why is it taking so long to develop this game?

And this is why you aren't a mod (thankfully).

 

I really hope this secret FF means Force Feedback!
Keep up the good work!

 

assuming by FF you mean't force feedback, would that help keyboard users in any way (i'm imagining it would, as it would have to cause the ground and roads and such to cause the steering to move like it would IRL for that to work, would it not?) (my steering wheel is actually WORSE then keyboard, hence why i ask this )

 

Unless your keyboard has a force feedback function (Which I doubt), then no, it will not help you at all.

 

i don't think you get what i mean, for force feedback to work, the ground and road and all that would actually have to affect the steering of the vehicle (like the faster your going, the harder it is to turn and such) and because that feature would be required (at least IMO) it would also help keyboard user's, as the speed would keep you tires straight as you go faster, just like real life, but without that feature, your tires can turn freely, as there's no force being exerted on them keeping them going a certain direction

 

Okay, I understand, but on a wheel the force feed back would make it harder to turn as the wheel fights you, a keyboard has no way of doing this (It's either 1, 0, -1). While a wheel or controller has variable values between 127>0<-127. Force feedback Will fight you to go to a certain integer Like 60 if the tires hit something and it wants the wheel to go to 60. On a keyboard you wouldn't have anything fight you and the car already just hits something and goes in it's own direction. I do not believe force feedback will do anything other than move the wheel in your car and all it would do is go back to center afterwards (Unless you're holding left or right).

 

but because the feature is making it so certain speeds make it so that the wheel can only go so far before you reach the limit, it's harder for the car to just go spin out (obviously if you go crazy, they'll still spin out though )

it may be the way i'm explaining it, i know someone can explain how it would help keyboard user's better then i can explain it

 

FF obviously means Firefox. We're adding a browser to each car so you can go on facebook and twitter while driving. Not

 

oh, so ill take it the world of beamng doesn't have laws against driver distractions then?

(i did see the (Not) btw, just thought i'd make a joke that works with your joke)

 

I'm confused... Force Feedback doesn't do anything but transfer info to the motor in a PC Gaming Wheel... or the rumble in a controller. How would it be effecting how the wheel is moved on screen when using keyboard.. or affecting how the car drives after a crash in-game? it's only capable of effecting your input device. (Keyboards don't really count as a compatible input for this.)
-Just how I see it-

 

well without that feature of having wheels being affected by the ground, there's no point in force feedback, as it would still be the same as without it, because there would be nothing for the game to tell the wheel to use for force feedback (other then rocks or something causing the tires to suddenly turn for no reason i guess, but that's all i can think of)

besides, it'd be a nice feature to have anyway

(i imagine the way i'm explaining it is making it confusing to get what i mean, hopefully someone else does know what i mean, and can explain it better)

 

Damn, I'm late to the flame party. Fuck it.

Next Car Game uses rigid-body physics. BeamNG uses actual soft-body physics. Two completely different games.
There are 40 people working on NCG and only 7(?) working on BeamNG. Plus, BeamNG is much more complex. That's why development is slow. And because they're improving the physics engine rather than adding new features. Once the physics are working nicely, we'll get a lot more stuff, AI, etc.

 

When you crash in NCG, or any rigid-body physics game, the game applies pre-calculated deformation to the mesh. With soft-body physics, everything is calculated in real time, 2000 times per second.

 

Best example of rigid body would be the 3d era GTA games (GTA 3 through to vice city stories). Hit an object, your front bumper mesh unloads and gets swapped for a broken one. Same for doors etc. Load up a mesh for those games into blender/etc and you'll see they have modelled both the damaged and non damaged versions of the car already.
Physics will be calculated with the entire object treated as being entirely solid. An impact occurs on a cube shaped thing, they will of course calculate how far off from the centre of mass that impact was in order to apply a rotational torque and work out which angle it flies off at, plus of course they still have to simulate where the collision surfaces are, but there isnt any deformation occuring. The entire vehicle can be simulated simply as 1 large shape with a set centre of mass, fixed mass, fixed drag and then a velocity and rotation.

Next car game/wreckfest is Rigid Body. It is also rigid body done extremely well compared to the previous example, but the basic concept is the same. They just have multiple meshes for a front bumper and can switch between them dependent on where the impacts came from, but if you watch slow motion footage of NCG you can actually see where the game instantly switches from a clean bonnet to a damaged bonnet mesh in a single frame rather than gradually deforming it.

BeamNG is soft body. The vehicle isnt treated as entirely solid and there is no precalculated damage. Instead the physics are simulated in nodes, beams and coltris. The nodes are simply a set point in 3d space, beams link the nodes, coltris then link up the beams with a solid face for collisions.
Those old kids magnet toys where you had the seperate balls that could be linked with small magnetic rods to make structures, basically the balls are the nodes and the rods are beams. Coltris would then perhaps be a little piece of paper put in the gaps.

Each node has a mass, velocity and rotation and of course there are tonnes of nodes so that is already alot more stuff to calculate than rigid body. Then the beams all have various values for how springy they are and the strength for when they will break etc, coltris dont do as much. Something hits a coltri on BeamNG, it then pushes back on the 3 nodes its linked to, they then push on their beams, those beams push on more nodes etc etc etc.

A rigid body car perhaps has 20 different variables for the program to simulate a single vehicle, BeamNG has over 2000. Other games tend to update physics at 60, 120 or maybe even 200Hz, BeamNG aims for 2000Hz (although I would perhaps like to see the option of lowering that to 1000 or even 500, may aid lower end systems at the cost of slightly less smoothly done deformations, although I'm sure the devs have perhaps looked at that already).

 

Damn 6677, that post should head straight for the wiki. Nicely stated.

 

@6677, the reason they won't lower the physics Hz is that it also effects handling. Lowering it even 300Hz (which will happen on its own if the hardware is weak enough) makes the cars very undriveable. My laptop goes down to 1750 physics FPS with the Moonhawk, it's terrible. Also, how does one check physics FPS with the new debug UI?

 

Nope. When your laptop physics frequency decreases the game doesnt account for the varied timestep and therefore gives the effect of a game running in slowmotion. I was suggesting that it should account for a varied timestep.

 

Just to correct some things:
next car game does in fact use softbodyphysics, but only when a hard impact is detected and only for that one frame. the actual driving etc is done with hardbodyphysics and a traditional drivingmodel.

You can't lower the physicsrate in beamNG very much because it influences the physics. The higher the rate, the more materials can be simulated. With 5000 Hz (afaik) we could simulate materials as hard as diamonds. That's impossible atm. The rule is: the lower the updaterate, the softer everything gets.

 

Well, I agree on some points like more work on the handling for example. It's like driving on ice so it's not particually fun to drive around and explore. But they are a very small team so at least give them some credit for what they're doing.