I loved using this feature to carry damaged cars between maps, and while this was most likely not the intention, the 'buggy' nature of this feature worked great as a way to do basic "repairs" to a car's driveability, without having to undo all the fun deformation sustained during a long adventure! It also worked great as a solution for cooling down engines, without having to find a body of water to teleport the car into - waiting for engines to cool down in real-time is just not fun. Please put it back! If it's in too 'shameful' of a state for the radial menu, maybe as console commands?
Im wondering, why keep the load button if you removed the save button?... +1 tho. i loved messing around with damaged cars and repairing the radiator only with the save/load vehicle thingy, and then go beat the car until its death again... I liked that feature...
Vehicle saving started out as a quick and dirty experiment that got released. Unfortunately, vehicle saving has to interact with all of the physics subsystems and this increases considerably the overall maintenance cost. This means that whatever change i did to the physics core, i would also have to check how it interacted with saving and at some point a decision had to be made if the overhead cost that it added was worth the trouble. This decision was postponed for a long time, but reality does move on, and the saving functionality went unmaintained for a long time now due to me being overloaded. If saving worked as much as it did, it was due to chance and i didn't want to leave something there unmaintained that would give the wrong impression to people and they might have started building things on top of it. This has happened with other functionality and i've ended up being forced to maintain it due to backwards compatibility reasons. If this happened with saving, the burden would have been to great for me to keep it there, due to saving having its "tentacles" touching everything in the physics core.
Right, I understand that getting rid of unwanted complexity is always desirable, but isn't this feature needed long-term anyway? Wouldn't it have been reasonable to get a less "dirty" implementation of the feature, which will be needed for career mode anyway, up and running, before cutting this from the public build? While certainly janky, it did add a lot to my enjoyment of the game, and, for now, I'd rather stay on an older version than go without it (which is where software regression is always annoying, with no public archive of older builds (Steam makes this pretty easy to implement for the developers, by the way)) Spoiler: praise I like the save/load feature for: Moving vehicles between maps Repairs Lucky, interesting deformation not being gone forever after reset/end of session Form of saving the session (just need to remember location and F7) A sort of "Flashback" (referencing GRID), where a single hit doesn't have to ruin a long adventure with the same car As a compromise, could we at least have a 'Magic Repair' item in the "Fun" tab, that resets the state of powershafts, engine and thermals? There are much sillier features in there already
I think what estama is trying to say is that it was removed because the multiplayer mod used that API, and after he said MP was impossible it was making him look bad. How embarrassing.
Okay, I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly: When you say "saving the vehicle", do you mean saving a vehicle of your choice as the default vehicle when you first go into the game? Or saving a vehicle to remain in a level that you saved in your [username]/documents/beamng/levels folder? Or are you talking about something entirely different? I don't mean to come across as self-serving, but I'm curious if this issue applies to me or not. I have only saved vehicles for the above to reasons I mentioned. EDIT: Also... why wasn't this mentioned in the DevBlog notes for the v0.19 release 2020-04-08? I swear I read every inch of the release notes from stem to stern... and nowhere in the bullet points did it mention deprecation of a "vehicle save" feature... or define in what aspect this was. (Unless I missed it, in which case I'll apologize in advance). Thanks.
I HIGHLY doubt a feature of the game was removed solely to break one minor mod that "made [estama] look bad". That would be completely absurd. Your username and join date really doesn't help your credibility. One mod got broken, and a pretty rudimentary mod (that if any number of things changed would have caused it to break) at that, it was only a matter of time for something like this to happen.
It was a feature in the Radial menu (the one that appears on pressing Esc) - you could save the current shape (deformation) of your vehicle. It's the last bullet point under "PHYSICS", should've searched for "vehicle sav"
Ahh... there it is. I was looking under "MISC". Yes, this was something completely different. It's a shame to hear it's gone, but it was something I never familiarized myself with. Maybe I should have. And I forgot about using search in the DevBlog section. Didn't think it would work there-- and that it would search the whole forum instead. Thank you for the fast reply.
I thought about this some more, and realized that the replay system surely relies on saving the shape too, doesn't it? With this in mind, I can't imagine why it would be much of a problem to use it's save/load functions in freeroam... Obviously, I don't know what the code looks like, but are the functions for recording/applying vehicle state, as used for replays, really not generic enough?
Dear "callingyouout", i understand that you have concerns which led you to misunderstand and misrepresent what i've said. Also based on the creation date of your account it looks like you feel threatened to express your opinion more openly so you used a throwaway account. I would like to propose you to at least consider approaching this discussion with a more open mind to see if it might work better compared to your current approach. Concerning the MP mod, we took care to keep the decision strictly surrounding saving functionality, so MP mod should remain unaffected from the saving removal. Sorry, i've just noticed that the changelog line is less prominent in the DevBlog. I had the line at the top of the physics list in my internal changelog but as it moved to the public changelog it got moved around. The line is this: "Removed vehicle saving functionality, it was unmaintained so we decided that it is better to remove it"
Yes you are right, replay system saves the visual shape of the vehicle (node positions). But it does it in a lossy way because it needs to compress the information a lot and it doesn't care that much about the actual mechanics, workings and internal state of the vehicle. The people' expectations from saving functionality were a lot greater. People had start coming to me with bug reports about this or that not being saved or not working ok after a vehicle got saved and reloaded. And i had to explain to them that saving was indented as a fun quick experiment for people to play with. But the expectations had started to become more serious and i had to take a decision to either fully maintain or to fully remove it.
As far as I'm concerned, the rough 'general shape' of the vehicle being savable is very much good enough - I was sold on the game by it's deformation physics alone, and having a magically-repaired driveshaft/rad/engine (and even tyres) hasn't taken much away from the experience, and, in a way, has actually improved it! For the sake of avoiding major regression (for some players), it could've been downgraded to a more obscure implementation (console command?), where the experimental nature of the feature is more obvious, to cut down on the reports.