Did anyone ever thought about adding an OPTION in the game settings to make the maps have physics like vehicles? I mean when you smash your car in a wall nothing really happens to the wall. So I mean will it be possible to make the concrete fall apart, drive into buildings, trees or something like that. I know this will be possible for monster pc's only but consider this is a good idea?
I'm pretty sure that it is not possible due to the limitations of the amount of Jbeam you can have without the game being laggy or crashing. If anything, the most environment destruction we would probably be able to have, as far as large buildings and such go, will be on the level of Brick Rigs, and how those buildings destructicate after a certain amount of building has been damaged. Gee, I hope this makes some sense.
If only we had object sleeping, then this could be done without any framerate impact until you get near destructible objects, in theory
You know, I've been thinking about that exact sentence for a few years, now. Is it even possible? Or is it only theory?
Honestly, completely destructible environments aren't even easy to do with more traditional types of physics simulation. But to put it in perspective, Small Island (one of the smallest and sparse-est maps) has well over a thousand trees. And each tree would have about half the physics weight of, say, a Pigeon. The Pigeon isn't a greatly physics-heavy vehicle, but I have yet to see a consumer PC that can run 500+ vehicles of any type in realtime. It was a feature that the devs said they were working toward back in 2013 and 2014, but that they ultimately decided not to implement. Too much trouble to add, would slow the physics, and not many enough benefits.
How does a game such as Spintires or World of Tanks simulate a tree falling? Is it just a simple scripted happenstance? I mean, I would have to assume so. And if so, could something like that be applied to BeamNG. Drive?
Those games use a rigid body physics system that allows for physics sleeping or can spawn the needed body at runtime. Theoretically, one could add a rigid body object after impact with a tree to simulate it being felled, but the fallen tree wouldn't collide with the player (rigid body objects can't interact with Beam's soft body objects). A JBeam tree added at runtime would require a few seconds to load the object, just like how spawning a new car pauses the game for a few seconds.
Well, I don't believe anybody would need a whole forest of beam trees in this game. Just the fact that the environment is destructible at all would be pretty cool. Or one object, say a critical building or focal object (i.e. a town hall or landmark) could be destroyed in a BeamNG-like way while everything else could be more rigid and not as detailed with its destructive nature.
Game engines have their weakness and strong points. BeamNG has very very small maps without multiplayer and you can barely interact with the maps at all. Its strong points are obvious. You just cant have everything you want about a game without miracles happening.
Ah, yes. Thank you for stating the obvious. This was a theoretical discussion, if you didn't know. The problem is, with this recent update, the game started to have abilities that I for one didn't think were possible. We were discussing different possible ways, which have been shown in other games, that the game engine that could, in a speculative and academic way, be implemented into the game. I would actually say that not too many people have a firm grasp on exactly what the limits of the engine are. I'm sorry about the harshness of this response. I haven't had my coffee yet.