I like the way Next Car Game looks because of how many pieces go flying off when it hits the wall, but I also like BeamNG.Drive because the cars are more softbody. I think it would be really neat if you could add a lot of more parts that fly off the car when you crash, or at least an option for it.
This is a completely realistic softbody simulator. If you crash with enough force parts will come off but you need to crash hard. Bits aren't gonna go flying if you crash a 50km/ph.
To add to that, the way NCG depicts parts flying off the car is rather unrealistic... you have to practically have every nut and bolt come flying out of the car to have the amount of shrapnel that gets flung around in NCG... never mind the fact that the car will keep moving. NCG has all those extra parts generated during a crash for exactly the reason that you want it in BeamNG... it looks cool. Car confetti looks really cool, especially in slow motion. However, BeamNG is a different kind of game altogether. It is built with the soul intent of being the best Simulator it can be... not Arcadeic at all. An option may get added in the future for broken glass particles or a couple nuts and bolts falling out as bouncing particles, but that would be it really.
Actually, particles make a lot of sense for cars with plastic bumpers and fenders. Plastic breaks on impact, so having particle effects would make it look better.
That's true... or anything that shatters for that matter... but stuff like nuts and bolts and random engine parts like they have in NCG is not real and if you did hit something that hard... you don't have a car anymore.
I happen to have witnessed an 80km/h crash from another moving vehicle right beside it. There's actually quite a lot of debris(or that's what it looks like). From what I remember, it was a cloud of light-colored dust(both cars were dark colors). Basically in some crashes, the glass of the headlights and side windows and such keep moving while their "housings" are already stopped from the impact. It breaks in a million pieces, but they keep moving as a group for a little bit. Or, in a t-bone collision, on the car that gets hit in the side, the broken side glass bits more or less keep moving forward while the car is being pushed off to the side by the other car. Same exact thing happens with a lot of dust and dirt that has built up on the car over time, and sometimes even paint and trim pieces. It's obviously not as grand and cinematic as NCG does it, but you'd be surprised at the cloud of crap that comes flying out of a car. When I witnessed that crash, it was only a 3 year Ford Focus that a Mk4 Golf plowed into the back of, so even with new cars there's quite a lot of debris. And it makes sense: Even a simple bumper modern has a ton of bits attached to it that might fly off if it breaks or bends. Foglights, foglight housings, grille surround pieces(usually multiple), the metal clips that those are all mounted with, tow-eye covers. Plus most of the hard plastic surrounds will break into multiple pieces. License plate will likely seperate from the housing and both will fly off. Then there's usually a fair amount of paint or even just clearcoat being scraped off, which will break up into into millions of little pieces. Should be cool if BeamNg finds a way to visualize this in a realistic way, it'll look a lot better than the exaggeration that NCG does.
This would be neat if properly implemented. Modern cars use a lot of plastic parts which, as previously stated, will break and fly apart on impact. Ive noticed that Beam tends to "disappear" meshes when they get hit with enough force to break, instead of allowing them to break at the nodes and become separate objects. For example, jump the Grand Marshall a few times and look at the front suspension. The lower control arms will have vanished instead of breaking at the ball joints or frame mounts. Crash the Sunburst and the bumpers invert on themselves and get all strange, when in reality plastic breaks and falls off. If realism is the goal, I think that should be one of the next implemented features. I know that animating every nut/bolt and making paint scratch, crack and fleck off would take a TON of processing power, but I wonder if something similar to the Smoke Nodes in Dummiesman's Expansion Mod could be used to "flag" certain nodes so that when they suffer an impact, they generate a few paint flecks and chunks of plastic/glass that fly? As for paint scratches, that's been a thing in games for awhile now (Something that comes to mind is GTA III) where it's a simple texture overlay that appears at the point of impact. Beam can already do this with broken glass, so I don't see why the same technique can't be applied to body panels.
We all have to remember that this game is in alpha. The possibilities are endless as to what the devs can make more realistic but the amount of processing power and space needed to have these kind of things is giant. Including these ideas would be amazing but right now it's just not really possible or practicle.
All of that is true which is why I stated glass particles and nuts and bolts of the like... wasn't really thinking about plastic parts though. Mostly I wasn't because the vehicle I am currently driving in real life (81 Chevy K10) has no plastic in it that I can find what-so-ever other than a couple random knobs on the dash. So it didn't even cross my mind. Although, this goes back to NCG particles and the point that I was trying to make... the cars in that game are like my truck... they are old, full metal part, cars who's only trim pieces would have been big chrome bumpers and other nonsense like that. Also, the 2 vehicles I relate to the best In BeamNG are the D15 and the Moonhawk... again because they are old, metal, bouncy vehicles that I am used to driving, both of which would have had a grand total plastic count of solely the grill. However, BeamNG has cars from all sorts of eras, which (depending on how creative people get) could span from the dawn of automobiles all the way till right now. That coupled with the fact that newer cars are designed to break on impact to absorb energy and we have a pretty good soup for flying debris! So, shifting my though process here a little bit, I think that if something could be coded for the trim pieces like what is already in the game for the hubcaps (they were LUA scripted on the official cars I think right?) then we could have some pretty cool effects, coupling that to shattering glass partials and dust getting blasted from the car and other stuff like what Mythbuster mentioned.
