New Asset Management System - What Modders Need to Know With the latest release, we’ve introduced a major improvement to how the shared assets are managed in BeamNG.drive - the new assets/ folder and .link files. What’s Changed Most of the textures (and soon, all static meshes) have been moved to a single location, removing duplicates and reducing the game’s size .link files have been added to the map folder; these tell the game that the original textures and meshes are now live in the centralized assets/ folder This prevents mods that reference the files in the old map directories from breaking: file paths remain valid thanks to the virtual link system Creating custom .link files for mods is NOT yet available: for now, modders still need to copy and modify assets directly within their mod, if they want custom variants or changes. In the future (once the tool is released), you will be able to make lighter mods that always reference the latest game assets via .link files, instead of duplicating existing resources. We decided to release this first chunk of textures to perform a direct test and verify whether the moved files are causing issues for modders. Practical Tips If you create or modify a unique asset - save it inside of your own mod (do not overwrite those in assets/) If you notice missing files or broken paths after this transition, please let us know by replying in this thread Additional tools and guidelines will be released in upcoming updates. Thanks everyone, and happy modding!
As a new modder, struggling to make new objects with skins, this sounds really promising. Should become a massive improvement for the game's structure and for modders as well. I assume this will also help free up ram used for objects, improving performance a bit? (eliminating duplicates) You Dev's are really creating an awesome game.
Nice, i started recently with my first map and was wondering why i had to make all these duplicates. But i mostly wanna use my own assets any way. That's such a necessary feature. Thanks
Can we create new custom DAE objects with unique textures and .link those in a custom map (level) mod yet, or will the game not find those?
I can't find the location of the parts of the cars. --- Post updated --- Nevermind realized i was in the wrong beamng folder
Linking is good but hundreds of good old maps have already been broken in previous patches 0.36, 0.35 etc. All that's needed to enrich everyone's experience and bring those maps back is a small tool that would rewrite materials. 1. Find "no materials" / "no texture" - already possible via resource checker. 2. Write a list of broken materials and texture paths (not found). Already possible but not without filtering the warning ones (adding filter is 5 minutes). 3. Find those materials in official beamng levels - no such tool yet but vibecoded in 2 minutes with very fast parsing. 4. Rewrite the references to textures - no such tool yet. Boom, hundreds of old maps working again. Seeing how the repo is being reworked, more mods would benefit it. Also it would motivate more people to create maps since maintaining their mods would not be such a PITA every patch.
