Nobody is working on anything of the sort atm, please stop making threads about this people, it's driving me insane.
Simple: It's too much work. There's too much to account for in a situation like that. Simple scratch textures won't cut it as most of us buy the game for the realism. Imagine the game having to account for every single speck of paint on a car during an accident or at all times. The lag would be unimaginable.
Yeah sure it's too much work. It really is and I probably could never do it. You're right, but at the same time, this game is way too much work, and guess what? The developers of rigs of rods decided to make it. I get what you mean but to me that's no explanation. If they could make a Beamng.drive they can make a Beamng.drive with scratches with enough hard work, right?
Yup. The simple answer is that it's still an early access game and it hasn't been done. But people need to quit making excuses for the devs. It certainly can be done.
I don't think it's a bad idea, but not everyone has super high end systems, some can run at playable Fps one day but the next day the game is a lagfest still, because there'll have to be new textures for dirt and scratches, all custom for each car, this would increase the game's storage on your hard drive/SSD and would also increase lag as the GPU would have to load those textures(which would probably be high res) onto the model, and when you go in water, it would have to offload them. It may sound like no problem but it really makes an impact on the game. The only way rigs of rods was able to get away with this is because it's from 2005, and it uses low res textures. It could be added, but it could cause chaos for the people with lower end systems.
Remember, the devs are human, not some magical beings that can make things happen with the snap of their fingers. Paint damage will likely happen some day, but I wouldn't be suprised if it doesn't. The devs don't like to cut corners in simulation, so the paint damage will likely be dead on accurate or have none at all.
Also, if games like Rigs of Rods have paint scratch or dirt effects in them, they can be implemented into Beam.
okay, I see your point, but the storage is still there, it still would take up a bunch of space, but I do think that the devs will add it, we just have to be patient.
I'm sorry to those of you who believe it can be done, but I think you're forgetting a) how advanced computers are, especially high end models, and b) just how much more power you'd need to simulate all these particles. First of all, no mathematician in history can work with anywhere near the speed of a halfway decent computer* - even a very skilled mathematician cannot calculate 10 points' movement based off position and force vectors (these are direction and magnitude of forces, including momenta(momentum plural)) in a second, let alone thousands of points. Even if he could do thousands of points, he would then have to bring the time down from 1 second to .0005 seconds per calculation. Meanwhile, computers happily do this for hours for us. Now, realize that to accurately depict scratches, they would have to have far more detailed coltris and real-time updating textures. File re-writing takes time.* For dirt, you're essentially simulating liquid, which requires thousands more particles. All this in such a quickly running low level part of the program means it slows down the program even if you are just skipping the code* (to address those who say "just disable it on lower PC's"). Don't forget you need real-time updating textures for this too. Maybe if computers keep getting faster, but not yet. Give me an "I told you so" when calculators have quad-core processors and the average computer sits at 64 cores, and I will return the gesture. *Note that throughout, I assume a mid-level computer - I understand that if you have certain types of memory, it is just as quick to access files far away from each other as it is right next to each other and that it therefore takes less time to read/write on these systems, but currently the HDD is the standard, not SSD or NGFF/M.2
MudRunner and Spintires also have paint scratches and even wetness effects. You act like paint scratches in a game is something ground breaking that hasn't been invented yet. Sure I understand BeamNG devs want to get it right, have it realistic & optimized at the same time, but there's no need to not implement something until it can be perfect. I'd take a mediocre implementation (that's not ugly) over no implementation, and it can be improved over time. That's what already happened with other features in the game, for example tire compression, AI, overall graphics, etc. They've come a long way. And BTW, loading new textures from a hard drive would only be done at game load time or new car spawn. Of course you'd need sufficient memory, both RAM and VRAM on your PC, but modern gaming PC's generally have plenty of it.
As long as your computer isnt crap its probably possible. if you have a crap computer you can always turn it off.
You already need a pretty decent PC to run BeamNG anyway, unless you run with very low settings. And I don't think paint scratches would add that much load. In BeamNG the most resource intensive part seems to be the vehicle physics calculations. That's why we can only run few cars at the same time without bogging down the CPU.
The storage is still there. You may run out of storage if you have very little storage. --- Post updated --- Yes it would, you would need hundreds of high res textures of every car, which will take up quite a bit of processing power. And that goes back to taking up a whole lot of storage being taken up.
Ah, someone who gets it - yay! Ahem, "modern gaming PC's" - I'd wager approximately half of BeamNG users run as low as possible settings on computer that barely (or don't) meet game requirements. Many games actually have a tiered texture system (clean, dirty 1, dirty 2, ..., dirty n) rather than accurate or even random dirt. I cannot speak to those two specific games, but I know which system I'd implement. And most of those features that were added then perfected are not like scratches, which fundamentally change the car's shape. Again, if you have a "crap computer" (which for BeamNG is most computers), you won't have the SSD or M.2 needed to skip this much code with impunity. HDDs have to spin to get to the memory point. There is a hardware induced speed limit and this is why people have been moving to the former two. See response to your first, as well as what Phym said, and remember that each of these particles must be calculated.