Early Experimental Preview of Career Concept

Can't wait for towing stuff!
My PC is lower-spec, so I can tell you if performance is iffy. (16GB Ram, 4GB AMD GPU, 6 Core 12 thread AMD CPU [Model names in my signature]) The current traffic vehicles run fine with my 16gb of ram (with vehicle pooling ON), so I think 10 is very reasonable.
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Also while i'm at it, can we have a Torque Curve UI intigrated into the Part Shopping somehow? It's annoying having to buy and install upgrades (then exiting) just to see the power numbers.

 

I believe I may of had some sort of glitch.

As I started a career, I bought expensive Covet from only three options that were given to me, then after driving off sequence, I did choose to immediately return to dealership and traded my expensive Covet for the much more economical option, which resulted car dealer to provide me some cashback.

Here by it was that glitch then happened, for some unknown reason, sell the car dialog did not disappear after purchasing the vehicle, so there was I did spam the purchase button quite liberally and found myself with quite large number of economical vehicles, which did not register under my name, so I could not sell them or equip them with cargo parts in my garage.

After this I did found out my treasury boasting quite considerable start up bonus from purchasing all those vehicles with negative sum, oh poor car dealer was probably ending up tearing his pants after he found out about it!

Sadly I have not found means to replicate this event as surely enough, I would of abused the bug once more if given the possibility.

Looking forward to next week's new surprises in 0.34 version.

 

As soon as 0.34 comes out i am gonna start a new save because I hacked my old save and it will occaisonally give lua errors and I created a hacked version of RLS's mod that also gives errors so i will be deleting both

 

Speaking of the drag strip. I don't know if it is just me or not, but i do feel like the end of it is pretty weird. Like if you fail to stop in time (because of things like brake fade or too weak brakes as a example) then are you straight up gonna get yeeted into the sky with the mountain as a ramp. I'm not really a fan of that to be honest. So some change at the end would be really nice. Like sand and barrels as example, just like the race track have when you run off the track. The rest of the drag strip is pretty fun though. More immersive tuning would be really nice too.

 

So I've been enjoying the heck out of this career mode, I just did a "speedrun" to $1,000,000 doing just deliveries getting a T-series tractor/trailer ASAP. About 5 hours to get a daycab COE upgraded to an optimum setup that I came to in earlier attempts, made a mil by 16.5hrs including destroying a lot of $50,000-$100,000 loads and almost never using insurance claims. I did it in an almost uninterrupted play session for peak immersion, my prefered playstyle and this sandbox play is like you made it just for me and my OCD, thank you.

What I found is the tractor trailer cargobox options make the 32' lead b flatbed almost useless when two of them and a 28' in a three trailer road train carry less than a single 48' trailer.

I'm guessing that's WIP and not balanced yet, I'm curious how a few people have done custom cargobox setups for mods and such, modifying the files I'm interested in notepad++ seemed too involved. Is there and utility for adding/modifying cargoboxs or documentation on how to somewhere?

A few days of googling has just found one person asking eh same question on the forums here and him responding to himself a "nevermind figured it out" rather than saying what he'd figured out. I just want to change the 10XL boxes to stacks for 20 or preferably 24 on the 32' lead B and 20 on the 28' to make the hassle of b-training worth the effort.

 

Playing this new 0.34 career mode has shown to me that low cost vehicle options have been moved perhaps slightly upwards in term of price.

Where as in 0.33 low cost Pessima or Covet set one back 500 or even less, now I have observed pricing being more than 1500 game money units.

It has been quite shortwhile that I have been able to play for now, but as vehicles seem to behave quite the same regardless of mileage, having a vehicle for 300-400 most certainly did have quite an advantage over sparkly spanking new one and this balancing of the cost does help bit with the issue as getting new one instead of repairing the old one was most certainly a hacky method of getting around of the problem poor driving ability of mine caused at the times.

So it is now a bit more interesting to take care of the vehicle, which is good.

I do wonder if there are plans to make older and more affordable used car options to track slightly off from the true or perhaps even to have small electrical gremlins as a bonus for lower cost?

Certainly in real world I were a proud owner of vehicle which kind of lost it's fuel overnight leaving only 15 liters of it as there were lesser minor rust hole in fuel tank, which made me fill said vehicle to only 15 liters of fuel. Naturally I ever found out about this after firstly filling tank to the brim and loosing all that expensive motoring liquid over night.
The very same vehicle also did have a habit of loosing some air pressure from bottom part of the front left tire overnight, so it did require some refilling every morning.
This high quality automobile did set me back a bit more than 500 euros when I purchased it in real world, so I have been thinking if such interesting options have been planned to be added to game at some point?

Also every vehicle which I have ever owned has came with some extra dents or holes as a standard option, one vehicle did have even most of it's right side bumper replaced with somewhat large hole.
Of course my budget for purchasing new excellent quality automobiles has never exceeded 1000 euros so they do tend to come with some additional options and extras like a rust and bend underside parts, blowing exhausts and alike, in game these more cost effective options do seem to sit slightly better compared to real world versions, but perhaps it is for gameplay or technical reasons, so increased cost of lowest ones do seem to be interesting and welcomed change.

 

I've been doing time trials (I'm about halfway through). So far I really like the aggressive time standards. The vehicle I've been using is about 0.367 ps/kg and as I've gotten further along it's been pretty tight (i.e. some level of skill is required to achieve the time standards). However I've encountered two issues.

1. The "Best Lap" in the UI has been cut off.

2. The challenge "Urban Assent" is broken. I even re-attempted it with a better suited car (ETK-K Series with 0.567 ps/kg) and was only able to manage a 2:34.08 with a best lap of 42.83. I think someone subtracted 1 minute from the total time. The game thinks a 59.00 is an ideal lap time, add two more 59.00 plus 2-4 seconds for the standing lap and that puts the avarage time to 3:00.00-3:02.00 as a reasonable "high score" I will finish the remainder of the time trials and report back (hopefully later today)

 

I've noticed it seems to be possible to get stuck attempting to pick up cargo (the screen that pops up and says loading cargo never appears, leaving your brake stuck on forever) but I can't figure out why from the logs. It works fine in safe mode so I'm assuming its something wrong somewhere in my userfolder but even with all mods disabled it keeps me in limbo


edit: after about 30 minutes of doing things at seemingly random i seem to have resolved it on my end? my absolute best guess is that somehow a ui mod breaks it but i dont think that explains how it can be affected when all mods were disabled?

 

Wow! Krallopian listened to me and put new bus stops around!!! This is what makes the Beamng devs unique. Best devs ever.

 

Would it make some sense to have automatic route feature to make timed cargo as a priority?

What I have found out is that sometimes I pick up timed cargo and automatic route makes me spend some time to some other cargo instead, which sometimes might be less optimal.

Of course it is possible to turn off automatic route and make manual route instead, so this is not so much of an issue than quality of life challenge.


Another interesting event has been with trailer deliveries, when I pickup trailer, I tend to pickup some other cargo as well or maybe even cargo from another loading spot, but from some reason while trailer drop off location is shown by navigation arrows, actual drop off location remains hidden until I visit at the map screen and then exit map screen.

Sadly I am not aware what exactly causes trailer drop off graphics and triggers not to function, but I can get around with this issue with opening the map screen and then exiting the map screen and then drop off graphics appear and trigger opens menu ui items normally.

 

Thank you for the response! I wish there was a way to balance out the time trials based on power to weight if the player decided to use their own car (if their car is faster than the one provided). I feel like the Race AI is still very WIP, lol. I was able to beat the Beginner Race, Pipeline Drive and the city race with my car only being at 0.129ps/kg =D

 

With 0.34 out, I thought I'd chime in with my own combined feedback (most of which is weirdly trailer-related):

Observations/questions:
- Any way to tweak the spawn points at the commercial garage as to enforce more reliable spawning inside the garage rather than at the parking lot next door? Particularly with truck & trailer setups, it happens a lot that one of those things spawns way over across the street, even when there's still room in the garage. That's particularly awkward if the actual motorized vehicle ends up outside, with only the trailer at hand.
- Not sure what the player vehicle limit is about (or whether there are any neat plans to expand it with player progression), but it feels odd that trailers (even trailer dollies) count towards it. Perhaps it's just my uncanny obsession with articulated cargo-running contraptions, but it feels a tad too harsh how quickly I hit the limit on cargo vehicles alone.
- Any chance we can get an option to summon player-owned trailers to our current location, perhaps for a towing fee or something? You know, for those occasions when you find yourself at a cargo facility with tempting jobs, but no appropriate cargo slot at hand.
- I believe this has been mentioned before, but I'd be all in favour of being able to take on more than one trailer job at a time. Those B-train leads are just too tempting.
- Are there any plans to have jobs for those neat specific loads like planks or pipes, so we can put other things than those odd boxes on our flatbeds and box trucks? Being able to put those logging rigs and dump beds to good use would be great, too, but I suppose that's just wishful thinking... (?) ;-p
- This is just a balancing issue, but it feels like semi trailer hauls should pay more, considering how expensive a good tractor setup can be. Relative to hitched trailers, liquid runs or XL cargo, the pay-outs just seem a bit off.

Glitches:
- There's still that odd glitch where trailer drop-off points randomly don't show up in-game when in proximity (screenshot attached). This is easily fixed by bringing up the map screen, causing the drop-off area to re-appear, but it happens a lot (I can't seem to reliable reproduce it, though).
- It also happens a lot that nav routes to trailer drop-off points remain on-screen after delivering a trailer. Again, easily fixed by hand on the map screen, but still.

Praise:
- All in all though, career mode is amazingly fun and disturbingly satisfying even in its current iteration. Thanks so much for allowing us to put our hare-brained contraptions to good use with no regard for sanity or road safety.

EDIT: Forgot the bit about spawn points.

 

You can, I use two 48' flatbeds and dolly, I occasionally set my second road trailer as my favorite vehicle so if I can't fill both trailers but there's some parcels and a good trailer delivery I drop the second and grab their trailer with my dolly.

It's fussy how you drop/load like having to drop all my stuff and hitch just the delivery trailer to get it to work or trigger the targets on foot.

But when I'm done I can line up me, my lead trailer and dolly in a straight line, go stand about 50' behind looking at the dolly and call my favorite vehicle like a taxi, then just back into the pin if there's no obstructions causing the trailer to spawn offset as far as I can tell.

 

My current (realistic) career wishlist is:

1. A way to reserve jobs (delivery related) from the computer (or mobile device*)

2. Using one of the provided vehicles would take a percentage of the rewards and no vouchers. Provided cars could come in 3 tiers, a 1 star tier which would take 15%-20%, a 2 star tier at 30%-40% and a 3 star tier at 45%-60% of all rewards.

3. Increased payout for beating a previous best (in a % based increase) for laptime or 3-lap best or both.

4. A mobile device to get jobs.

As far as performance balancing, I made a post in the bug reports section about some strange things that go on with some cars. Maybe that might help with career balancing. All in all I finished all of the time trials and I was very happy with the gameplay loop.

For the road corses, I think you can make the time hacks more aggressive. I was able to complete them all with many seconds to spare in my Barstow sitting at 0.324ps/kg on 9" wheels on race tires. More aggressive time hacks would influence players to grind out for faster cars or figure out how to drive properly/tune. For example I was able to get an average of 1:45.8s on the long racetrack configuration in the above car.

 

Ok, but you're still the best devs.