Rethinking AI traffic

One obvious limitation of BeamNG's AI traffic is the # of cars you can spawn. Because of the advanced physics model, the cars are very resource-intensive and you can only have a few on a map and even those few can lower the frame rate.

So what if the game compromised and simplified some of the physics of the traffic cars so we could have more of them? Would that be feasible? The fact is we don't need extremely detailed physics simulation on the traffic cars. They mostly just need to stay in their lane and drive their speed limit. Chasing, fleeing or racing AI cars should of course have full physics to make the gameplay fair. Thoughts?

 

Usually traffic cars have simple geometry, less details etc. rather than changed physics. Best example is Burnout series BUT there are games like Wreckfest where every car have same level of detail.

If you talking about AI "brains" this isn't that much hard to handle for CPU. Spawn some cars and start AI traffic. Usually cars itself are problematic than AI scripting (which is already simple)

 

Something like this has been suggested time and time again, but its been called impractical by the devs many times before. The physics are too core to the game and they cannot be simplified, slowed down or paused individually. The devs also don't want to compromise on their game. The best way they can increase the number of traffic cars able to be run simultaneously is by increasing the performance of the physics and graphics engines, which are goals they are already chasing, and which make more sense in the long run.