Update Speculation thread

New cars are making old cars look barren.

(especially in mechanical components like engine)
I do wonder (If ever) there will be a full on revamp of the older cars to give them better textures, remade engine models, and more configs/features.

 

Its going to have facelift

 

Hopefully the render engine optimization will finally allow for streetlights/night driving.

 

I think that might take bit longer as illumination system would probably need redoing too, current system is really not working for that at all, you need something like 8x 1.0 lights to see even a bit, while daytime one 1.0 light (sunsky) is sufficient to illuminate everything to overly bright and if you then enable those 8x 1.0 lights everything burns white.

Of course in current system 8 lights will kill performance really bad as shadows are so expensive.

Not sure if rendering engine optimizations are Vulkan or separate optimizations, but whatever those are they are very welcome because physics are not really holding performance back anymore.

 

Vulkan will be super awesome when it comes out, there also should be linux support which is awesome.

 

I have reason to believe that the main issue at this point is the performance of Italy. In recent screenshots of the Italy map, it appears to be done. In one of the screenshots posted by LJFHutch, the main city appears to be complete too. I honestly think that Italy could have been able to be released around November, but these performance issues are holding it back until further notice. I highly suspect that the developers want to release the Autobello alongside Italy, so the next update probably will probably include both, but I believe that said update might appear in late December at the earliest.

The main issue here is when @tdev mentioning that Italy might not be ready for the next update, which makes me believe it could be released in the spring of next year, but then @Nadeox1 's claim that suspecting the update around the beginning of 2019 is overreacting. As of now I am simply confused, and if a developer could provide clarification about this, that would be great, mainly as to the issue of one or two potential updates.

 

0.13.x update this month, 0.14 with Italy December-January, maybe February at furthest?

If Italy comes with Vulkan, I suspect that it will cause some work needed to be done to mods as things might end up bit broken, but I very much would think that there would be pre-Vulkan update that will give transition period.

However It can be Italy comes before Vulkan, only with some other rendering engine improvements.

It is obvious though that there is two updates before March 2019 unless Nadeox is having little fun on our expense

There is also some 10% chance that Vulkan will not come, but tdev did mention earlier this year they have been working on that, knowing that Italy needs more than 3 times better performance with current hardware that would be where Vulkan does help as performance issue is somewhat because of single core limits of the graphics.

Considering how much they have given out recently, I would think update is very near, probably in 2 weeks or so, but of course this estimate is probably far off.

Still if there is two udpates before March, then it can't be until December and if November it really has to be very early November. I would think much more of Halloween release and Christmas release, but mysterious are ways of developers, they always have so much cooking which we cannot be aware of.

 

You now made me wonder, if the 'performance improvements' made by the devs mean that they're working on Vulkan because of Italy, or just trying to push past the limits of Torque3D?
To be honest, I would LOVE if they would release Vulkan together with Italy, considering that the game itself would run better than it does now & maybe wouldn't be as taxing on the CPU

 

Josh the Awesome may have been a psychic

He knew too much, rip JTA, the only one who could decode the Devlopment blog

true martyr of the beamng forums...

 

Yes, but Nadeox did mention that it is still too early to tell if improvements are helping other maps, which can mean they working on Vulkan or not.

But would it be possible to make T3D run on Vulkan? I know there is a way to use OpenGL to wrap things so that it is easier to move to Vulkan, but T3D is DX11 piece.

Tdev has also mentioned in regards of PBR that they will not move to new T3D but make their own. It is kinda vague short comments around the forums though, but putting all these pieces together would lead to new engine that uses Vulkan?

Anyway it is not easy thing to pull off and takes time, as tdev himself has mentioned, so I would be surprised of this year release of Vulkan, I would think at least 1 more year, but what I would know.

I'm 90% certain though that Vulkan will come as it is not only best option for .Drive but also thinking their research project, work that would allow software to run on more platforms (science world is SGI, *nix etc.) and knowing doing something that gives benefit on two areas rather than working everything twice over is very much best course of action for small team, this all really means there will be Vulkan, only question is when.

It also means that they would not do work on current renderer if that work would not be simple to do and not to be wasted in near future, so is is new renderer then which gives those improvements, remember tdev mentioned they need more than 3 times performance they currently have, it is over 300%.

Or then I miss, again, but that is nature of speculation

 

I reckon T3D is going to be a painful staple of BeamNG for quite a while, maybe in 2019 or 2020 they will switch to something better, but at the moment, it'll have to be T3d.

 

I believe the game has gotten too far in development to be able to be switched to a different engine. T3D is a really good engine for BeamNG and I don’t see them moving to a more complex engine like UE4.

 

T3D derived engine is possibility though, making enough modifications to T3D that it is kind of new, while remaining compatible on areas where it is possible and saving amount of work.

I remember reading them saying that other engines would not give enough performance room for their physics or something like that, I'm not exactly sure how that is, but while current engine is bit limiting in gfx department, I would think that is possible to be solved, but how much of T3D will remain at the end?

 

Where did this whole idea of Vulkan come from?? What it more than likely means is they are just optimizing parts of the engine that are already problematic.

Switching to Vulkan is a great idea if they were also to advance and rework parts of the engine to update it, but just switching to it with no real advancement elsewhere seems like its going to cause more technical debt to build up and need reworking anyway in a year or so.

Better to do all the major work at once then update it over time than do random bits and pieces then fix them all to work together later on.

 

As posted earlier (who really would go back hundred page or so):


https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-on-linux.53767/#post-833235

So what do you think, would they improve rendering engine and move to Vulkan, then release Italy before March next year?

 

Ah, definitely hadn't seen that, should be cool to see. As for it changing that soon, I guess its possible if they have been working on the engine since back before that post in April. Progress should be quite far on if thats the case but I would have expected some sort of progress or teaser at this point. Unless it is solely optimization and no visual changes, which would be a shame.

They also mentioned that PBR could be coming in the future so its confusing as to why they would finish a map like Italy without it just to end up reworking a ton of things down the line.

 

Yeah, looking by likes etc. on that thread, most seem to have missed that, I didn't notice that either until very recently, but it is really something that should help to open potential of this game.

Still, we must remember that all these bits of information are something experimental and something they wish to implement, there is always chance plans have changed, some unforeseen challenges forcing different choices etc.

For me Vulkan before March sounds too soon, even if they would of been working on Vulkan before April, I would think it could be 2 years to make it happen, maybe even more as they can't totally break the game etc.

Still even with Vulkan, there are rendering improvements to be done, those could be made before Vulkan support comes, but I'm not sure if those are alone to help Italy to run so much faster as was mentioned, making it run more than 3 times faster before March (also is it really coming before March that too is strongly based on guess).

So it is very much just a speculation, trying to guess probabilities without much data and even from what data we think we have, lots can be off.

However next 365 days is probably going to be seriously awesome in how much game will evolve, lot of big things has been worked on for a long time and we probably will see them released, at least some of them, so probably we are moving to one of the coolest BeamNG year yet and even this last year has brought some really cool stuff, so surprises will be lots and possibilities of speculation nearly limitless

I lack ton of information about PBR though, not really certain how that will affect and how much possible it would be make old assets compatible with it etc. I'm barely starting to understand how graphic performance bottleneck actually is possible to avoid in current game, which then probably changes completely right about when I could actually be able to understand how to avoid greatest pitfalls, but that is how it always is, I'm so slow learner

 

Yeah I agree on March being a bit too early also.

As for PBR it would be a case of redoing asset textures to work with it where needed, main difference is that PBR uses "height" "metallic" and "roughness" texutres as well as diffuse and normals. Older textures should work just fine with it too, although they wouldn't be nearly as a nice looking. Its mainly metal, vegetation and painted surfaces that will benefit from it in particular, but its quite noticeable on anything. How that will be able to work with the current and terribly convoluted texture system of using alpha as a way of defining reflections is still something I'll be curious to see how they work out.

Overall its pretty time consuming to do, however not impossibly so.

 

This is the first time I ever heard of Vulcan. How did I miss that post back in April?

 

Probably improvements to some older vehicles will be done after they move to PBR, if such move happens. Also East Coast might use some texture improvements and I would except minimum vram to move 4GB at some point as hardware has advanced during the years and if they need redo some textures, then it would make sense to make it to that time's standard.

Today anything less than 4GB vram starts to be bit old tech and 6GB of vram being most common, 4GB is entry gaming now already, so that would allow some room for better visuals.

I guess that with improvements to rendering that could lower vram usage too, which might help bit more.

Oh you all thought senile fufsgfen is mumbling nonsense again? At least randomly there is some sensible facts in my ramblings, purely by luck though