Beamng has never had the best graphics but I really think cars could look a lot better if players had an option to change the paint roughness (softness, matte or any other word for it). We can currently change how strong reflections are with the chrominess option, but not how sharp reflections are. I think in need for speed they have a softness slider, would that be possible?
Actually, reflection roughness (as opposed to reflection opacity) is one of the cornerstones of physically-based rendering, or PBR. PBR has been on the community's wishlist for a long time, and may have even been on the development roadmap at one point. But I don't think there are any plans to implement it at present, since it would break the wealth of content available, both official and modded.
I'm not asking for full pbr as I know that takes a lot of time but I was under the impression that the game already supports roughness, as far as I can tell the bottom of cars and other objects can have rough reflections, am I wrong?
I think the point is that PBR makes for dynamic texture changes depending on the model? or at least that's what i ASSUME of it. The current textures dont really support "roughness" or dirtiness, or scratches, compared to the rest of the game, the texture work is very outdated and basic.
It's not as complicated as you think, you can already control the colour and chromyness certain areas of the car so it's not much to ask for roughness as well, especially as roughness already seems to be supported
It doesn't need to break anything. A game can have basic shaders, but also more advanced one. It only depends on what the engine allows and that these things need to be coded as seperated shaders, so it won't conflict with outdated mods. And for my opinion, its too early to develop mods, because they need constant updates.
Super late reply, but... The bottoms of cars generally use the same textures as the bodywork, but the cubemap is fully (or almost fully) occluded in those areas. It's not so much that the shader system supports rough reflections in those spots, but that there are no visible reflections at all there. I'm not sure about the technical backend, so I can't say whether just a partial transition to PBR is possible. 'Roughness' as a measure of how precisely a material reflects its environment. A perfect mirror reflects with 100% precision, aluminum foil with, say, 98% precision, brushed steel, ~40%, down to materials that reflect in a very diffuse way, like cloth or concrete. Further reading :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physically_based_rendering The dynamic dirt/scratch system you're talking about could use PBR in its rendering to some extent, but neither is reliant on the other. The 'Why Not Both?' mantra may work well in spirited taco shell commercials, but having two different material pipelines would be hell to manage updates to and would create extra costs on the performance front. I think. Not a programmer myself, but there has been many a time the devs had plenty of reason to consider branching features, and they never did. My guess is that having one system that's used universally makes everything easier to manage.
