YouTuber FailRace brings some interesing points

I think I agree with him, BeamNG needs to have random mechanical failures. As he also said it could be made to toggle with a checkbox in the settings for those who don't want it. What do you guys think, do you agree with his idea or is it a waste of time?

 

Also different cars should have different reliability.

 

Mechanical failures are quite rare IRL.

If you look how far apart failures are for driven mile per vehicle IRL, then see how many miles you drive per vehicle in BeamNG, it might not happen very often, with some vehicles hardly at all.

 

Random mechanical failures would be amazing for beater cars. The average life span of a BeamNG car is really short, so if we do get random mechanical damage it wouldn't make sense for a car in perfect condition to randomly have a failure when driven less than 100 miles or so, but for beater cars it would make more sense because they already have preexisting issues.

 

What about beat-up versions like the Covet beater we already have?

 

And have an option in the car customization menu to set what the car's default reliability is.

 

That is absolutely true for the regular vehicles, but for purpose built race cars with very tight tolerances it occasionally happens within the span of a race session. I believe FailRace makes this point in the video.

 

I think a slider in the tuning section that controls the number of miles the engine has done would be a good idea, the higher the mileage the more likely there are to be problems. The same could be applied to other parts as well.

 

and things like, when an engine is near its overtorque limit, it has more chance of breaking.

 

You get a new car in BeamNG when you select a vehicle, how many miles you typically drive with it and how many miles is typical race session? I'm just pointing out that quite often we drive not much more than 20 miles in BeamNG, default islands are quite small under 4 miles diameter I believe?

Random failures would be nice addition, but if we keep them realistic, then you might not see random failure very often, even with a beater variant of purpose built race car (I doubt such exists). If you look Formula 1 for example, where they do get a lots of mechanical failures, then look how many miles specific car (for example Räikkönen's car) goes between mechanical failures, it is surprisingly lot of driving in BeamNG, hundreds of miles.

Going unrealistic zone, surely random mechanical failures could bring some value, but then it has to be considered only option for those who wishes to experience should despite being quite unrealistic to have mechanical failure, that is where slider or some other game element would come handy.

I doubt lot have really thought how rare actually such failures are in reality, so that is why I think this point needs to be brought up.

 

Again you are correct, I can't argue against facts.

How about this perspective then; considering how many cars I think most of us go through in a single play session, at least one of them could be a "lemon" and have a random manufacturing defect or two. Maybe you get reduced engine power from a faulty turbo bearing, a broken hood latch or a botched spring mount that breaks under unusually light stress. At the end of the day, how realistic you'd want this feature to be to be is up to you.

Either way I appreciate having the discussion. My intuition about the devs say they will take our feedback into account if they decide to implement random failures.

 

Challenge is that IRL we see certain number of mechanical failure and that includes lemon vehicles, so some nice multiplier for number of cars used and for mileage as even with lemon vehicles fault might take time to occur, would be in order. Adjustable/option to have it on or off would be nice though.

When playing Campaign it might not be so nice to have mechanical failure to happen, at least I would feel bit same like if in a roguelike I would start in a room with no doors and no way to dig floor or walls, so certainly option to turn it off would be nice.

Also when mechanical failure happens, it would need to have message as otherwise player might think there is something wrong in game, some might think it being even a bug without clear message of mechanical failure.

Leaking tire, is that mechanical failure? Those do happen, usually of course because of foreign object, but can be some lemons too, anyhow system might be possible to be use to simulate getting slow leaking flat.

There are many possibilities, I'm not against the system at all, but probably it would need possibility to set unrealistically high fault percentages for players to experience those events.

 

Having a multiplier based off how many cars you've spawned is a nice idea, it seems like a good mechanic for sorting out when to spawn lemon cars.

I think wether or not to have it enabled in campaign mode depends on how they plan to take the story line. Maybe there would be a scenario somehow involving a lemon car. For the most part though I agree that this should not be a part of the regular campaign scenarios.

There should definitely be some sort of message about it, possibly even when you spawn the car. Something like "Warning: lemon car" or "Driveshaft broken (manufacturing defect)".

A leaking tire would in theory be a mechanical failure but as you said it can happen for a lot of reasons. It's an interesting question and I hadn't considered that possibility, so I don't have an answer about how I'd feel about a random leaking tire. Could be interesting in say a 3 lap race around Hirochi Raceway, do you take your chances or reset?

Indeed it would take an unrealistically large multiplier for it to trigger for a particular car, but I do see the enjoyment of trying to deal with random mechanical failures even if it means sacrificing some realism. Anyway when it's all tweaked in it would ideally take a while for new players to encounter a random mechanical failure, possibly hours of total play time. The general idea is to add to the sense of realism.

 

What if the age of a vehicle was a value you could set in the vehicle configuration menu, and depending on the age and the type of vehicle, the car would experience more or less and different kinds of mechanical failures. That way, the age would be something you could save to custom vehicle configs. (for example a beater config)

 

That would kinda lead to wear of parts, tire wear probably happens at some point, I think clutch wear might not happen though, not sure about other bits either as it adds to complexity and management of everything becomes huge monster easily, but maybe some generic wear might happen.

Wear or age, different ends of the same stick, I guess?

I have bit soft spot for RPG and saving car state so that instead of spawning new car, you could spawn that old beater of yours, it is something I would like to see and age/wear would go well with that, just not sure if that is really going to happen though, it would make sense for Career mode though.

 

I actually thought wear was going to be in the game anyway, for the career mode and it's probable used car shop. It would be a simple system consisting of about 15 parts per car. And it could be calculated completely from the age and mileage of a car, with a little randomness put in.

As for random failures, I think it should not involve the hole car, instead only the electrics. Having bulbs burn out or an ABS/TCS malfunction or distributor issue causing misfire, I really can't think of anything that could possibly have a random failure, even these are highly debatable. As for high end racing like F1, I dont think Beam should even consider adding racing specific failures since high end racing is definetly not the main aspect of the game. Even carbon fiber seems to really not exist in the BeamNG universe.

At the end of the day, there is only so much a computer can compute and a developer code in. Also the devs have said that they do not want to add features that nearly everyone is going to disable.

 

I think if the career mode includes a Used car lot... this would be a much more relevant feature. For instance... if there are no mechanical failures in the game, what is there to make you shy away from a car that has half a million miles on the clock? Pretty much nothing other than it might need straightened out or something... but if this feature was implemented... a car with a half million miles might be 10 miles away from having a con rod break, or you might get really lucky and have no issues at all... it's all a crapshoot... just like real life... and that would be amazing to have to take that kind of gamble in my opinion.