We can actually make night ourselves with reshades and such. But we can't get rid of visual flaws like window reflection, headlight cone, daylike shadows, lack of ambient light, neon boards along the streets and no color correction(tint is not applicable). If some dev is looking here, I'm begging you to hold creating content and make something about visual part of the game. I think many of us wants to have some atmospheric night rides. I don't know how much engine is limiting the possibilities, so that's just a small request. Thx for reading.
This is i7 with gtx1080, only two cars at gridmap, no dynamic reflections, high beam on and light bars on, under 50fps: I would love to have proper night driving, but I guess it will not happen near term, I'm not sure if it will ever happen, but when 10 lights is too much for relatively modern gaming rig, I don't see how we could achieve proper night driving with streetlamps, neon signs and all. Tripling max intensity of spotlights would already give some performance boost as one would not need to use so many lights to be able to see something at night, but not sure if that is possible either. You can't see much with dim glow of Covet high beam: It can be made better, but this one uses 8 spotlights already at max intensity to be able to see something and sadly light cones shoot upwards as much as down, for better light you would need to place spotlights hoverin over the car, which then is not casting shadows properly: It is a lot of work to get night driving anywhere realistic level and at least right now that probably is not possible, also I'm not sure it will ever be as I think it would require rewriting all and everything related to illumination.
That is if you turn on enough lights, it is way graphics engine works, single core performance of CPU is limiting FPS as shadows seem to somehow use CPU computing time on single thread which then gets overloaded very quickly. Setting shadows to partial helps with that, but essentially issue is within engine and is limiting what is possible with lights at the moment.
The lighting is the graphical engine is not really suitable for dynamic time of day. At least, the lighting is quite odd. For example at the moment the headlights of most vehicles are more powerful than the sun itself, yet they don't seem to illuminate much. As well color gradients does not really give any good sunrise/sunset. All maps are made for daylight conditions for now. Maybe in the future, but lighting is not a small thing.
You said in the "Something is still on the horizon" blog post that you would like to add deferred shading. Is that something you would still like to do?
Can you guys at least change sunrise tint from that swampy green to soft orange or rose? It's the most beautiful time of day, speaking as a photographer
It seems that the more i read about Torque3D the more i think maybe it would be a better idea to just start again in a better engine :/
I have read that it is not going to happen, but I get sometimes that feeling too, but then again, we are on this road have not seen what is at end of it, who knows what they have planned in regard of performance and lights for further ahead. Lights are difficult, not many games can get it even close to reality for night time, daytime is so much easier.
Fix a render engine after years of content and mods is not an easy task For example if we decide to modernize the engine, like adding deferred shading, this will make lots of materials to look broken or directly dont work with the new render. We have plans to fix some of those issues, like day reflections during night. But remember that we are an early access game and we are always working on lots of things, we need to decide always our next priorities. We will continue developing our own technology, use other engine is not in our plans.
And what is your milestone after which you can tell "we are in beta bois"? Cuz thx to engine you can mostly add some physic calcs and content, I assume it will be a very big patch
I've seen it both ways. Both games that are great concepts using engines so old that it harms the actual game (like with my summer car) And games that because they nonstop scrap everything to start working on the lastest popular new engine they are stuck in development hell. I know its hard to make a compromise. I just genuinely hope that if beamng is gonna be stuck in its limited state, it pioneers a future for soft body physics games with better engines. Even if not made by the Beam team.
There is one good thing for BeamNG, as development will take still quite some time, hardware can get faster, Coffee Lake 8086K is already about 35% faster in single core performance than my 6700, overclocking that will give even more performance boost. Beginning of next year there should be next revision of Inte Chips, but perhaps 10xxxK would be again better in single core performance and that should help with BeamNG performance quite a bit. Also improvements to UI might help, so it is not impossible with the engine, but might require some upgrades to hardware, but I also think team has few tricks on their sleeve that might enable even current hardware to run more lights in the future.
Unity 3.-something. 3.0 IIRC. The game has been in development for more or less 5 years when Unity was a meme engine for everything shitty and unreal 4 wasn't even announced.
