I think making the car body into multiple pieces would be nice so you could do something like take off the roof etc. I really think this could make the game a bit more realistic. Also you have done an amazing job trying to make the game as realistic as possible.
The cars in BeamNG are built like the real things. Most, if not all cars have a body built in one piece, with panels covering the frame. Generally, the roof is part of this.
I never saw any kind of footage of Beamng that cutted something, almos 3 times a week i see some trucks that cutted the shipping container on a bridge.... And the car isn't made in one piece, alot of parts are weld to made a unic part, but on the weld points things have more chance to detach.
The boxtruck already can split in seperate pieces so if you drive it under a low bridge it will cut the roof off, depending on speed. You will almost never see a car or whatever cut clean in half, unless it was at high speed (at a very specific angle), or a poorly built car. The unibody on a car is designed to not come apart in a crash, so the welds are made very strong. There's a video on Mastermilo82's Youtube channel where they try to pull a damaged Peugeot 205 out of a mud pit with a K5 Blazer, by tieing a chain to the rear end. On the second attempt, instead of breaking at the welds, the rear panel rips off. Not at the welds. It just tears off. And that's on a rather old and damaged car... Even if you open the door on one car, and drive another car into it at full speed, it usually won't rip the door off right away. Usually it takes like 3 high speed hits before a door comes off... You can find plenty of evidence of that in old Davidsfarm videos. When they do come off, it's usually the bolts/pins in the hinges that fail, not the welds that attach the hinge to the body/door. However, you'll be able to rip the roof off on one of my future cars. Honestly though, the result just isn't good enough for how much time it costs to make it work, and I wish I hadn't bothered... (And I can't show a pic of it at the moment because the front and rear windows don't break yet, which means they stretch across the map at the moment)
like mythbuster said, it usually has to be a crap car, or an old one, like when my old english teacher told me about how some of his friends got drunk and got into their old tsuru, flew into an underpass with an intersection, I guess it was like a bowl of sorts with the 4 way intersection, and they were going so fast down the hill, when they levelled out, the suspension got pushed down(or however you say it) and they hit a bus, but a bus like this one, but with the axles intact according to my teacher, the four of them got guillotined by the bus, and the roof came clear off, sadly(not the best word for the situation) I don't have any proof the roof actually came all the way off. but yeah, don't drink and drive, kids. but on the beamng side, you couldn't represent this, seeing as you can't cut beamns without the swaths of missing texture, unless you make the points where the roof intersects with the unibody have a small web of beams at the base, so that when you hit it hard enough, the missing texture won't seem nearly as noticeable, which what I assume Mythbuster is doing, if that is how broken beams work.
I thought mesh tearing was going to be fixed and included at some point? wouldn't that allow this to work?
I do believe you are right, if I remember correctly, the main reason they wanted to do this was so they could cut the truck in half. but it would be awesome if when you crashed the bolide into the cargo van, it make a hole instead of a hugely warped dent.
Maybe if you noticed we already have some kind of "tearing" in BeamNG. They improve it with every uodate. If you watched it then you saw how it got better after some updates. Or maybe it just looked like it became better... whatever. They surely improve it and tearing will become more detailed and not so edgy. In theory i know how this would work but it will take a lot of time for the algorithm to be perfect.
You can set the strength of the beams of the car's body to something other than infinite in the .jbeam files. I have tried that and managed to rip the roof off, and the entire car apart it doesn't look good though because the beam structure is low resolution and there is nothing in place to make the cuts look better so it looks like theres massive cube shaped holes and cuts in the body
I can't wait to see when all the materials no longer clip within each other so that collision become a bit more clean and accurate. So far that is the only thing that annoys me but it's not exactly severe. I have a feeling that the coming patch is going to provide us with wonders. I really can't wait. That said, the current rendition of the game is loads of fun! I thoroughly enjoy driving around with the stock D15 with the Deathmachine weight in the back. Poor suspension just can't handle it and it's just so much fun! I think we should have lap time competitions with that particular vehicle setup. Whoever can complete a lap without rolling over!
