The physics in BeamNG are excellent and apply very well to trains & planes as well. Some official maps have airports, which is nice, but what about railroad tracks? We need more maps with train support!
Not like there are many railroads IRL in the maps that are featured, but i dont see how this wouldn't be a bad idea. Maybe a railroad cross in a road on ECU would fit perfectly
I would just like more places to run trains. BeamNG could easily be one of the best train simulators out there, if it had more railroad and an easier way to place trains. The physics are much better than in most of the so-called train simulators.
This would be pretty cool if it were viable, but there are some compelling arguments not to include train tracks: They take up a lot of room. The tracks themselves are pretty narrow, but turns are extremely gradual, and train tracks can have almost no grade. You'd end up having to remove buildings, rearranging towns, and potentially wiping out hills and other elevation changes in order to feature them without making it look too unnatural. They don't do much for regular play. True, airports are mostly useful for allowing planes to take off and land, but they can also double as drag strips for the land-based official vehicles. Comparatively, railroads are a much rougher surface to drive on, being a downright chore in low-lying cars and too repetitive to be much fun for offroading in a more capable vehicle. And there's currently no way to make it play nice with the traffic tool. Either there are no AI paths on the tracks, and police won't try to chase you onto them, or there are, and normal traffic cars will try to treat them like regular roads. There's currently no exact standard for BeamNG trains. Most current trains were built to adhere to Standard Gauge, but most of them feature flanges that point slightly inward at differing angles, some have slightly wider or narrower wheel-axles, some don't have the suspension for hard bumps and sudden elevation changes, and some are much more top-heavy, and would need broader corners for reliable operation at high speed. Most of these problems could be solved, but even then, I think railroads would be better applied to newer and potentially flatter official maps than revised older maps. And that this is an itch that community content is much better suited to scratch to start with.
idk about making full railroad tracks with the size of the maps in game with the exception of italy (Maybe just a small monorail for it since italy has those tho across the mountains?) But i still think that a railroad crossing in ECU + having a train pass, even if you have to mod/script it, would be a terrific idea. Specially for those that want to replicate the ending of F&F.
Yeah I think the East Coast map would be a great candidate for a railroad, especially since it's mostly country. But otherwise I can definitely see issues with adding it to other existing maps. I didn't mean specifically that it should be added to existing maps. New official maps with railroads and generally better train support would be very welcome in my view. I just feel that the physics engine is under-utilized if it's focused only on vehicles, though I'm totally fine with those being the main focus. I've been playing with BeamDrifter's locomotives on his Train Racing Mountain (https://beamng.com/threads/wld-fs30-2-diesel-electric-locomotive.57253/) and I've been thinking, man I wish TS or TSW had physics like that.
Right? I could do with more simulators like BeamNG to start with. Not just the physics, but also the tone: just about every simulator gives you only very straight-laced, pedestrian missions/scenarios/campaigns. With the possible exceptions of Flight Simulator X and the Arma series, most proper simulators don't really get creative with mission design. BeamNG? Bombs on buses, insane jumps, rallies in ill-fitting vehicles, a dart minigame? They know their game is fun and they run with it. Anywho, I should point out that while BeamNG inherently simulates suspension, centrifugal force, etc., its train physics are slightly faked. In BeamNG, the flanges are typically fixed panels which force against the inside of the rails to help the train to stay on the track. In the real world, the flanges not only spin with the wheelaxles, but also seldom make contact with the rail altogether. Instead, the subtle taper of the train wheels toward their outside edge helps to naturally correct the train's path toward the center of the track: Sadly, this effect isn't possible to reproduce in BeamNG without either edge collision (which Estama has been trying to work toward), or fitting a train with multiple recursive wheels of differing widths and radii.
Thanks for the good explanation. I learned something. Even before that I wasn't totally convinced that BeamNG simulated trains correctly because I felt the flanges were sometimes hitting the track a bit too hard and there was a lot of scraping. In a good train simulator the train rides on the track smoother, but still has some movement side to side and up and down. What BeamNG does really well with trains is simulating the centrifugal force that correctly simulates rollovers on turns that are taken too fast.
It can be a pain, however it helps a lot if you pause the game and switch to the free cam when placing the train. --- Post updated --- BTW guys, do you have any favorite train simulators, something like BeamNG that takes physics seriously and executes them well? I've tried or looked at pretty much all of them, and I think the only good ones are Derail Valley and Diesel Railcar Simulator and that's what I have. The others are pretty bad, graphically, physically or both. I have looked at Run8 as well which supposedly takes physics seriously, but the graphics are quite ugly and even the physics leave things to be desired (tracks are perfectly smooth, there's no up/down motion and derailment isn't possible).
