Whats' going on with the game content?

I've had a feeling for a while now that the game is on a bit of a decline and is dying. Much of the modding scene has gone away as there's a distinct lack of original content on the repository save some really well done airplanes.

Official content-wise, a new vehicle with every major update seems to be the recent pattern but there's nothing to look forward to really besides LJFHutch making a very pretty rendition of Italy. The bluebuck and wendover sit on the wiki with not even a word about them. Don't get me wrong, the bus was a really cool addition but there doesn't -appear- to be much more going on in terms of game content. I'd like to be seeing more Jbeam content. even if you have shit tons in the pipeline already and you're planning a paid DLC release. Because at the end of the day, the point of BeamNG for me is to be a bit of a physics sandbox and a bit of a toy so what I really get excited about is new Jbeam props and new vehicles.

Is there a prius parody in the works? Is the team making a modern european hatchback? What about a parody of an amusing convertible like a miata? Another disposable sedan? A minivan? Are you currently finishing the Wendover? Hell, I would even love it if you released some accurately Jbeamed kitchen appliences and cardboard boxes and bits of junk I can crash into. An official aircraft or crane? Anything like that?

I have no idea, it's radio silence. There's no news regarding content. I don't want to say that a new vehicle every 6 months is too little, thats not really the issue. I just recall the start of this community and a lot of new exiting stuff kept appearing. every other week a new design was posted by Gabester and we ended up with a pool of body shells to look forward to and WIP's to get hyped about. The release cycle was sparse even back then but at least we had news about new jbeams to enjoy.

I know Gabester's sick and other 3d artists have had to take over, but you guys surely have something cool going on back there to get excited about don't you?

 

Definitely agree on that boi.
I'm guessing they're pulling another ETK.
What I meant by that is they're only going to announce the new vehicle's existence only when it's released.

 

This game's development is relatively silent when compared to other games. However, developers have hinted that there are big things in the works at the moment, most likely career mode, which i am very excited for. There's not a whole lot of info regarding career mode, but it seems like a huge task that, when released, will add a major new level of gameplay and immersion to beamng.

 

First off, thank you for telling us this. It's always nice to hear about updates.

Secondly, so this means that Gabe is still active in the development process? I thought that after he talked about his health conditions, that he was unable to work until he completed his recovery. He's been extremely quiet about it, so I know little of it, other than it happened and it affected development.

And last, I look forward to seeing what all this "surprise" stuff will turn out to be. The Wentward was absolutely a pleasant one. However, I really really wish something would be said regarding the Bluebuck and the Wendover. One of my main concerns still is the possibility of the latter getting cancelled because so many users think it's too similar to the LeGran, and therefore they think it doesn't make sense to release it. And for the Bluebuck, the only thing I know that's been said about it lately is that Gabe said it wasn't in game yet.

I haven't heard anything about the Wendover that confirms it's still coming, regardless of what those users say. If I did hear something like that, I don't remember it.

 

What BeamNG lacks is game.

While BeamNG is really awesome platform, it currently does not have that red ribbon to follow as a game, lots of freedom, but there is no goal.

There are few campaigns, there are short challenges, but lot of that is like showing 'look this is possible' with very simple gameplay elements, but without real gameplay features that would make a game from a platform.

So my guess is that there is area which will or is being worked on as any game to be successful needs to have a start and the end with some kind of story between the two.

Some games have that online racing etc. Some games have progression system, but BeamNG feels like it has samples of how you could build a game out from it.

It is not bad thing, even some may interpret this text being negative, it is not meant to be like that, but it is to bring attention of what more would make BeamNG experience more complete.

Now making new cars and roads is of course nice, but what to do with all that?

For example in SLRR you did races to earn money to get better cars to get tougher races, there was progression, there was challenge and most importantly clear purpose of why one is doing the racing.

In ETS2 you get just a jobs as a truck driver, goal is to gather enough money to buy own truck and build a trucking company, you have progression with unlocking vehicles etc. as you gain experience points and levels. Another clever thing they did was to release new maps as DLC, modders make maps and use resources from those DLCs so you need to get more DLCs to use mods, which is quite good in business wise as it allows more room to make content, even some gamers don't like the approach it does allow bigger product. (there are no truck physics in that, it is like driving in game called Pole Position, but still it is more of game where as BeamNG is just a sandbox).

So in BeamNG we have a game engine, that has lot of examples, maybe it is for modders to create a story and a game out from BeamNG or maybe dev team has suprises on this department, but way I see this, is that we need stories to make a game.


Instead of new vehicles and maps, I would think these things would work better for BeamNG.

Have a step by step tutorials how to make:
-Game world (there are some great tutorials made already)
-Vehicle (lot of areas missing completely currently, making vehicle is like inventing wheel all over again at the moment)
-Game features (I have not seen much for this)

For game features, if person wants to do for example new career mode, with transporting cars, boxes whatever, with progression and saving game state, how to make that happen is sort of question that needs to be asked.
Not all bits are on place for that yet I guess, but I think that moving from current way where modder practically needs to reverse engineer whatever he wants to build and then trying to figure out how it works with help of some quick notes in Wiki to proper documentation which you can follow without need to reverse engineer every step, would certainly help with amount of content created by community.

Those are areas which I feel are bit neglected or perhaps it is not quite seen how much it has an effect on mod building, there are now other games where you can build things, which are far more intuitive, this reverse engineering method that originates back to ISI's SCGT times and RSC community is perhaps today getting bit old.
There are games which offer you to place 'nodes' and 'beams' visually, where building is perhaps tad more limited.
But also I don't see why 100 modders need to reverse engineer same wheel, when 1 creator could build documentation covering all aspects, let that be creator package with a price tag if needed, but that would really boost BeamNG up, imo that is.

Track builder certainly is a move to right direction, now just build on that concept and make node beam builder same way, that would allow lot more people to build anything they want


Another thing what limits userbase and amount of modders (along with mentioned complexity which again could be helped with more/better documentation), is the fact that compared to most games I have played within a year, BeamNG is heaviest to run on my GPU, there are also CPU optimization needs, but everything of that comes down to graphics engine and optimization, there are few games that I own which I can't 1080p with high or very high details while maintaining 60fps, BeamNG is one of them and GPU is limiting factor most of the time.
Now in addition to GPU power BeamNG needs lots of CPU power when running several vehicles and that means price of computer that can run BeamNG is bit higher than for some other games, that is again limiting potential userpool a bit.

Just Cause 3 and BeamNG are close to each other in terms of how they run in regards of GPU, but JC3 world is massive compared to BeamNG islands and amount of stuff GPU renders in JC3 is a loads more. Of course comparison like that is not fair, triple A game using top of the line engine is bound to be tad better performing, however at the end it comes to what hardware people have to run games and how much money people can put to their rigs, game devs have to try to balance things based on that.
I'm not sure how much work can be done to reduce GPU load, but I'm quite sure there is going to be optimization phase in development when all bells and whistles are in place.

I have to stress again the point that I do not aim to criticize, but more to explain what I see which would benefit BeamNG, when I look BeamNG compared to other games I know about and what very little I know about building content to games. Also nothing is ever easy, there are always challenges, none knows them all, so not everything is feasible which may appear to be so, that is why we communicate, to learn more.

 

i hope there is more surprise than annoucement

 

That surely is going to big one and I'm really looking forward of all wonderful things you pull off, because from some odd reason you do manage to pull off those new things pretty much right unlike many much bigger game houses

You did mention some coming blog posts, now I wonder if there might be little mentioning of career mode too as currently I must say I don't know anything about it.Of course it could be that not much could be shared as it needs many pieces to be on place before proper structure can be locked in.

Oh and if you happen to come by a code that would double hours in a day, I would be _very_ interested

 

You've written this exactly on the day of a new vehicle peek... the irony!

 

Slightly off-topic but this is a perfect example of what makes this community so much better than others out there. When the users make posts stating their concerns and issues, the devs do not take offence. They do not ignore or dodge around the questions being posed to them.

It makes me happy to see that there is still plenty of work being put into the game, even if we don't see it initially. It is also great to see devs commenting and replying to the user base.

@Nadeox1 you deserve a medal for all the work you do. You must see the utter worst of this forum sometimes and you must get stupid amount of notifications BUT yet you are still polite and do not escalate any tiffs that occur. You are also so incredibly helpful, pointing people in the right direction when they don't know where to go (speaking from personal experience).

Then of course there are all the other people working hard behind the scenes. I see plenty of complaints about bugs and errors blah blah but nine times out of ten... those problems get addressed at some point or another in either a forum post or better yet, a fix/update.

I would like to thank you all at headquarters for putting up with our shit and creating an amazing piece of work which I & many others have enjoyed for many, many hours and will continue to enjoy.

Best of luck for the future and the excitements it holds.

DrPeetree

(ps @Nadeox1, what is the most number of notifications you have seen when logging in... just curious)

 

I do know my way around a jbeam from a million unfinished personal projects. I understand the frack on you can have to make something that you'd be happy to give to the public. So there's no problem there, however I was mainly referencing the prevelance of derivative content as opposed to fully original content. There seems to be less of the latter than there originally was with major bit players in the modding scene sort of dissappearing. Either way, I just get the impression it's sort of dying. This isn't fault of the modders.

well, thankyou for getting back to me on this, nadeox. I'll certainly be keeping an ear out and the reassurance of stuff to come is welcome. Would I be pushing the bounds of politeness if I asked for some kind of teaser?

 

If the Wendover gets cancelled, I'm not gonna lie, I'm gonna be pretty upset. I don't even have the game (potato computer, two potato cars, and now I'm over $1000 in debt for many things, and my new job is starting very slowly in terms of hours), and that's still the one I've been waiting for since I got here (so over 3 years now) simply because it's based on a Pontiac and I like Pontiacs. Pontiac deserved to live. Also I think it would look killer in full IMSA-style aero kit.

 

One possible reason for the influx of derivative mods is that there's now a greater wealth of resources, starting points, and assets available to modders. When the game dropped back in 2013, anyone wanting to make a 40's/50's car would have to make the jbeam from scratch (or take from Mythbuster's Caddy; which I doubt he'd have been okay with). These days, there's a viable starting point in the form of the Burnside. Not only do most prospective modders not know much about jbeam, but with a car or car parts on hand that capture what they'd like to see in their product, they may find that the benefits of doing things from scratch just don't justify the time investment.

This extends to maps as well. Before Utah, all the desert maps used custom or heavily-modified assets. Before WCU, all city maps used custom assets or ones adapted from ECU's town. Even with scenarios, I usually hunt down code snippets from official scenarios to see if what I'm trying to achieve is feasible or has been done.

 

Me too.

 

The Gabe thing:
As ever I am stuck under a rock when it comes to things like this, I am glad Gabe is recovering and you cant keep a good worker down can you!


The busy period in Game dev work:
The busy nature of the time I assume means something major is coming shortly and I have been around here for what almost 5 years there abouts and I know the qualities of patience (I ALWAYS have to correct that darn word!) when it comes to dev work on this game which can be um....challenging to say the least

The other stuff:
All I have done is a few basic updates to the core files made a few mistakes like making say "ui.mainmenu.play" once....erm....like 4 times because of a comma in the en-US Json file, I did add in a few of my own units like, Atmospheres, KgM and even kW to the brakes section (which should have been there, I am just saying okay) but there are a few other updates I did around the Simple Engine Debug screen like improving the UI look, cleaning up a few other things, if the devs want to see my files that I have tweaked I am more than happy to send the files in question to them to look at and see what I have done, even though I have to find the edited files first!

 

A thing that will keep ME playing again and again is a kind of mieage simulation, like in rFactor 1, 2 and Automobilista. You have a lot of cars, every single one set at 0.0km at the odometer and the game keeps updating in real time the odometer, so if you do a lot of km with that car, you have a chance of getting an engine malfunction (overheating, engine broken...) and a large list of failures an engine can get. That in BeamNG Drive will be great, specially for races and delivery trucks, old cars...
More engine simulation will be great, a good example is that the turbo doesn't make the oil heat while spooling, it does that with the coolant but not with the oil, so for example an oil cooler in a diesel engine makes no sense.
There are a lot of things, like the implementation of the ETS2 system (as a truck driver, taxi driver, bus driver...) to earn money for parts, cars, so you have an improved career more (with the option of freeroam too for testing cars and parts and not having money restrictions.
Game is entertaining but lacks of game as you clearly said.

 

I've been busy for the past few months, but things have calmed back down. As of right now, I'll be resuming my modding where I left off. So, expect some new content from me sometime in the near future.

 

I wouldn't care much if the Wendover was cancelled.

I kinda like it, but it is too similar to the LeGran and I'd rather see other archetypes (planes, boats, pre-war cars, Euro-style small cars, hypercars, etc.)