Usually AI in other games uses simplified physics so vehicle mesh is moved to position, but driving itself is not so heavily simulated. AI uses more arcade like driving model quite often if not always. Most of the games are really focusing on giving you impression of racing, they use really cool tricks that require also lot of work and skill to pull off, but they are more of magician tricks. It is not really bad, good magician show is really enjoyment too! . B25Mithc did autocross event with Automation developer, does that count as collab? Surely such activities are causing new ideas and information to be shared etc. After all bright creative people is same space tend to create something, quite often sparks too I think that lot of these topics stem from the fact that people bough game at early days thinking it would be banger racing game with cool deformation, but instead today it is also so much more, I would guess that originally developers could not even dream of what would be possible for them today.
Despite being a "magician show" they still feel better than beamng driving feedback wise. Plus i feel like drivability hasn't been very high on the priority list considering the fact there still isn't any kind of smart dynamic steering for keyboard/pad users.
There could be something in regards of settings I guess, for me feedback has more detail than what I get from AC for example, but surely BeamNG is much more difficult to set up correctly.
I recently wrote something in regards here: https://www.beamng.com/threads/possibly-a-new-engine.59255/#post-960618
There is dynamic steering for keyboard and pad users. The filter options dampen inputs pretty well, and you can set dynamic steering lock limiters.
Drivability gets quite a lot of interest on our part. A lot of the work on tyres, force feedback, torsion bars, mesh-based road experiments, etc that have been going on, either directly contribute to the drivability, or were a direct result of us wanting to improve drivability. However, this is often really hard to notice if you're driving with buttons, keys or sticks, since they are a extremely limited way to drive, and have no good feedback (even if we were to dedicate efforts for proper gamepad vibration support). Regardless, there have recently been experiments geared towards those who really like driving but, for one reason or another, haven't been able to (or decided to) get a steering wheel to drive. There were also experiments 2 years ago. These experiments didn't make it into any update yet because, while they were very promising, they also had corner cases (...and sometimes not so 'cornery') that would surely create lots of complaints and bug-reports on the forums. They were just not at the quality level we wanted, and additionally we have to be careful with were we pour our limited resources. So as usual, "no promises here"... but maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to see some improvements for keyboard/pad/joystick users too, in the future.
Not sure what you're playing with but I've played both AC and BNG with a wheel (G27) and only BNG with a pad, and AC for sure does feel way better on a wheel than BNG. And this has nothing to do with setting up because I've tried everything under the sun for BNG and it just feels subpar. I've tweaked on and on with those settings, you can tune them to work "meh" on a specific scenario but it'll be utter dogshit on the next. It fights you more than it does any good. If you look at forza, they have a smart dynamic steering system that just works... everytime... everywhere... wether you're racing on the asphalt, rallying or drifting, it's smart enough to know wether or not you're steering into a corner or when you're countersteering.
I admire the fact that the interest is there, I've followed the development over the years and the driving (with a wheel) certainly has improved a whole lot but the keyboard/pad department is still left untouched. I can drive fast in BNG with a pad no problems, takes a lot of focus but it works. My issue but it's so counter intuitive and bare that a lot of the times it sucks away the the enjoyment of just picking up something as simple as a controller and have a steering system that works with you rather than against you, and just go for a drive just to experience the great work done on the tyres, torsion bars and the roads without smashing into a wall every other minute.
Oddly enough, I prefer unlimited steering lock despite having to use a worn-out xbox 360 controller. The automatic steering lock limiter is one of the main complaints I have with Forza 7, the other complaint is the constant crashing in Forza. Beam has crashed less than five times in five years and 650 hours of playtime So I can only assume, seeing how extensive settings are in Beam, that all the driving help for gamepads is not going to be forced on
They left CryEngine for a reason, so I doubt they'll come back to it... Especially now, where they sunk in thousands of hours of work & money into Torque3D
Which is common place and completely possible to do. Do you search anything before you speak? If the foundation is crumbling, and the homeowner likes where they live, they support the house, pour a new foundation, then set the house back on it. On the subject of Torque3D, they went to it because the engine is open source and a tad more flexible than CryEngine. They've changed so much of the underpinnings of the engine that the only truly Torque3D thing left is the graphics renderer, and even that has been modified to oblivion and back. --- Post updated --- I use a wheel with Beam most of the time. If I ever want to just mess around causing big crashes or hunting scarecrows, I'll use a pad. But with a wheel, I can agree that something just doesn't feel right still. It's much better than it was even a year ago, but there's still something off. Playing other real sims like AC or rFactor or even going as far back as NR2003. I can't hold slides, cars understeer like mad, and everything is just so twitchy. Look, I'm not a good sim driver by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm not the engineer here, you are. But I don't have to be a chef to say that something about a soup is off, especially when I've had other soups by other chefs using similar ingredients. I think some of it may be down to countersteer. Real cars have an amount of natural countersteer in a slide. Two RWD cars in a wet and snowy climate have taught me that, so I can slide around pretty okay in real life. No sim I've ever played feels right in that regard, but AC is the closest (but still no cigar). I know that you guys will get there soon, and I'll be here when you do. Tire model. More work on tire and steering models. Your surface models might be fine, but I genuinely feel it's tire and steering models that are keeping you guys from figuring out whether or not your surface models really are okay or not. It's a chicken and egg thing, I suppose.
Research project. Now that is more like it. Thank you for your post. Occasional posts like these can work wonders in helping the community understand what is going on behind the scenes and for the community in turn to help others understand the unique ground BeamNG is breaking.
Jokes on you I live in an RV. Also that post was not entirely serious, was just pointing out that Torque3D is infuriatingly old and tedious (To me, at least.)
I have actually found this topic to be a worthy subject to provide additional information about whats going on I have made a few good points in it like a monthly or bi monthly q and a with the staff on the forums so we can all get an understanding whats going on about this
I have T150 wheel and Rumble Pad 2 gamepad, as well as kb of course, but I don't use kb, I have played enough car games with kb from times of pitstop and alike, that I just don't want to use kb anymore for much other than toggles and typing. Settings for gamepad I use: Those provide speed and the control that I want to have. I'm finding any other filtering than direct being too slow to react to my liking, but with these settings I get quick response and still enough control that I can do hotlapping. For wheel, I also set direct filtering, but it is more complex to setup, I don't use response curve as those generators just don't generate anything sensible with T150. 20 change of strength is enough to set it pretty much impossible to feel understeer, especially with some car setups that is quite sensitive as wheel is not that hugely strong. Smoothing I keep quite low, at edge of feeling 'jagged' when turning wheel, but with T150 at least sweet spot is quite small, can't have it very strong at all to feel understeer and have to increase strength for drifting to compensate FFB deadzone which I would need to deal with by hand crafting correction curve. That is pretty much limitation of hardware. AC can of course exaggerate many things artificially, but I'm not using those options in AC, I set for realism, I want to feel real and it is not that incredible then really, less detailed, but if you like from strong FFB, then you can get by with overly strongly settings better with AC. Here is Reiza guy telling you why liking of strong FFB might not be best of the things: https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/like-your-ffb-strong-think-again.30763/ Still at the end FFB is really quite bit matter of personal preferences, some squeeze wheel knuckles white when going faster, others barely touch the wheel, I like to thing wheel is fragile as potato chip, helps a lot with feeling of subtle forces of weak FFB wheel.
Sorry for bringing this up from the first page, but remember what WaCKedMAN (idk the order) said and did about the EULA. I feel like that'd only go well for so long.