from just the game's EXEs (UI and all other BeamNG exe that it uses.) the FPS did not really increase much since i was testing if the bottleneck might have been the GPU not getting enough CPU time but it was not really the case... (more like FPS remained mostly the same tho i could place one automation car less, so went from 6 to 5 Automation cars.)

EDIT: also wanted to point out, no matter what graphic settings i use, the FPS never goes below 50 and pretty much is 55 no matter what i put for settings.