technically, it's not a racing/driving/car simulator, it's a soft-body physics simulator but ik what you mean
lol, they contradicted themselves, main beamng.com page says they are aiming for a soft-body physics simulator
While the reviewer in question was likely far too harsh and irrational (I say 'likely' since I didn't watch the video, nor do I intend to), I don't think it sound doctrine to state that people should not negatively criticize something just because they can't do it themselves. It'd be like NASA building a new, expensive, complex rocket, but building it upside down, and predictably ramming it into the ground on launch. Then, detracting all criticism for the failure because their critics don't have the budget, resources, or government permission to do better themselves. "YOU try building a multi-billion dollar rocket on a multi-billion dollar launch platform. Oh, you can't? Then don't blame us for forgetting something so minor as orientation!" I'm not stating that Beam (or NASA) is effectively doing something comparable to the above, or that critics cannot be irrational. But, for as often as it's used, it is a pretty poor counterargument.
I don't understand the technical problems here. You can constrain two nodes together with a beam yet its somehow impossible to constrain a rigid body object to two nodes like an axis and maybe use this as the basis for starting to code a tyre simulation around it? Has constraining a rigid body object to a node even been tried? We are going to need to interact with them eventually, that concrete barrier is as rigid as it can be in Node/Beam and its still hopelessly floppy.
Well, FFB is at least a high priority. - - - Updated - - - The BeamNG physics subsystem is custom-build. Merging it with PhysX would take a lot of work.
I'm not even talking about PhysX, physX is not the sole realization of rigid body kinematics. Source engine doesn't use nVidia's physX for instance. I'm literally talking about a general rigid body physics engine. BeamNG could code their own rigid bodies and its half way trivial to do. I can do it for christ sake. Doing it effectively takes some work but its possible for them to do it from the ground up if they're so inclined.