Update Speculation thread

Might I say, I've never heard of Vulkan. If anyone has any links referencing the BeamNG T3D - Vulkan change that'd greatly be appreciated

 

You seriously think they would cancel it? Only certain people in the dev team would focus on Vulkan.

I also think you're pulling that statistic about how many gpus support vulkan out of your ass.

 

A bit backwards there, optimizing doesn't make it harder to run, it makes it easier so that people with lower end hardware can run it, extending the playerbase. Vulkan support would extend the playerbase further, because of improvements and Linux support. It would also allow the engine to look nicer in the future (PBR?), which imo would be way cooler than a car.

 

On the bright side, the AB pictured in the official thread is orange and resembles a pumpkin. Halloween update confirmed?!?

 

Vulkan isn't a game engine, it's and api like direct x. Right now the game uses direct x11, tdev mentioned a while ago that they were working on a Vulkan backend.
https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/

 

Last time done just few days ago, has been done numerous of times before that.

 

@¿Carbohydration? looks like you’re up, give us another release date conspiracy plz

 

I read somewhere that dds files are directX prorietary, and almost all the textures in .drive are .dds files, I think that's the biggest part in changing APIs.

 

Threading is big thing too, what I have read is that DX12 and Vulkan are challenging because of timing issues, also if Vulkan is used directly, it is quite low level, meaning you need to do lot more coding to get simple thing done.

However it is possible to use OpenGL to handle most and to make just calls to Vulkan, but I don't know if that is possible in case of BeamNG.

Textures can be always converted, it is batch job if it is needed, so it probably is not very big thing, but there are other things related to that too I guess, like alpha and reflections, moving to something else probably requires bit more than just converting file format of textures.

All kinds of tools are of course then needed, which takes time to make, might take longer than making actual textures.

All that of course has been in works for months and months, could be longer than a year and it is really needed to be done because there is no CPU to feed fastest GPUs, challenge that has been around in all computer games for a long long time, 10 years ago it was already important to balance CPU side of graphics so that one could keep GPU at 100%.

In ARMA I, many though it being physics being hard on CPU and that game being CPU intensive because of that, but it is more of graphics side that bottlenecks CPU, optimization was not very well done in it.

 

One of the main draws of Vulkan is Android support. Right now this doesn't make much sense at all for BeamNG.drive, but what about 5-10 years when mobile phones will likely become powerful enough to run it well?

 

Also I think that livingroom entertainment systems, something that might use SteamOS, it is unknown to me how big those would be, but I think world is trying to push away from PC thanks to all those tablet etc. things. which is a shame, but if world moves to such direction, Vulkan would at least have more possibilities to keep doors open to sales happening.

 

Halloween = October 31st
October 31st 475 AD is when Romulus Augustulus was appointed Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
That was 1543 years ago.
User number 1543 is @WilliamsCE24
His first post was December 17 2012. It was about a new engine and how it has improved the game.
Vulcan is the God of the forge in Roman Mythology.
Vulcan sounds like Vulkan
Vulkan isn't a new engine, but it can improve the game.
The Autobello will contain a new engine.
2012 was the year that the Mayan Calendar ended.
Calendars have Cal and Endars in it.
Cal sounds like California.
Endars sounds like Endors.
Endors is Multiple Endor.
Endor is a Moon in Return of the Jedi.
George Lucas shot those in California.
ROTJ was released in May 25.
The distances between May 25 and December 17 is 207 days.
The VW engine that the Autobello uses in aircooled.
30 degrees is widely considered cool air.
That is about -1 degrees Celsius
207 - 1 is 206.
206 is the number of bones in the human body.
Bones have cells
The first person to observe cells is Robert Hooke.
Robert Hooke was born on the Isle of Wight
The first person to observe cells is Robert Hooke.
I just repeated myself.
Repeating is repetition.
December 17 is 17 days after the start of December.
17.
Wikipedia was launched 17 years ago.
If you search "Repetition" on Wikipedia you get a Disambiguation page.
Dis Ambiguation is the art of relieving something of its ambiguity.
December 17 is a Date.
Taking a Date out of Ambiguity.
Giving a Date for an Update.
The Isle of Wight is an island.
Italy in the upcoming update is an Island
The Western Roman Empire includes Italy.

Therefore, The Update will include Italy and Vulkan. (And the Autobellos engine as a standalone part)

 

And will be released in five or so years once Torque3D has been completely reworked with the new backend and is completely bug-free, despite being alpha software (i.e. bugs should be expected, but apparently the devs don't understand that). In the meantime, all we'll get is pictures.

On-topic: Where did you guys get the idea that the next update has to include Vulkan support? It seems that the most likely thing to end up in the next update is the Autobello.

 

ayy it was a joke lel

 

Not next update, definitely not next update.

Italy is running something like 20fps for them, so they can't release it, tdev mentioned they need to make it run at least 3 times faster before release. Nadeox did hint that March would be too late for italy to come.

We know that in current BeamNG single core is worked very hard, more materials there is, harder seems to be impact, more drawcalls seem to cause more of this effect, so what Vulcan does is allows to use threading to what DX11 uses single thread, which then at least in theory should allow going past that limit current BeamNG has.

As it has also been mentioned often by tdev that Vulkan is what they are looking into and also earlier this year mentioned how they are working on experimental Vulkan backend, you put together 1+1, what would be way for them to improve performance so much in such short time?

It can be that Vulkan takes even more time and does not come with Italy, but why would they waste time something that probably would be waste later when Vulkan support will come? Would there be way to get so big performance increase by other means that would not be a waste of time?

Also I think Nadeox did mention that it is too early to say how much improvements will help other maps, unless I remember that wrong, but they are usually quite cautious about new things, even though I think they all seem to be pretty excited and motivated, energized, cheerful of something, which can indicated they have achieved something cool, but this last bit is purely guessing without any concrete facts behind it.

But I'm almost 100% certain next update will not include Vulkan support, I think Italy would come then too, I would be also surprised if Italy would come without Vulkan, I guess that could be possible, but would it run?

What I'm almost 100% certain is that within 2 years there is Vulkan version, but it is probably much sooner, because I think they have been working on it from 2017 or so already, they have been evaluating it back at 2016 already according to old messages, so it is not like that they would just started with it, it is more of like they are probably close to getting it publish ready.

Update: One thing that I have found out is that Vulkan is bit slower than DX11, but that is when CPU is not bottleneck, however it is so easy to have CPU as bottleneck with DX11 that it probably does not matter a lot, difference is less than 1% anyway and in CPU limited situations Vulkan can be a LOT faster.

 

I'd prefer more content to better graphics.

Once the game is past a certain threshold (and Beam is past it, as the threshold is somewhere below GTA IV's graphics), I'd rather have better content options than graphics.

 

I'd rather wait for good graphics to be honest... quality before quantity in my opinion.

I don't mind if their not amazing, but I don't want something that runs at 20fps on the dev's computers (so likely 10fps for me and 5fps for a large amount of casual players... although this is probably a bit of an exaggeration)

 

For all we know, the AB runs just fine with the current engine. It probably doesn't need to be delayed, although the Italy map might.

 

Cute!

 

I had the feeling that ridiculous name could only be the product of a (wrong) automated translation...