If you have driven the semis in the game with a trailer and have tried to do any form of realistic backing up, the mirrors on them suck. They look directly at the trailer instead of sticking out past the trailer so you can see exactly what you're doing.
Mirrors have been discussed before. They indeed suck in this game. They don't even render the player vehicle. I think the devs know, but they probably have other priorities.
Actually this mirror aspect is what keeps me from driving semi with trailer, there just is no point as IRL driving with such relies quite largely on mirrors. You turn at intersection and it is mirrors you observe and then bit of other things, but in this game mirrors do nothing really, but be decorations, sadly. Way mirrors work make it kinda difficult to improve, although there was improvement to mirrors some time ago. Hopefully they find a way to get proper mirrors, virtual ones that show things properly would also do huge improvement, does not need to be physical to make driving trucks more interesting.
is it possible to make the mirrors show just the model? like, no physics/jbeam etc, just the model of the truck/trailer?
I think that is how mirrors currently work, but mirrors and dynamic reflections are related, there is lot of cameras which create dynamic reflections, from those some are used for mirrors, if I don't remember wrong. There has been talk about mirrors earlier and what I remember is that it was not possible to add specialized mirror cameras, which I think would be required to have proper rear view. Perhaps they get idea some day and figure out nice solution to this, developers have previously shown to sometimes be possible to solve issues and provide solutions that were considered impossible earlier, so you never know.
I think the devs just haven't found the time to improve the mirrors. They're not rocket science. Other driving games have very nice, optimized mirrors that show everything (within a range). I'm not sure how you would do a mirror "physically" in a game, but a virtual mirror is done by capturing a view via another camera from the mirror's point of view, saving it to a texture, and applying it dynamically to the mirror surface.
Here is developers reply to the subject: https://www.beamng.com/threads/dont-like-so-ugly-mirrors.67289/page-2#post-1101093 In short, making more cameras to create mirrors would be performance heavy and that is why they don't currently add more cameras.
Of course. But they have other stuff, like lots of buildings and traffic. My point is that quality mirrors don't have to be a performance issue. Of course the games are different.
True, that game does have LOTS of Ai, sometimes dumb, but if you crank up the ai in that, a 2 core 4t cpu will struggle a LOT.
For some reason developer of this game has given a reply where developer mentions performance being the reason it is not currently done, perhaps game engines differ enough that performance is an issue with this game as I would think developers generally know their stuff. Also developer literally addresses this same subject in post I linked: So what information and facts you have that is more than developers have? You claim performance is not an issue, so you should give something to back that claim up as you are publishing point of view that is completely opposite of that which developer is holding, that is why simply stating that performance is not an issue, is not really enough for community to believe your claim, but with some good information backing your claim up you of course could then provide something interesting to discussion.
That just show you simply don’t understand the issue. That ain’t essy to resolve. We’ve got atleast 2 improvements on mirrors, to make it to current state, devs wouldn’t bother to do so if there would be a nice simple way. I think that as long as it’s based on dynamic reflection it won’t be able to show your vechicle. Unless some major changes to rendering system or completely new way of rendering view for mirrors would be invented. Right now it’s „not” possible, as each mirror would need to render it’s view separately, and that would be too demanding on computing power. As you could read, devs are aware of state mirrors are. Moreover they know it’s very important for many of us to have those working better. Don't forget our amazing modders community, they’ve made some crazy coding to create a tank, helikopter like thing, planes, working heat seeking misstles, Anti-aircraft weapons with auto aim etc. Do you think, they wouldn’t fix mirrors for us if it would be easy? Simply .drive ain’t like other games, can’t tell if we’ll ever have proper mirrors view, with driver’s car visible in them.
Please turn off your fanboy mode. That dev reply you linked is from nearly 2 years ago from Nadeox. As I recall, he's not a programmer on the game, and things may have changed since then. We all agree the mirrors are crap, and other games, though they are different games, do them better. So what's the point of defending the crap mirrors? Sometimes I don't understand the people on this forum. You suggest something for improvement, and you get scolded for daring to do so in front of the elder BeamNG gods. BeamNG also needs better anti-aliasing. It looks like crap on objects in the distance. Oh no, I offended the gods again. --- Post updated --- My main point is that what the current limitations of the engine are is irrelevant. Of course there must be some limitation, otherwise said feature would be better. But that doesn't mean things cannot be improved in the future. It does seem from Nadeox's description that the mirror system is quite primitive in this game compared to how other games do it. But he never said it cannot be improved or replaced eventually. So please stop with the list of excuses of why something isn't done a certain way. In the end, it doesn't matter. This is a suggestion forum for people to suggest improvements. Just because something can't be done right now doesn't mean it's a bad suggestion.
Physics run on your processor not your graphics card. They work independently of each other. Basically all of these problems would be solved easily by a new graphics engine. But that also means multiple years of work and basically redoing the game from scratch.
I'm not new to the forum. Look at my join date. But thanks. --- Post updated --- What I would like to know is, is BeamNG using an in-house game engine or is it something proprietary & licensed from a 3rd party? If it's an in-house game engine, then anything can be improved. If not, then perhaps it's time to start porting to a new engine if this is the kind of mirrors we are stuck with (as someone said, something from an 80's game - well to be fair, I'd say 90's). --- Post updated --- Generally yes, but GPU can do some physics jobs, for example Nvidia's PhysX. I assume in BeamNG it's all CPU.
BeamNG uses heavily modified Torque3D engine, I mean modified so much that literally the only things left are cs files, old World Editor, some placeholder textures and some stuff in the compiled code that only the devs know. Probably in a year or so nothing will be left from the original engine at all, they are already getting rid of TorqueScript and replacing it with LUA functions.
They use torque3d but it’s so modified at this point it’s basically their own engine. I already know they are working on pbr textures for maps, I assume that after that happens they’ll focus on the mirrors. (And maybe ray casted sounds?)
