... Well, I guess you can count both of yourselves lucky because along with zach444 here, I'm also an aspiring-to-be simracer (and eventually real-life FIA GT3 racing driver (I hope)) treating BeamNG as a serious driving simulator. I regularly switch between Beam and GT7 (yes, I know it's a simcade, but I don't really care. At least it's better than GRID Legends, Forza Motorsport, NFS Shift, Project CARS 1/2/3... there's a whole lot of stuff it's better than. No need to treat it like it's at the bottom of the trash can), and I find the reason Beam isn't getting much love from me as a serious racing sim is because there seems to be quite a lack of interesting motorsports content. Most mods are about production road cars that you don't usually race; you just drive them regularly on public roads, and the few ones that are primarily racing-based content/cars (and I'm really really sorry to say this, but rather unfortunately I do have almost ridiculously high standards) are rather inaccurate compared to their real-life racing series, or just don't adhere to any specific racing class at all, or are just flat-out boring (sorry LucasBE, your Carbonworks F4 didn't cut it for me). In fact, I actually returned to the forums for a while just to check up on Exchy's Scintilla (& friends, apparently. The ETK K-Series is also getting a GT3 racing model by E'X Motorsports) GT3 mod, for the teased widebody that was, according to Turbo49>, finished for the most part (I also helped with an Automation mod of someone's own, original Le Mans Hypercar to make sure it fit at least 80% of the actual LMH regulations for its accurate year (2023) in my downtime). Usually the inaccuracies in the racing cars can range from being minor, miniscule issues (such as the Scintilla GT3 not having a widebody (yet, as of currently) (sorry Exchy)) to major, glaring errors (such as HP or weight violations (being too over or under), driving assist issues (some racecars still have "comfort" drivemodes, of all things; I've heard this is a problem with the Automation exporter so I'm learning to tinker with drivemodes and driving assist values), etc., as is the case with most usual Automation racecar mods made to a specific class that you see on the first page of the Automation mod repo list, bar quite a few which do accurately conform to their regulations, vam's Automation mods as an example), but usually they are enough, unfortunately, to discourage me from driving them for the most part. (I would probably try to say more, but I think I've taken WAY too much time on this little, uh, "2 cents" post. Like jeez, it's not even 2 cents anymore, it's taken me the whole afternoon, starting to go into the evening. Man, I really need to take my OCD meds. It's not healthy, trying to obsess over these hypothetical gramar issues.)
Iirc around that time CryEngine (and CryTek) was going through some changes and almost went out of business. They changed licensing models a few times and a large portion of the dev work ended up with Amazon for their Lumberyard engine which then got replaced by a further modified CryEngine. It's been a source-available engine for years, and Ubisoft's Dunia is also (barely) based on it so I wonder how much of Amazon's and Ubisoft's work went back into CryEngine. Cryengine 6 has supposedly been in the works for over a year, dunno what's up with that. None of that really matters though, and I have no clue if any of the initial licensing issues influenced the Beam dev team. The Folding@BeamNG team only just fell below the top 2,000 teams in F@H. Pretty proud of everyone for getting as much science done as they did, it was a good time. Checking the list of members really is a look back in time I'd like to get back into it if I can, but power has been crazy expensive and I lose enough money per month as is. Maybe this winter. I'm also originally from Rigs of Rods, and always looking forward to more and more heavy equipment being added to Beam. Sadly their old forum got nuked, but that had to be as far back as even 2010 or 2011? Playing on an i7 870 and ATI HD 5770. Some pretty powerful stuff for the time I also remember having just moved as the Beam alpha dropped and downloading it for hours on phone data because I didn't have internet at the new house yet. Looking back now with over 600 hours in Beam, it was a great investment. Thanks dev team
Thanks for your opinion! I’m also hoping to sit behind the wheel of a race car one day. I totally agree that the game needs more Motorsport content, as we only have two race tracks in the vanilla game iirc. With soon-to-be 2K hours of gameplay I really think Beamng would benefit from more purpose built race cars. As the majority of the sim racing community nearly exclusively use race cars and not modified regular cars, a race version of the pessima is cool but isn’t enough imo. I’m for a new vehicle that doesn’t have a normal version (unless modded) but instead is an endurance car (such as lmp or similar). For lore purposes this fits very well, as “prototypes” allow you to go wild with design elements and other aspects. An example of this would be cars 2’s (one of my favourite games that I don’t play that much sadly) Marek RP 219D LMP2 or RWD P30 LMP1. They have what my mind can only describe as “aura” that makes them almost frightening to drive. That and Beamng also needs better AI, but that’s just nitpicking. TL;DR -I agree with your post -I share the same aspirations -Beamng needs better AI -Beamng needs more racetracks -Beamng needs lore friendly race cars, even if jbeam intensive On a side note, using Beamng as a racing sim might not be physically realistic enough, but it’d simulate accidents and failures perfectly, making esports broadcasting entirety possible (P.S: SomeGuy, you should check out BeamGP on YouTube!)
