What was this game about again ?

You can find the general lines here:
https://blog.beamng.com/something-is-still-on-the-horizon/
And the Steam Store descriptions:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/284160/BeamNGdrive/

 

Old doesn't mean it's dated or not valid anymore in this case (side-note: That's also why writing blogposts takes time, everything that is written has a lot of thought put into them)
Going into details with 'in plans' or 'highly wip' stuff is not possible (or worth), as details are the first thing to change on a general plan, for a reason or another.
We might revisit the very first vehicles. No promises about those kind of variants for those.

Thanks for your thoughts.
We are working hard toward making the game more than a sandbox game, it needs time, but nonetheless it's being done.
Isn't it cool that the game is so open that you can mod pretty much any aspect of it?

Because it is an update for the game: the Automation content is still an addition to the base plans, and it did bring new content for the game (an entire level).
Since you seem concerned that this Automation update took time and effort away from the actual game: it did not.
The majority of the team was still working on its own tasks during that period

 

IMO repo section for automation converts is kinda pointless... Wouldn't it be a better marketing strategy for Automation to introduce their repository for essentially .car files which player with the automation game can then export to beamng as well? That would force users who want to drive automation cars to buy said game as well as keep this forum clean of their "junk" and possibly save up some money for BeamNG due to lower usage of the could that has to store all of those "mods".

This is entirely My opinion and the way I'd orefer things to be done.

 

Vehicles are constantly revisited. People tent to forget the research aspects of the whole endeavor and how much of an effort is to just update all the vehicles whenever new research pans out. As new improvement and discoveries are getting done, we have to go back and integrate them into the vehicles.

A recent example, we had problems with designing sway bars and steering racks with sufficient rigidity. The simulation primitives we previously had, didn't perform as well as we wanted them to, and Corey was constantly struggling to push them to their maximum.

Our latest research on that shows an enormous amount of promise to solve all of above problems that we had. If everything goes well, we'll release it in the next update. But the research is just the starting point. Corey will now have to start updating all the various vehicles and configurations. He'll have to do research to find the proper real world torsional stiffness numbers for each car, do the proper modifications in accordance with how it would have been designed/installed and so on.

I'm saying all of above so that people understand that adding new cars/configurations/whatever is just a small % of what we do here. There is also an enormous amount of work required to continue improving the existing simulation and vehicle designs to continue approaching reality even more.

To conclude, there is a tug of war that happens here. Of quality vs quantity. Our primary focus is quality. I have said it in another thread, but speaking personally, my main interest on the whole thing is to approach reality as much as possible. I want to understand and replicate the world, to solve the hard problems. And it isn't only me, we are all passionate here about the same things.

On the other hand, people naturally want quantity, they want more of everything and we also want to give to people what they want. The Automation collaboration is a step towards the quantity direction. Even more, instead of people being only users of other people's designs it allows people to drive their own designs, which is a property that i'm particularly fond of.