Could someone tell me a way to for example increase the amount of node points to have more bend points to be more realistic metal damge? or maybe make a jbeam or maybe make it a setting in the game
Excuse me, what? What in the world do you want? You'd have to create a totally new Jbeam to just up the nodes. They're placed specifically afterall. And correct me if I'm wrong, but if there is more nodes, that could also cause spiking (I know it's especially with models though) If it was a setting, 10% of the whole site would be able to run it, aswell as needing to redo every single vehicle in the game (And prop if you want to go too far) And that also would mean mods would most likely not go to that level because Jbeaming is already difficult. Yes, I'm just ranting at this point, but I wanna know what type of specs you have to be asking these questions.
You would have to completely remake the cars, not to mention the horrible fps you would get on anything short of a NASA supercomputer.
stop, dude just stop I actually have a good cpu every answer i get is but you'll lag, no dude no, dude stop ahh the lag well i'm saying just can it be done, and I mean instead of remapping the jbeams. Let me explain it like this the jbeams are triangle instead of having 1 large triangle you can have 4 smaller triangles making up the already existing triangles sort of like this The large triangle is the original jbeam and the smaller triangles can be like an option called node density, this can help more bend points as I feel the hood crashing right now is like folding a rubiks cube.
It's definitely possible to have a more detailed jbeam than the official cars (look at the 8x8 Big Rig for example... it just murders CPUs), but for that you would need to know how to do jbeam to not overdo it. Also, I think that the better damage will be up to a certain point, as too many nodes & beams may actually cause a lot of spiking when damaged
To me honestly more realistic damage is more to do with part complexity and things coming apart more then it is the resolution of the jbeam
And, increasing node density will hurt the stiffness of the Jbeam a lot. The 8x8 Big Rig has such a high node count because it is just plain large, it's actual node density isn't much higher than stock vehicles. But you really do need to know what you're doing, and 9 times out of 10 you aren't going to be able to improve the stock vehicles. The recent vehicle overhauls have been focused on reducing the number of nodes in the vehicle body Jbeams, because it's more realistic and behaves better.
ok, well idk how nodes work more than the basics I was just wondering because in iihs videos the hood ripples and crunches in circular patterns and what not.
I totally get what your idea here is. I have often thought how cool it would be to have a car that crumples and deforms almost to realistic and detailed levels. Perhaps a set of vehicles like this that would obviously only be for very high end PC's. Vehicles with lets say, double the node count of an official vehicle at least. While this theory doesn't make sense in the general BeamNG game scheme it fits very well with the latest research and development narrative going around. Why the hell not? Now, in order to do this, I suspect the node/jbeam layout would be absolutely mind boggling to get right and would take a team of testers many months to get right at the very least, perhaps even a new application just to make it half sane?
More nodes does generally equal more detailed deformation, but after a certain point, too many nodes will cause issues with structural stability; The more nodes you have, the lighter they need to be in order to maintain realistic weight values, thus, alongside this you also have to lower the beamSpring and beamDamp values of the beams connecting the nodes together otherwise you'll end up crashing the physics engine or at the very least your car will implode. However, if your beamSpring values are too low, the vehicle will behave like jelly; It might be sturdy standing still, but when it's in motion and impacts something the jellyness will become apparent.
This is due to the physics update rate being too low to simulate extremely high density materials accurately with stability. The game updates at 2000hz (2000 times a second)... if they had 10 000hz they say they could simulate diamond, however getting enough computing power to simulate 5x more information in a second would be incredibly difficult, there is no way that'd work on a modern computer in realtime. Also.. other games often update as seldom as 64-400hz in comparison, and the calculations going on during the average tick are also often much more simplistic. More nodes also don't always equal more detail. Again, what would be more "realistic" is the simulation of more complex jbeam it's self. Like simulating a roof that snaps at the pillars or actually making the D-Series, H-Series and Roamer platform fall off the chassis rail like the Grand Marshal does, bed and all on the D-Series Or simulating fibreglass. All things previously discussed before. I don't really see it being practical at all to try to make denser jbeam as more crumpling doesn't always = better, it often just makes a folded spiky mess, no amount of testing can really solve that.
If having ultra detailed simulation was as easy as making the node structure denser, wouldn't the devs already have done so? They are pretty smart people. I think you are confusing modeling with Jbeaming. Sure, if you have more triangles in a 3-D model, you could theoretically make it a smoother and more detailed model by adding polygons, but if you just add more vertices, without actually making the model smoother, you are only making it less optimized. Do you know what speed the IIHS camera runs at? as in how many frames it is actually capturing per second? I think Beam has by far the best crash physics of any game, and looking at the big picture, Beam is remarkably close to IIHS levels of damage. The biggest difference is glass and plastic pieces shattering and flying all over the place.
but if you see the metal ripple, and iihs has infinitely more metal bend points and the plastic bumpers break realistically I digress, what I meant is maybe they can find a way to make it more detailed damage models.
I believe you may be missing the point of BeamNG. The crash physics are realistic to a point, but they're not the focus of the game. Rather, they are a side effect of the node-beam model, the primary goal of which is to enable realistic handling dynamics.
There really isn't. You ever played one of those bridge building games? Those bridge building games are pretty much a 2D version of the BeamNG physics engine. If you want to increase the resolution you run into a few issues. There's no 'slider' you can add to increase the resolution of a bridge in those games, you have to just build denser manually. Same with .jbeams. If you increase the resolution of a .jbeam structure, you add more nodes which will increase the mass of a part. So you have to make the nodes lighter in order to get the part back to a realistic weight. However, if the nodes are too light then the .jbeam is prone to spontaneously exploding, so you have to increase the tick rate for the physics engine UPWARDS from 2,000Hz. The engine is fairly well tuned to the resolution we have now, and more realism can only come from other approaches. More nodes also means more beams, and having been modding and mucking about with this game quite a bit... getting a dense network of nodes and beams to behave itself properly at this current resolution requires a lot of learning. And the problems compound with increased complexity. and more of a thing, I can run 10 cars at a reasonable FPS. I like that I can do that. weaving through traffic or setting up AI on an oval track for full contact motorsport is fun. and I'd rather just see things get more efficient. I long for the day when we get 24 cars running on a track
Thank you... that needed to be stated. It's never been the direct focus and that's what the devs have previously stated on the old product page and across the forum over the years.
so the devs don't really care about the crash physics, and also every youtube is crashing cars off mountains at 500 mph and I don't see many videos displaying the handling physics.
They care about crash physics obviously, that's the big selling point; the groundbreaking crashes. If they didn't care about the crash physics, the game wouldn't be anywhere as appealing, nor would it be complete because as far as I know, you'd need some softbody physics to have realistic driving. Also, that's the Youtuber's choice. You can see the views they're getting because of little kids. Who is gonna click on a video of simple, clean racing when there is 30 cars constantly and realistically crashing right under it. Sad truth.
More nodes = more CPU, less stiffness, tons more beams. BeamNG's physics engine only runs at 2000FPS, would probably need more to properly do what you're talking about. Also the way beams are tuned and connected completely depends on how nodes are structured. Having a dynamic option wouldn't be practical.