Update Speculation thread

pls no self contradictions

 

>be real life
>have different V8 engine designs throughout a 20+ year and 130+ ci span

>be BeamNG
>just have one design

Scrap that, just realized the Burnside 423 exists.

 

What I meant in the first post was that they don't cut corners by choice. When they are demanded by the community, then of course some things will get rushed. Eventually the rush jobs will be fixed, similar to the updates to the Grand Marshall and Italy.

EDIT: I don't count when the community forces the developers to release things early. The devs have since learned from past events and no longer allow them to happen by only teasing nearly complete features and keeping testing behind closed doors instead of having an open experimental branch.

 

guys, i have found secret concepts of the new vehicle!







--- Post updated ---
Acctual discussion:

Not quite, Bruckell is more like dodge and Gavril is more like Chevrolet. So i would say its more a sub brand.

 

That looks like something out of the Gadget Racers series. I really need to break out the PS2/look into an emulator, that series was my favorite for many years.

OT: I'm wondering if little updates will be the norm for a little while. We could do with a couple of 0.17.x updates dedicated to some more vehicle remasters. It would be less than ideal to have to wait for 0.18 to get those Gavril remasters.

 

The way I've always seen it is Bruckell and Gavril are competitors, not related subdivisions. And lets not start in on the "Gavril is this car brand, Bruckell is that car brand" bs. Though I have an idea for that common V8...

Remember B25Mitch's thread on the new Gavril V8s?
https://www.beamng.com/threads/gavril-v8-engine.58579/

He mentions that the low poly components can be reconfigured to form different engine configurations. So one could be working with the source file for the engine (Where all the components are still exploded apart,) and simply configure everything to make the engine visually distinct, that way you can have 2 V8s without having to redo the high-poly modeling, UVing, and texturing process.

Pair these subtle changes with recoloring the block, changing manufacturer name, and possibly some work with the Carbeurator, air cleaner, and adding other 70s anti-pollution engine bay equipment, and the vast majority of the playerbase would never know that the engine itself is almost exactly the same as the Bluebuck V8, and would regard it as a different engine.



I could be wrong though.

 

Why

 

reminds me of a honda aerodeck, which is cool

 

*laughs in volvo 480*

 

So today I feel like bringing up something that doesn't get a lot of attention, just to see what people think about it. Tiled terrain support. See, I finally got around to messing around in @bob.blunderton's Roane County map, and some signs at each end of the freeway indicate that the map would be much larger if BeamNG had tiled terrain support rather than restricting maps to a single heightmap. But will it ever? Part of me wants to say no and part of me wants to say yes.

In the No corner, it may simply be out of scope. The way it is now, you can already make some pretty huge maps with it, especially if you're willing to sacrifice heightmap resolution. Now, with tiled terrain, you could go much larger, even have, in theory, a BeamNG map which replicated, at a 1:1 scale, a whole state or country. I say "in theory" because time and money are limited resources, especially for modders. But say someone did. You've now got a huge map, probably too big for most players to effectively memorize all but the most basic routes around and through it. Maybe not such a huge problem as players would quickly find their favorite areas and gravitate towards those for the majority of their time on the map, but it might also start to feel rather empty. Of course, we have traffic support now and the AI is constantly improving, so that would help to mitigate the emptiness quite a lot. However, there is another problem with this: now you're putting many maps' worth of time and effort into one map, and unless you actually are replicating a real area 1:1, large maps have a tendency to, shall we say, prioritize some areas over others in terms of quality - I mean, just look at The Crew/2; one of the largest maps ever seen in a racing game but so much of it feels like generic filler hastily bashed together from modular assets. That's just not the way BeamNG does things, but they may wish to avoid such a temptation entirely. I'm not saying Italy is the largest map they'll ever make, but they do like to take their time and give a highly polished final product.

In the Yes corner, the BeamNG team are fundamentally can-do people, and I've never been wrong in predicting that they would eventually do something that seemed technically difficult, out of scope, or otherwise unlikely at the time. Furthermore, BeamNG is a tech demo game; they don't just want to sell a game to end users, they want to sell technology to other producers - perhaps even other game developers. Other developers who may want large maps for their own reasons, or who may want a more normally-sized map but with a higher resolution. Tiled terrain support out of the box could certainly make a more effective pitch.

I don't want to make a prediction either way (after all, I have a reputation to uphold!) but I figured it might make for some interesting discussion.

 

because yes.

 

Technically, it's possible to make the map bigger with meshes as your roads etc, but I prefer the mesh-objects (models) placed on the terrain approach, and since 4k x 4k was the biggest terrain I could do at the time, and that was feasibly as big I could stretch it, that's where tiled terrain would come in. It's on the road map. I just hope the developers put it in one day - not so much to make the map bigger, but to enable a more fine level of detail on the terrain there. Making it bigger would be nice, too, even I would enjoy that (I'd likely only do it to extend the highway another 10~20 miles or so). However, this is one part where there's a limit to the size of any BeamNG environment. The shake. The Rattle. The roll... well, not quite roll, but the shaking, that's serious stuff once you get 20~25 miles from the center of the map. I once was editing, and a box truck was falling for, oh, about a WEEK unbeknownst to me. It kept getting saved every night, further, and further, and further from the world coordinates. After that 5~8 days or so (don't remember exactly), it was all over the screen.
The further from the map center you are, the larger the number of your coordinates get. Since this physics is all done with floating point, the larger the number, the more that gets chopped off (rounded, hence 'float' numbers). So when you've been falling all the way to the center of the earth, you'll essentially be not inches, not feed, but yards/meters of difference PER FRAME. It doesn't always round the same with the coordinates per frame so it jumbles all over (this includes item placement, that's why signs and traffic lights don't quite touch in Roane County all the time, the placement moves an inch or two, things can move a bit between when you place them editing the map and when you spawn in later on). Not only does this make the vehicle 'wig out' but it also shows it's ugly head first as the small shimmy and shake, as if the vehicle was running very rough.
So with all that book said, the largest beamng environment would likely be about 20x20 miles or so, roughly a 10 mile radius around the 0,0,0 world coordinates. That's still pretty darn big, though.
Other games don't use float physics (they use integer, which is much slower but more precise), so those games don't suffer from the rounding. Yet other games work by moving the world around the player, vs moving the player around the world.
So while I'd love to yell 'here-here for Tiled Terrain support' and hence my signs in Roane County... I will patiently wait for it one day. If it happens, it happens, I'll be eternally grateful, if not, well, we still have a heck of a fun game here and a real prize of a game-engine.
Thanks for the shout-out.

 

Your welcome. I'm aware of the shake and to the best of my knowledge it is felt all up and down the Roane County freeway to some extent, but I noobishy assumed that tiled terrain would take care of that somehow too - had probably thought that the heightmap 0, 0, 0 and the map 0, 0, 0 were the same thing, and so multiple heightmaps would mean multiple zero points... herp derp derp. (In practice, this would be similar to the "moving the zero with the player" approach mentioned above.)

 

Ye lil bomp:

Is it just me or is there almost nothing to speculate about? :/

 

pretty much unless some one want to talk about the dreaded Wendover

 

I wonder if the devs intend at all to make a pre-war car?

 

I hope so. A 1930's American coupe has a mind boggling number of possible configs, and if we want an official open wheeler our choices are pretty much that or a Plymouth Prowler style car.

 

Bruckell is very much non-Mopar, and more like Buick.

The Moonhawk doesn't have the signature Mopar unibody, torsion bar front suspension, nor slant-6 engine, so it's more GM/Ford-like.

Similarly, the LeGran has relatively large V6 engines (Mopars did not have them until 1989), GM's signature supercharged V6 layout as an option and Buick Century dead ringer styling.

 

If almost all of the old maps will be updated soon, what would happen to Cliff? Would it get more trees? Would it turn into a proper map with roads? Or would it be the same?

 

nice speculation