PBR and traffic

Hi,

I've looked around but haven't found any recent discussions on these. I'm really curious how far the development is / if there's any plans regarding:

1. PBR
IMO a feature that will make the game look 1000% better, and the lack of which is what's currently stopping me from looking into making car mods for BeamNG. Today when browsers can render pretty PBR, it feels very strange that a game that so heavily focuses on vehicles doesn't support it.

I know it's planned, but anyone knows how far is it?

Even your browser can run this - try it out


2. Simple / raycast vehicles
I'm a huge bus fan and playing the bus simulator game mode feels almost pointless when there's no traffic.
I couldn't find a discussion on this, but did the devs ever entertain the idea of very simple cars that would obey traffic laws and fill the roads?

I know there's no way to have many complex vehicles, I'm talking about very simple cars with no deformations on them. Raycasting boxes, GTA SA style. I'm sure the game could handle dozens of those. Seems to me like a very obvious solution for getting the roads populated...

Thanks for any answers.

 

I Was thinking the same since a while
and as a addition too what you have mentioneted
whats is if the deformation only is switched on when a objekt to collide is near to the car or the cars are just about to collide and activate the jbeam string after string ?
this would save a lot of system recources even with deformation.

 

Nobody has really any idea how far PBR development is, everyone knows the devs want it because it fits the overall development style where it's the best option to simulate everything so that you don't have to hard-code any specific scenarios. I think Torque 3D needs a pretty significant overhaul to be able to support that feature.

As for traffic, check here: https://www.beamng.com/threads/ai-work.54961/

 

I might be wrong, but I always thought of PBR as just a shader. You would need to overhaul all the textures to work with the metallic/roughness workflow, but I thought that's about it to get the basics working. Even if it was only a possibility for modders to create cars with PBR materials, it would be great...

And cool! Good to know traffic is being worked on.

Ok thanks.
I think it would be a damn shame if BeamNG never had PBR, especially since there's so many implementations of it, and a bunch of open-source ones.
Comparing to any modern game, BeamNG cars kinda look like they're made out of plastic...

 

Yeah, like if you remember GTA SA, the cars would just follow a path, and when you bumped into them they activated more complex physics...

My point is only that driving a bus seems pointless with no traffic. There needn't be any deformation, you probably don't want to crash into cars anyways when you roleplay as a bus driver...

 

I don't think Pabst Blue Ribbon and traffic go well together... I think that's called DUI?

Also, PBR is shitty beer. Don't be a hipster and pretend to like it, we all know it sucks

 

When the beer looks like this...



or this...



I just can't help myself...

Maybe I'm just spoiled, but the current materials in BeamNG look like plastic to me.
The simulation and deformation in BeamNG is of course amazing, but I think proper use of PBR could attract a lot more attention to BeamNG as a whole...

 

Who knows maby i like to roleplay a mad bus driver that likes to crush people in their cars like an Pepsi can

 

Part of that is also texturing.

 

Please note that is 2 years old and the op was asking for an update.

It wasn't unreasonable for him say ask but to refer him to old material instead of answering seems wrong, but I am a pessimist.

 

Of course! The examples I provided have superb texturing. But with a good implementation, I'd think that reflections, fresnel and clear coat effects wouldn't need much adjustments to work and would add a lot to how cars look. I don't think any of those effects are currently present in the game.

Replacing the specific diffuse and specular textures with albedo, metallic and roughness textures would probably take some time though... If we wanted to port all of the default cars over...
--- Post updated ---

Yeah I've read that one and wondered if there are any updates, but I guess it still holds true. Visuals just aren't a priority for BeamNG I guess...

 

Wait a minute, is PBR that raytracing shit from the new RTX graphics cards? Won't that absolutely toast anything but a $5000 liquid-cooled monstrosity?

 

PBR stands for physics based rendering, and it's been around for a couple years. If anything, it's less intensive in some cases than traditional rendering, and as the examples above show, it can even run in your browser.

 

I think BeamNG vehicles got lot improved looks in latest update, something in specular has changed or something, it is much nicer looking now.

Metallic purple and blue trick paintjob:

That kind of paint to Barstow and it would look fine.

For flake to work, one would need to redo UV maps though, would need to be something like 4-8 times size of current or then use tiling, so there is reasons why you don't see such.

There is materials.cs if someone wants to play with such, pearl texture is just simple several layer noise made in Gimp.

Code:

singleton Material(material_0_balama_drift_balama_drift_body0)
{
    mapTo = "material_0_balama_drift_balama_drift_body0";
    opacityMap[0] = "stamp0.dds";
    opacityMapUV[0] = "1";
    opacityMap[1] = "stamp0.dds";
    opacityMapUV[1] = "1";
    diffuseMap[0] = "vehicles/common/null.dds";
    specularMap[0] = "vehicles/fufsgfen_balama_drift/blue_pearl_s.dds";
    specularMap[1] = "vehicles/common/null.dds";
    diffuseMap[1] = "vehicles/common/null.dds";
    castShadows = "1";
    doubleSided = "1";
    specularPower[0] = "128";
    specular[0] = "1 1 1 1";
    specularPower[1] = "198.385101";
    specularStrength[1] = "1";
    specular[1] = "1 1 1 1";
    diffuseColor[0] = "1 1 1 1";
    diffuseColor[1] = "1 1 1 0.001";
    instanceDiffuse[2] = true;
    specularMap[2] = "vehicles/fufsgfen_balama_drift/blue_pearl_s.dds";
    diffuseMap[2] = "vehicles/common/null.dds";
    specularPower[2] = "128";
    specularStrength[2] = "1";
    specular[2] = "1 1 1 1";
    diffuseColor[2] = "1 1 1 0.5";
    opacityMap[2] = "stamp0.dds";
    opacityMapUV[2] = "1";
    useAnisotropic[2] = "1";
    castShadows = "1";
    translucent = "1";
    alphaTest = "1";
    alphaRef = "128";
    translucentZWrite = true;
    translucentBlendOp = "None";
    dynamicCubemap = true;
    materialTag0 = "beamng"; materialTag2 = "vehicle";
};

 

Well, there really isn't anything you can do to drastically improve the diffuse/specular model, because it's fundamentally wrong. That's why PBR shaders took over and are now called "Standard" in most engines.

Any way to fiddle with shaders directly? I've written some shaders in Unity, but I guess it's a lot harder in torque...

 

that punto looks damn good from all angles, and the polyflow/count even looks fairly consistent with beam.

 

Hey, actually, PBR ain't half bad (the rendering, not the beer!!!). Looks kind of like Spintires. In fact, I wonder: could PBR be combined with some kind of dynamic dirt/scuff system for more realistic off-roading and damage?

 

they're 2 separate concepts, but pbr could be applied to anything in the game to get it looking better and more realistic. it's just a way of rendering different layers of more complex textures to get objects looking lifelike

 

Let me jump in with a thought or two:

PBR is a completely other way of rendering graphics (Physics Based Rendering) and is no small thing to implement but you all probably know that.

The good thing here might be that the developers of the game engine BeamNG is based on (Torque3D) is working on implementing PBR continously, see https://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=159&start=290#p10492
Now, if this helps BeamNG or not i dont know, might have been so much work on the BeamNG side that its not a simple copy-paste so to speak.

Also, about ingame shaders, Torque3Ds shaders and lighting have been updated since BeamNG started using them although i dont know if theyre implemented or not, as i 'discovered' some months ago. Things like Light rays, AO, water fresnel shader, PostFx settings and so on was different. If i recall correct Jeff, which is the main Torque developers afaik, said somewhere that he redid alot, for example the mentioned water fresnel due to him earlier not knowing how it worked. Some of the shaders and main lighting files seemed to be a simple overwirte thing but some wasnt when i dug into it the last time. Gave up since my knowledge is not that great on these stuff.