Please note: the following is meant in a positive way, and just hoping for improvements As a new player, I'm enjoying BeamNG very much. But also as a new player who's not grown up with the "game/simulation" it does feel like loads of work is being done to improve the "finer technical points" whereas in-you-face items (like the Elephant in the room saying) are either ignored or not seen to be of any importance. Buildings/Trees/Lamposts etc being made of "Nondestructium" is a shame, but I get that wanting everything to break when you hit it, is a BIG ask. So, putting that to one side. Is there any chance in the near future years that any work will be done on the more in-you-face / obvious issue of Plants, Water and Smoke simply passing/clipping through car bodywork? Whilst on a race-track/road this may almost be a non issue visually. Once off road, which is a very enjoyable aspect of BeamNG it really destroys the sense of realism. Not being a Games Programmer, I of course cannot really appreciate the difficulty in making this a reality. I did think that given the rendering of different aspects of the "Game-World" that if/when the car was rendered towards the end of the frame, then this would block out the Plants/Water/Smoke as the car was laid over the top so to speak. But anyway, I guess my question is: Is there any intention/roadmap of this ever being addressed? Given BeamNG is now 9 years in the making, I suppose my fear is that, if it was seen as important then such a basic issue would have been long fixed, and we'd be onto the more finer points by now. So might this mean, it's simply not going to be fixed/worked on, or that it's just something that will come in a while if we wait long enough?
Hey, while I am not a programmer, I can try to help explain why alot of this does happen In order to same processing power, vegetation within BeamNG is set up as a model composed of various textures. Take for example, a tree. The trunk of the tree is a modelled cylinder with a hitbox set as a solid object, any vehicle hitting this object is stopped immediately. The branches, however, are set as a permeable hitbox, so while they will show down the vehicle, the vehicle can still pass through them. In order to get these to not be visible inside the vehicle, a real time rendering protocol would need to be employed that checks to see which part of the tree is intersecting with a vehicle, then further hiding that portion of the tree texture, while leaving the rest of it unchanged. Not only would this take up large computational power, it would also be difficult with the way trees and other vegetation are set up in game, since they are all one solid model, it would be difficult to near impossible to simply unload minor portions of that models texture in accordance to how a vehicle moves through it. The other option is have deformable vegetation which moves around the vehicle, but this would require insane computational power and as such be an impractical solution. Water is a different, but similar case. In a BeamNG world, water is placed as a model object similar to the branches of the tree as a permeable hitbox. However, the water case is unique, since it tends to stretch all the way across the map, sometimes being magnitudes larger than the map, it has an incredible low poly density to save computing power. This means that the water would need to be modelled with much more detail to allow for it to move out of the way when a car enters it, which, once again, would be very resource intensive. Finally, the animations for kicking up dirt and splashing water are actually not really deterministic by physics. Obviously, vehicle speed entering the dirt or water plays a role, however once the dirt and water particles are generated they are collision-less sprites. While this means they do not interact with object and, as such, clip through vehicles and walls, it does mean that they are significantly easier to render, since there can be huge amounts generated within gameplay. Because of how difficult each of these can be to implement on a simple enough scale where the computing power would not significantly worsen the games performance, they really dont have any intent to do so, and if they do it likely isn't an issue that will be fixed any time soon. Hope this helps
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Yes, I can totally understand that there's no way to expect genuine physics when it comes to plants, water, dirt, smoke and all the landscaping items. Well, not unless perhaps a totally different game engine was used, and way more powerful machines needed to run it. I guess in my mind I was thinking of the way a frame of the game was created, as in layers. like in photoshop, you could have say plants, but then, if the car was rendered on top, after the foliage then the car would simply? overpaint anything if you see what I'm saying. I of course presume it's not done in that way
