I think that's the right decision to let as much people as possible to play the game decently with at least one car , and more the time passes, more the average computer will get powerfull, so beamng will be able to improve their cars quality. I believe you never thought in 2012 that you will do one day a car as complex as the cherrier FCV because it would be too hard to handle for the majority of the computers. (remember the good old days were a GTX780 was a high end powerfull graphic card ? Now it's just an average/low end component that became really cheap)
Silicon performance improvement don't only come from smaller nodes, it's largely the architecture, and streamlined code that contribute to performance gains, beyond 1 nm nodes speed increase will have to come from innovation, rather than iteration. Stuff like carbon nano tubes different die materials etc will be the replacement for Moore's law
A developer in the past said that this isn’t possible without creating extremely complex and performance heavy j beams. I think it could be done fairly realistically with textures and normal maps, though.
The issue is the jbeam system is what manages deformation and it doesn't interface with materials, excluding glow maps and deform groups, which just change a material for an other. Deform groups are pretty much an all or nothing thing for an entire mesh, which is probably part of why there isn't really a scratch system using them other than some experimental attempts. And having the bumper cave in like this on impacts requires designing a "reversal" in the jbeam, the issue is that jbeam reversals tend to deform the mesh in weird ways, so it probably would never look as good as in the picture.
Yes, I understand all of that. But, it’s only a matter of time before deformation textures get implemented. I dont see why you couldn’t use normal maps for these as well. It’s a pipeline dream, but it would be really impressive if implemented well. I trust the devs