Update Speculation thread

I'm just not really sure how well that will work, though. As someone who can only play with 3-5 traffic cars (and has never had much luck getting traffic pooling to work), either a minimum of 20-30% of all cars are from the 80s/90s, or none of them are. If 1 out of 5 is too many (and statistically, it is), the only remaining option is 0 out of 5. Which brings us back to the variety issue.

The one area where we agree seems to be that more, recent-ish vehicles are called for. I love my classics and weird one-offs, but the 2000s are an inexplicable void in the roster.

 

I completely agree with you, I’m just looking from an optimization perspective: I rarely have access to a PC that can actually run with traffic at a good FPS.

 

I am also on a lower end PC, since we cant spawn as many cars you can spawn them yourself. The problem is once you spawn more than 10 cars it starts to be weird to see only old vehicles.

 

Don't forget about decimals! 1/5 is 20% out of 100%, so we need maybe 0.4/5 which is about 8% of all traffic if you were to have the AI limited to five cars. That would probably be realistic in my opinion.

 

They literally DID optimize it. They gave us simplified traffic vehicles and you can customize the amount of the traffic that spawns etc. At a certain point, minimum and recommended specs need to be considered. It’s not a developer problem, it’s a consumer problem. Traffic vehicles have a jbeam and run on the same physics engine as player vehicles. There’s no getting around the extra cpu/gpu power needed

 

There are still ways to make the illusion of more traffic without any fps loss. Also they could implement simplified physics to the traffic when they are at a distance. (Simplified physics can be found in the menu)
--- Post updated ---
An idea I had for faking heavy traffic;
https://www.beamng.com/threads/idea-for-traffic-optimisation.107934/#post-1900539

 

I—I... what?

Yeah, sure, that's certainly something you can do with pure math. I even agree with the numbers you've chosen (though using both decimals and fractions at the same time is a bit cursed IMO). But would you kindly explain to me how you plan to have 40% of a car driving around on the roads?

 

James Bond did manage that just fine...

 

What I'm trying to say is I think it would be realistic for a car being spawned to have a 8% chance of being an older vehicle. if 1/5 vehicles being spawned is an older vehicle like you said, that means in theory a vehicle being spawned into the traffic would have a 20% chance of being an older vehicle. That's probably too much for a game presumably based in the same timeframe as the real world. Approximately 9-10% of cars on US roads (which is where career mode is based) are pre-2000's which are considered older vehicles. So 8% (which was just a guess mind you) would probably be realistic.

I don't really know what's wrong with using decimals and fractions together, as they pretty much go hand in hand. With that being said I'm not great at maths though, so I could be very dramatically and embarrassingly wrong. Also don't know where 40% came in either, don't think I said that.

 

It is that 0.4/5, so if a user can run 5 traffic vehicles they need to have 0.4 or 40% of a car driving on a road, you can't have the full car, I believe it is a math humor.

 

Yeah that was an oversight, my brain is not wired for this math stuff

 

Yes, but regardless of the spawn probabilities, if one of the five traffic cars you've spawned is an 80's car, that is 20% of the traffic.

Just to nip this one in the bud in case there's confusion, BeamNG's traffic system doesn't continuously spawn and remove vehicles, like other games do. It spawns a small and discrete number of them once, and then dynamically repositions and recolors them when needed. You can change the probability of an 80's car spawning initially, but once one spawns, you're stuck with it until you choose to remove it.

It's not strictly wrong per se, it's just that since decimals and fractions are both different ways to represent some portion of something, seeing them used together feels off-putting, in a hat-on-a-hat kinda way. To clarify, 0.4/5 would be represented as the pure fraction 2/25, or the decimal 0.08, each of which reads a little cleaner (though you did also use 8%, which is the cleanest-looking option).

 

Hopefully we get better systems in the future, I didn't fully realise that it worked like this, although they probably have bigger things to work on.

 

I think the spawn rates should be made realistic as the other user stated.

8% chance for a pre 1990 vehicle to spawn.

42% for an SUV (Roamer, D10, and Hopper, also would include Lansdale in this)

20% for a sedan (Bastion, Sunburst, ETK 800)

20% for a Pickup (D series.)

10% for unique modern vehicles (SBR4, H - Series)

This would be a much more realistic pool of vehicles. And if you can only spawn 5 vehicles in Ai, just spawn in the ones you wan’t or use vehicle pooling. (Also can only spawn 5 Ai, and thats what I do)

Plus as another person said, if you have low specs, thats your problem and the game doesn’t need to bend to serve your 10 year out of date PC. (I am talking about myself too, I can’t expect to much optimization because my PC is low specs)

 

I agree, I used to play on a 12 year old PC that couldn’t run any car but mine. Now I have a better PC

 

I play on a somewhat out of date PC (Think high spec 10 years ago)

There are still ways to optimize traffic further though, as a said on the Ideas and Suggestions and linked farther up the page. But that optimization is more just to make fake traffic far away, like most other games do. If you get close, they fade away. It just makes distance roads look populated, which helps emersion and makes it look like theres way more traffic than there actually is.

 

Yea I saw you are working on something similar.

 

The H series is not too modern as it was produced from 1993 and not unique. I see plenty of white chevy vans just like it all around the city.

 

H Series ended production in 2017

 

Yes but in European countries (like Germany where I am from) there are almost no American brands like Jeep or Ford. In BeamNG this isn’t true. I see random Gavril D-Series or Wendivers driving at the ETK Center or in Italy. There is an option in the settings to change that, but it doesn’t work for me.