Can this ever be fixed? (Physics engine)

So I've been following BeamNG for years now casually, playing a bit here and there, not really getting that into it since driving games are no fun to play with a keyboard... lol.

But every time I play it I tend to try and demolish something as aggressively as I can.

And inevitably, I will crash at high speed and it will end up having glitchy looking spikes sticking out of it like this:
(image will delete after a month)

It's always so immersion-breaking to me. Is there any way the devs can at least just make those pixels disappear or something if they fall outside of some kind of mathematical parameter?

I mean this isn't really even about accurate simulation. The cars go crunch just fine. But when it suddenly has a beam sticking out of it that's as long as the horizon it reminds you you're just playing an approximation... Kinda ruins it.

Also, as a side note, making your own cars in Automation and driving them in Beam is pretty much the funnest thing ever! (Above image is a stock Beam vehicle though)

 

Bet it was a high drop + high gravity

 

please remember, this is a simulation. sometimes computer math go brr when calculating how the car deforms with such aggressiveness thus it can't deform properly.

 

You're reaching the limit of the physics engine. Granted, spikes like that aren't realistic, but a car falling from the sky with 3000mph is not very realistic either. In 'everyday use' I rarely encounter spikes.

 

The spikes have definitely gotten less prevalent in the last few years, as well as cars sticking into each other. I don't know that it'll ever be "perfect", but I've been playing since release and the differences are palpable.

Like others have said, in "normal" scenarios this issue is now effectively non-existant.

 

I can't recall the last time I was driving when I suddenly got teleported into the sky and fell back down at 600mph. In conclusion, be realistic and get realistic results, or be unrealistic and get unrealistic results.

 

the physics engine only runs at 2000hz. at 3000mph, you're moving over half a meter for every single physics step! you can't expect it to just keep working right.

for me, it's tuesday.

 

Hmm, strange. Did it hurt?

 

nope. instant death. these posts are coming at you live from an advanced gpt-3 and markov chain fusion powered by google analytics.

 

Right...

 

Okay but listen his idea to hide nodes that have too much force on them is a good one, it’ll stop spikes from showing.

 

A other thing i was thinking when will they get the node splitting into the game so that whole parts of the cars structure can seperate. They already managed that frames can seperate fom the bodys. I would like to see that happen to the the whole body so that it can be splitted or cut in half (would be also nice for a fireman rescue simulation where you can cut the car body with a rescue scissor)

 

yeah that's the next step in this game. it just squishes as of now, it needs to fracture.

also fireman simulation lol that's a funny joke

 

If you really want to know why this occurs, here is why:
The jbeam (physics model) is less detailed than the visible model. The game has to interpolate between the two, meaning it uses the physics positions to find the visible positions. If the physics model deforms to the extreme, the game can't interpolate correctly and spikes are formed.

 

Yeah I knew that. They’d have to invent some new tech for fracturing to work, which really needs to happen because crashes aren’t super realistic

 

What most people don't seem to understand is that BeamNG is an old game and even if you can surely improve it, it'll eventually reach the game engine's limits in terms of what's possible to do physics-wise.

BeamNG's physics skeletons (Jbeams) are designed with 1 goal in mind : be as realistic as possible while keeping performance cost down. They have to be efficient yet realistic. They also have to follow a bunch of rules such as weight, stiffness, flexibility, deformation, and overall density.

While in theory, a way to make nodes "disappear" when they get too far from a certain point already exists, all it does is remove chunks of the 3D model from where that node interpolated the model. It doesn't look good and it certainly doesn't happen in real life.

You could also say that "node-splitting" is a good idea, but I think that it really isn't. To do that you'd either have to invent some sort of node duplication tech, which would take years to develop and would probably be extremely unreliable, or you'd have to duplicate each car's node count by 2 to make them be able to be split. This would also take years because you'd basically need to re-jbeam every single car in the game from the ground up.


TL;DR : BeamNG's physics engine is fine as-is and even if it's not perfect it's already more realistic than every single other car sim on the market right now.