Should the devs update the techdemo?

Last year I was thinking about this, for days. The current version of the game feels way more different than the techdemo's. No changes, no additional cars, just how it was: 1 car, 1 map, etc. Just with the updated version. Let me tell you why I feel like this. People want to experience what playing beamngdrive is like. What do they do? They either pirate the game or they download the techdemo. They only get the feel of the old beamng drive, not the new one. Or is this the catch, ''if you want the new version of beamngdrive, buy the game''?
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Sorry if I sound dumb, just asking.

 

Yes, definitely! It should represent the game how it is today and not 3 years ago!

 

It's best to wait for version 1.0 to be having this conversation. Going to need to have it at that point anyway, and it can't be that far off (relative to how long the game has already been in development at least)

 

I don't think the version number represents how far away we are from completion, but it is a significant metric of how far we've come. Just 2 years ago we were at 0.9.

 

The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes. I had the techdemo, but although it was cool, I don’t know that I would’ve bought the game had it not been my knowledge from videos, et cetera. The techdemo was fine, but I think the game has developed enough since then that it doesn’t really demo the tech anymore.

 

That's the issue. It's not very current, it demonstrates what the game is like back in 2013. It's lacking some pretty big things that have come in recent years.

 

The most recent version, V2, was March of 2015, and it's received no updates since then.

 

It would make sense to wait until work put to new demo is not wasted, so after feature complete stage probably would be nice to have new demo.

 

I think another important factor to updating it is the graphical+physics optimisation which has occurred. I can run 0.16, on gridmap with 1 covet, on medium settings on my laptop at a stable ~30-40 FPS. when I tried the techdemo, equivalent graphics settings get me ~15 FPS. if I was looking at the game for the first time, I wouldn't have considered buying it, at the prospect of there being more detailed maps and cars, in light of the demo's optimisation.

 

Thats what I was thinking about!

 

I've heard some people have had bad experiences with the steam refund policy.

It's also more professional and IMO easier for the consumer to have a true demo instead of just buy and possibly refund the game.

 

Techdemo should do some compatibility update because if a person downloads it and cannot run he/she might not want to buy the game, and if they runs the demo and cannot run the full game, he/she will be very frustrated

 

The tech demo runs on a much older version, the game has been optimized since. Dx9/dx10 should be the only performance issue that would cause someone to be able to run the tech demo but not the full version.

 

I got pretty good at driving that crappy little hatch around for the past couple years before I got my new PC to buy the full version. I know every in and out of that tech demo, and I'd say it's a good representation of the actual gameplay without giving too much. It's sufficiently fun and you can get pretty creative with the limited content you're given. I got a good many hours out of pulling e-brake turns and slow-motion crashes. As far as optimization goes, I guess the engine could use an update to a fairly current version to better represent the graphical requirements to run the game. I suppose that's what a tech demo is supposed to represent. But if you have sufficient processing power but lack the funds to purchase the game, the tech demo as it stands can keep you company until you buy it. Again, the tech demo should represent the resource-intensiveness of the game, and I believe the engine should be better-optimized, but the car and map provided are just about perfect to pique most people's interest.

 

I think somewhere on my computer's HDDs I have an Original copy of the Tech Demo I downloaded 6 years ago, I have to find it but I may use it at work for the LOLs to test computer hardware its a good use case for it