What a coincidence, I was thinking the same thing yesterday and decided to make a prototype/proof of concept using deformGroups aka the system used for glass breaking It's no where near perfect or even "ok" but it's just to test the capabilities of the game
Do you have to make a scratches texture for each of the body panels separately or do you somehow get one texture to appear in multiple places on the car when scratched?
GIMME GIMME GIMME P.S.: Are you still working at it? It might be one of the best mods in the repository!
A few years ago i tried to do something similar myself but it was a bit different. it was back when i was porting some dirt showdown models to beamng and i had found a tilable seamless scratch texture from dirt. I wish i could find some vids or something with that but its way too old now. Anyways, the whole body of the car was duplicated and i left only the top faces, i then started dividing all the models into multiple sections, hood had like 4 different deformgroups, with each their own trigger which when it would contact the ground it would only give some scratch texture on the affected part. It ended up being a pain to work with just because i have to define like 50 different deform group to make it all work well, and it was also kinda weird since sometimes it wouldnt always work like id hope. Its still nice to see people trying to do this tho, its a very requested feature and im even tempted to restart work on that, but every car needs to be hand worked, so its overwealming saying ill do this when i couldnt even finish the covet years ago lol. OI i found my post