Ten Years On...

Happy tenth anniversary, BeamNG.drive! Keep up the good work!

 

I struggle to remember just how much life has happened for me between the game's release and today. Finished my Associate's in a subject I couldn't do anything with, went straight into food service, got fired from a print shop, and moved from Missouri to Florida with some family to give the theme park business a try. All except a few of my numerous 3d/game design projects that I've worked on for the last decade have been for this game.

I guess I don't actually...

I do have one concrete memory involving driveshafts in the early builds. I had been working on Perryville (the first mod I ever released), a city map. In the early days, tire nodes were super sensitive to catching on geometry and tire beams were reluctant to break under nearly any circumstance. Since no official levels had curbs (no proper towns until ECA released), I didn't know that curbs weren't supposed to be completely vertical*, so tires could very easily catch if you hopped a curb without being on the throttle. A caught tire node could stop the whole vehicle cold.

One day, I was testing the map and hopped a curb in the D-Series, and accidentally applied the brake before the rear axle cleared the curb. Instead of breaking the tie rods/suspension and/or flipping the vehicle around like usual, both tires caught, and pulled the rear axle, frame, and bed out to nearly twice their native length. It was awesome.

*The "vertical" face of a curb should only be about 70 degrees relative to the road, which provides some self-correction if your vehicle scrapes the curb at low angles, and reduces the chance of bodywork, exhaust, etc catching when hopping the curb at high angles. I have to credit Gabester for informing me of this convention.

 

I guess I have an Elephants memory I suppose for things like that, its very handy at times haha!

 

I still wish we had bright, colorful forums like RoR did -- I stood by my opinion 11 years ago and I stand by it now. Blue, gray, and white sucks.

 

Early steam and/or just before steam release, if you spammed Q, any broken drive shaft (no matter how bad) would fix itself. Was always pretty funny to use on completely dead cars that could never have a working driveshaft or even engine (but as some have said this was when engines never died).

Those earlier builds had a lot of the stretchy issues haha. Things would clip and grab a lot. I remember any multi vehicle collision would cause them to be inseparable. I remember being excited when they fixed vehicle and prop collisions with each other, you could properly put a vehicle on a bed without it sliding off. Seems so long ago, things like that seem basic now. Back then it was huge.