I own both BeamNG.drive and Spintires on Steam and I enjoy both of them. What I miss in beamNG.drive is soft terrain. They have this in Spintires and also other games like Sega Rally. I have attached some videos and pictures to show what I mean. I think it would be a good idea to add something like that to this game too. Edit: if you are not able to see it in the clips, in Sega Rally your car leaves a trail behind itself and if enough people drive the exact same path the ground will get kinda bumpy.
In games like that it always seems like the AI slows down at preset points. It just goes from being so far off in the distance and impossible to catch to suddenly being very easy to keep behind you. Anyway, I think the Beam team are already plamnning to address soft ground or something, but this will be quite far along into the development process.
While it is 100% possible, we have to take some things into consideration here. BeamNG and Spintires run on two totally different physics engines. This means that they go about computing their physics in totally different ways. BeamNG is 100% vehicle based so all of the computational power is focused on computing the vehicles. Spintires is about 60% to 80% ground model based (just a guess from what I remember about the article that the guy who created the game wrote up years ago). If we were to combine the two of these engines (somehow) then what we would end up with is a game that would be awesome beyond its years... but would require a hadron colider of a PC to run it. Another way is to use the genius of BeamNG's physics engine and physically 'build' a JBeam file in the shape of the terrain and use the Beam physics to simulate soft deformable ground wherever it is needed on the map. While this would theoretically work I am sure you can see why this probably wouldn't be practical for a number of reasons, so lets just move on shall we? So skipping the combine physics engines idea because that would never work and the JBeam idea because that would lag us to the moon and beyond, would require the Devs to come up with their own solution to the problem. Now the joyous thing is that they are kinda 50% of the way there on their own already. I mentioned this idea WAY back in the day when the new friction code was under development on the RoR forums, but no one even bothered to read it... so I will mention it again. Our current friction physics code already allows for the tires and other parts of the vehicles to sink into the ground when the terrain is soft and do so quite realistically might I add. this means that to add in the element of terrain deformation, one could just program in a system that deforms the terrain only visually during the deformation while the current friction code did the rest of the realistic traction and sinking simulation. Once the deformation was complete, the game could (in theory) save the new terrain shape into the RAM to hold ruts in the height map. This would then mean that if you were to go and drive back through that area, the ruts would then be 'part' of the map now and would act just as they would in real life all while still running the original traction code and sinking in further and creating even more of a mess. The deformation could work along the lines of just looking at node locations underneath the terrain. The terrain would then just 'match' the lowest nodes point for the local area (be it a wheel node or axle node or whatever) as long as it has a stable position or a downward velocity. If the node has an upward velocity (axle moving forward but still coming up out of the ground onto a harder surface) but still is below the terrain, then it would just match the nodes lowest position for the local area and then freeze in that position. This would allow for a terrain deformation system that would be relatively lightweight on the CPU (I would like to think) and would be far more realistic then anything Spintires could ever hope to muster up. Of course... this also means that it could be very easy to absolutely bury your vehicle, but that actually sounds kinda fun.
You mean that sega game? They are designed to be like that, arcade games with rubberbanding. It's the same in other arcade racers like for example Mario Kart or that L.A. Rush game. If you look at the minimap they sometimes go like double the max possible speed and then go normal speed again right when they are next to you. I guess t hey do this so the game becomes more fun and you don't end up totally overtaking them. In assassin's creed it's basically the same, if you have to chase someone, they sometimes stop moving if you can't catch up to give you a chance at winning. @atv_123: I don't really know how the tech behind it works, but it does sound complicated. Anyway is this just very hard to make or straight forward not possible? I mean, yes if you mix both games it would probably end up being hard to run, but with if they just take a little bit of spintires? Like have the ground deform, but not as hard or as realistic as in spintires?
While ATV_123 explained the point perfectly, i'll simplify it: Terrains are static. The same way Gran Turismo's cars were statics. To have a deformable ground would require a lot of CPU power, remake of the engine, and more importantly, pretty much a full remake of the maps. I dont think we NEED maps to deform with vehicles, this is not spintires. That was never the point. What we really need is more realistic terrain and tire physics, which is what BeamNG truly lacks.
Spintires deformable terrain concept is explained here (along lightning, dynamic water, etc...). I guess a similar thing might be possible using the current depthmap.
PM: May 25 2016 Gmaksi83 - "...it can be feasible to creating caves and real time terrain deformation in future or it is planned?..." Tdev - "We have ideas for this, but we need to finish the promised things first "
I love realism and any technology that brings more to games but I feel terrain deformation just isn't their yet. Hopefully in 5-10 years it will be possible to do it accurately enough that is looks and feels convincing.
Would be cool to see this and it wouldn't take much processing power either if it's well done. The problem is wether or not it's supported by Torque3d.
Instead of an extension of the physics, why don't we have it to be almost a separate program that is running BeamNG with it, then we have better multicore support but this would be catastrophic because it already takes a second or two or three or four to load a map, loading the area in front would be catastrophic for people who have a fragmented Hard drive or just a slow storage medium.
But a 7 core 3.5 ghz CPU doesn't mean 7 3.5 ghz cores. It means 7 cores that make a total of 3.5 ghz. Its really much more simple than what most people want to think. The more simulation you want, the more shitty the game will run.
A 7 core 3.5 GHz CPU does mean 7 3.5 GHz cores. I have a 3.5 GHz quad core that can turbo up to 3.9 GHz. Each core can run at different speeds. Here, all my cores are running at 3.9 GHz, they've been running as low as 799 MHz. (Current, Min recorded, Max recorded)
That's why I like the idea of using the simulation that is already built into BeamNG's ground model and just visually deforming the terrain, then, once the player has left the area, taking that visual deformation and just adding it into the heightmap to make the change permanent. No extra physics nessesary, looks real nice, can still get stuck in ruts.
