I have first impressions, The handling and damage may be forgiving but the game is still quite brutal in it's way. It actually does have the feel of slightly more violent Finnish folk racing. The AI is competitive, probably the best balanced racing game I've come across and the game play is good. Its a fun arcade racer and that's not a bad thing. You can win in a fair racing environment and its an achievement because so much can happen to put you in last place instantly, you're not magically quicker than the AI and the AI are actually fairly competent drivers. We all race on the same physics engine with vehicles that seem to perform similarly. This game will be a fantastic tide over till the day BeamNG can give us races and hardware exists that will allow us to simulate 24 Bruckell Moonhawks at 60fps. For what bugbear advertized it doesn't live up to it, but for what it is it feels like what they wanted Flatout to become originally. Its a nice game, and BeamNG is in alpha. We're probably 5 years or so away from anything resembling a finished product from BeamNG. Here we have NCG giving us a rigid body version that still approximates extreme amounts of damage. It gives us some arcadey handling, 24 cars and destructible environments using known technology that is accessible to hardware that exists today. It'll have a shorter development time than BeamNG so it'll be out before BeamNG.drive. BeamNG aren't working with existing solutions, they don't exactly know what they're doing because Beam is new and its probably kind of a science for our development team. It has the hallmarks of a science anyway, look at how they've been developing the tire model. It hasn't been a process of "we have a bug, fix it with this known equation". There's been genuine experimentation and learning experiences to get the Beam.NG tire model to where it is. That's just one aspect of the physics engine in Beam. NCG doesn't deserve the hate we seem to be bordering on in this thread. I can tell you now that I own it that its good. Its like they made the cars out of the blocks in Space Engineers if I'm honest but its still quite fun.
It is indeed fun (somewhat), that's exactly what it's supposed to be. An action racer. Also, you are right, it is indeed in the style of the more rural Finnish races. All of the parts flying about and trash to knock over is pretty entertaining. Pretty much the perfect flatout 2014. That said, I find the handling to be far too arcade at this point and the AI rather uncompetitive. The environmental destruction is also neat, but it seems that most of the trackside walls aren't actually really destructible, merely the outer layer can break away. My largest complaint is the canned feeling to the oversteer and handling in general....I haven't spun out once due to oversteer, even with just a keyboard. I'm thinking (hoping) they will improve the handling over time. It is rather well optimized (more on the CPU side rather than the GPU side at this time), though the operations are far more approximate and far less frequent than beamng's I still don't think the titles are really comparable at all. It would be similar to comparing Assetto Corsa with NFS: Rivals. It just so happens that the two titles being discussed in this thread are more likely to attract similar customers due to a general misunderstanding of physics vs. 'fun'. I find the former to be considerably more entertaining. 5 years? Honestly, I don't know what you're expecting from this implementation of beamng.... You need to be thinking 'refreshed, more accurate and nice RoR with some new game modes' rather than 'AAA style action racer'. I expect the beamng dev team is hoping for a decent portion of content creation to come from the community, just as we see with RoR. I believe their hopes are well within reason, too. A decent base engine, cool devs and some nice base assets are all the (ex) RoR community requires.
what I'm expecting is for the developers to finish making the physics engine, move us into beta and start on the game play side of things. It would be a shame to leave it as just a physics engine technology demo thing without going for some kind of everything you can think of simulator. Especially considering tdev and estama haven't simply encouraged LJFHUTCH and Gabester to make mods, but actually employed them as part of the dev team to create a huge library of assets. Once you have the assets, if all you want to do is create a game engine then you wouldn't need to permanently take on any artists. They didn't commission the two artists for a short time to create a few assets for demonstration purposes and then let them off as normal users that create mods voluntarily like Mythbuster and Dkutch do. They actually went ahead and took them on board as full time team members. That's why I think they're going to make an actual game out of this.
I still see beamng drive primarily as a platform to launch and demonstrate their IP. The need for such a platform happens to be served nicely by the creation of a pretty complete game by a very small 4 person independent development team. An 'everything you can think of simulator' is kind of a tall order for a development team consisting of 4 people total, unless you count community created content as part of it. Notice how many re-used assets you can find in AAA titles, sometimes for several sequels. Getting together a moderate library of 'base' assets (there's already a decent start imo) would be a perfectly reasonable expectation. 'huge library of assets' is where I think your expectations might be a little extreme. Sure, if they could allocate 5 years of their life solely to asset creation (as a full time job), perhaps two people could create a 'huge library' of assets. I don't believe that's a realistic expectation. A single mid-sized map of decent quality with a reasonable amount of unique assets is going to take a month at the absolute minimum if you are creating/capturing your own textures and creating models from scratch, especially if you plan on some level of decent optimization. Model LODs alone can be very tedious and time-consuming if you do not wish to end up with very noticeable pop-in. They are also usually required for basic optimization and are certainly required for beamng+torque3d. They are going to make an actual game out of this. Though the base engine may support basically every sort of vehicle/transportation you can think of, I certainly don't expect these 4 people to provide that much content based on the price they are asking. Take a look at the content base behind RoR. Many, many man hours with a much lower standard of quality than we are expecting from beamng, yet there still isn't that much truly worthy of installation. Just go easy on 'em, they have already done a great deal of work and I really don't believe the whole particle/car-part-overload 24 cars crashing about wildly in the style of a NCG action racer is a realistic expectation either. They aren't really targeting the same thing. Quality over quantity, beamng's maps are already considerably more interesting than the standard (and incredibly wide) tracks you find in NCG, even if you can't knock some oddly light rubble off the outer layer of a wall.
i hate youtuber's (most, not all, some actually know what there talking about), they have to be the most IDIOTIC people on earth: (imported from here) in reply to one of my comments, which was in reply to another idiot's comment saying how NCG is better then BNG crash wise (which i had a whole comment saying how thats not even close to correct, and BNG has Soft-Body, NCG does not then, this snakerpace guy replied to mine, with the above comment (i saw it in my email, youtube is glitchy this morning, wasnt showing up when i clicked reply) so yeah, youtuber's are idiots, the lack of knowledge in his comment amazes me
Feels like we are repeating the same points over and over in the last pages. BeamNG Soft-Body-Based Vehicle Simulation with the aim of simulate a vehicle realistically Next Car Game An Arcade-ish with some Simulation traces successor of Flatout game. Aims for fun. Does not uses Soft-Body Physics AFAIK, but pumped up mesh deformation like in GTA IV and etc. Youtube comments about it are just poop, ignore them and live happy But the truth is that BeamNG and NCG can't stand to the Realistic and Accurate simulation of Big Rigs.
This is should help to clear things up: Better Version coming this weekend This video was actually just a test, but turned out better than expected so why not upload it
Should have used the Moonhawk. Nonetheless this video can clear up the superiority of the BeamNG engine.
Wow. I didn't even realize that NCG had it that bad with the one frame stuff. I already knew it was inaccurate compared to BeamNG, but just wow.
I actually didn't use the ingame slow-mo. For Both I used cheat engine to make it fair and slow down both games by the exact time.
I think it's really funny how there are so many people who think ncg is the best optimized game evar made in the history of evar. Really it's because it's a physics engine designed to run on pentium 3's running on modern processors (basically). In 15 years I should be able to launch this game and simulate 24 cars too, no problem.
CPU wise NCG is very good but there needs to be some GPU optimisation and graphics drivers. I personally can't wait until NCG is in a more finished state. At the moment it has as much content as a demo (2 cars, 2 tracks, 1 arena), but the basis is there.
They're literally simulating less than 1/10,000 of what BeamNG simulates, so of course they can run 24 cars smoothly. It's simple, computationally cheap rigid body physics like GTA 4/5.
Oh, I totally get that, I'm not one of those people who think "it must be soft physics and it's just like BeamNG". It's still impressively optimized though, with all the tires, debris and car count it can still work well on pretty low specs. I'm not taking anything away from BeamNG either, both are great in their own completely different way.
