Deformable terrain and knock-overable trees, or how Beam can be better Snowrunner

There’s been a lot of talk about how much processing power it would take to do fully realistic, beam-and-node physics for terrain and objects such as trees. No doubt this assessment is correct.
But then I remembered, Mudrunner/Snowrunner run on consoles. So just use whatever simplifications of the physics involved in mud and/or knocking over relatively fragile things like small trees those games use?
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of “good enough”.

 

Beam and snowrunner are running on completely different game engines. The short answer is: that’s not how it works, brother.

 

You are just repeating that like a zombie. If I had suggested breakable marble blocks six months ago you’d have been explaining to me why its impossible for vague engine reasons .
BeamNG already has some fair mud. The only problem is that how you attack crossing it has no effect whatsoever on whether you get stuck or not, and no visual change. It just needs to change somewhat visually (which we know is possible because tire marks surfaces) and in terms of grip (which we know is possible because not every surface in BeamNG gives the same grip to tires). It doesn’t even necessarily even need to have “memory” of damage done to terrain you’ve already traversed, that might be nice but not necessary. A very simplified approach to mud and the techniques for getting stuck or not stuck in it, which I’m sure is what Saber games use it, would add plenty to nicely round out off-roading in BeamNG.[/QUOTE]

 

If you would dive deeper into the technical stuff of BeamNG and its gameengine you just wouldn’t ask questions like a zombie. Sorry but your former answer wasn’t kind.

 

The fact that I understand how taxing really physically accurate terrain *on the same level as car body simulation in Beammg* would be on processors should be your clue that I have taken that dive, and even downloaded that beam and node mud mod at one point. Good, interesting work, and also overkill for purpose.

Terrain deformation physics accurate enough to simulate earth moving equipment or even freaking asteroid impacts aren’t necessary to enhance off-roading. An oversimplification such as MR/SR uses is superior to nothing/jackshit.

It basically comes down at bottom for the programming and maths that spinning your wheels too fast=digging a hole=more resistance to forward progress than the terrain was presenting formerly. It is, if you will, comparable to the problem of exerting maximum throttle for acceleration on pavement without just spinning your wheels and doing a burnout, the speeds and friction or lack thereof are just very very different.

 

if it was that easy it would've been done already.

you can transform the terrain with the world editor, but not only the "resolution" isnt big enough to allow tires to make tire sized mud holes, it also doesnt just deform by passing over it. (duh)
you think its just as simple as wheel maths. (so naive lol) but deep down, game engine wise, its not just that simple. the terrain is generated a certain way that quite simply put, wouldnt allow such level of mud physics as it currently is even if they somehow implemented terrain deformation.

the whole game engine would need a massive overhaul to allow mud physics at this level. and this is why we havent seen mud physics in beamng. (hell, we dont even have body scratches yet, let alone dynamic mud on your car, or tile mapping support for large maps)

and "repeating the same answer like a zombie" are you that dense? how difficult is it for you to grasp that TWO DIFFERENT GAME ENGINES ARENT JUST MAGICALLY COMPATIBLE TOGETHER?!?!
you cant just willy nilly decide, hmmm.. today im gonna take the mud physics from mudrunner and do it in beamng!!!
so everyone who "repeats the answer like a zombie" is telling you hard facts. you must be a zombie to not be able to grasp/understand the answer.
calling people zombies because they spit facts at you that these things arent easily done. bruh. the irony.


there was a single experimental mod that added a jbeamed mud pit.
https://www.beamng.com/resources/dsc-mud-pit.22556/
this mod is the closest youll get, until the devs decides to put plenty of hours to work to code a deformable terrain.

and btw, i literally did destructible foam cubes in 2018, nobody wouldve said its impossible to make destructible props in a game that already has destructible props.

 

“If it was that easy”

This is a logical fallacy. Was it ever particularly hard to add a limousine, or was it just something that didn’t get done amid more pressing matters?

Doing terrain deformation to remotely the same quality as vehicle deformation would indeed be borderline impossible, that’s easy to see. But that’s vast overkill. Clearly some form of mud is NOT a huge computational strain, as it was being done in 2014 by Spintires and today done by that game’s descendants adequately on potatoes.

Your point about terrain resolution is likely untrue, as there are rocks smaller on maps than at least some tires out there in the vanilla game. But it is also not relevant to this point, as on the fly map alteration won’t be needed. Now if people want actual earth moving with heavy equipment, ala the modded Farm Simulator I fool around with then yes you’d need real time terrain editing, but I digress.

Of course it is tire and vehicle math. (Everything happening on these screens in front of your nose is maths, you know that right?) BeamNG already has mud you know. Have you driven into it? Unlike say ice, when you enter it not only does the tyre friction with the surface change, resistance to forward movement increases dramatically. Increasing that resistance based on the tire behavior would at least begin to simulate crudely the physical outcome of spinning tires too aggressively in mud. If that theoretical “hole” disappears behind your path immediately, that’s fine, at least a little depth can still be added to off-roading in the bog.

Regarding scratches and such, many games do all their car “damage” simply by adding a skin to the side on which the collision has detected. The only reasons this hasn’t happened in Beam surely amount to 1. There’s always too many other things and 2. The Beam team wants it to be done in a more impeccably accurate manner than those other games. The same reason one must assume that tire wear and heating haven’t shown up in the vanilla game, though they have long been added to the game by modders,

I mean some fool, maybe the same one I ain’t keep track, was telling me that the FFB in Beam can’t be changed because of the engine, even though it has changed over the years, has been changed further by modding experiments, and already does exactly what is needed on a basic level (lateral G, a force calculated by the physics math, can optionally alter the forces sent to your wheel). Thus the torque you feel could be made to vary more discernibly with other forces, such as skilled trail braking making it go heavier as front tire grip increases, or lighter as brake application becomes excessive and front grip plummets. And yes, an optional vibration effect for things like lockup, spin, or gear grinding could also be sent to FFB wheels, the way I’m already doing with my pedals. IOW things some other car games have done for over a decade.

Have you calculated an estimate of profits from BeamNG sales? If engine limitations are *truly* holding BeamNG from progressing by achieving things that far less ambitious games were doing a *decade* ago, then it is only right to expend a large chunk of that profit reworking the engine or building a new one.

We don’t want the saying that BeamNG is strongest only as a “crash simulator” to be basically true into perpetuity.

 

It's the business model that they have chosen that has allowed them to stay solvent and profitable over the years. I don't think you fully understand how many man hours have already been put into this game, from a small dev team. This has allowed them to retain employees, pay them what I'm assuming is a fair and livable wage, and continue to give us updates for a game that's, what, a decade old now? Why would they abandon the game engine that they've basically built in-house and the game that's still in early access, to jump ship to another engine and remake all the content they already produced?

You were talking about something simpler: being able to knock over objects like small trees, street signs, etc. Just for perspective, right now, rally stages don't use collision physics for the prop barriers and such, because the devs said the performance hit was too much. I'm not saying new features can't or won't be added. I am saying there are limitations to every game engine and what works in one, doesn't necessarily apply to another.

 

Dude you have zero grasp on how the game works. Also the limo is complex because of the added weight and length. And a marble block is very simple… The game will likely not receive something like this for years as it would have to use a completely new physics system.
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Read over more of your stuff, you are beyond saving bro. Please look over how the game works before doing this, you clearly do not know anything about game development.

Respectfully, go do some research. If its that easy do it yourself.

 

all of that to make us paint a clear picture of your pure ignorance.

you clearly have zero idea how things work.

go educate yourself. because right now you dont even know the different between a mesh of a rock, and the actual terrain you drive on.
let alone the differences between a jbeamed vehicle, and deformable terrain.

 

So yeah, your replies are a bit passive aggressive, but unfortunately I have to say the same thing as everyone else: you need to do more research and educate yourself better on how game engines work. Let me remind you of something. When Unreal Engine gets a big update, about 90% to 95% of games stay on the version they were originally built on. But why not just update your game to the new Unreal version since it’s so much better? Because it’s complicated. Very complicated. And just the update alone can break half your game. It’s tedious and complex work, and for some teams it can take several months depending on how complex the game is.

Did you notice that very few games have terrain deformation like Snowrunner? That didn’t ring a bell? And just to be clear, we’re talking about real time terrain deformation that interacts with vehicle physics. Most games where you see the terrain deforming, it’s just an illusion with a normal map or a height map, or the ground sinks visually to create ruts without actually affecting the physics.

Another point. The physics of a single vehicle in BeamNG destroys the entire physics system of Snowrunner, which is much simpler than you think. BeamNG is not simple. In the editor, when you modify the terrain, the game has to regenerate the collision map every time you release the mouse after a change, and the terrain resolution is limited and not high enough to make ruts like in Mudrunner or Snowrunner. In Mud/Snowrunner, it works in chunks (a bit like Minecraft) with voxels adaptive resolution. BeamNG has none of that in its engine. We’re talking about a complete rewrite of the foundation of the base code which would basically break almost the entire game. You have no idea how complex and how massive the impact of changing a single low level line of code can be. It’s insane.

Why do you think the game still doesn’t have proper antialiasing (DLSS)? If it were simple, we’d have it already. It’s not just a checkbox the devs tick. Antialiasing is low level code that requires a ton of things (I’ll spare you the details). Just modifying that can destroy part of the game that depended on a single line of code. A game is incredibly fragile.