Here is another text post since my last updates are not worth video demonstrations, like I said in the last post I'm mostly focusing on fixing bugs and refining existing features so they're stable enough for release. That being said I did manage to sneak in a few new features, the biggest of which is random parameters for the used car shop. Following the same logic as randomized race parameters this now allows for Price, Paint and Odometer to be randomized for cars being sold. The way this randomness works takes into consideration the idea that higher odometer means lower price by having both values share a single random roll and applying it to the cost/odometer range values in such a way that the lowest price means highest odometer. A small QOL feature I added is this simple "Loading. Please Wait." message that shows up whenever BeamLR is currently saving vehicle state, which can happen often. I'm probably going to use this in more cases where the game is currently loading stuff like when traffic is being re-activated after a race that had traffic disabled or when initially loading into the scenario, however I thought it was more important for now to add it in places where players don't know something is happening in the background. Again it's a very simple addition but one that should help prevent spamming buttons that just take a while to do what they're supposed to. I also added "large" traffic vehicles to the traffic system, like police vehicles they're full detail so their numbers are limited compared to the regular low detail traffic. On my PC the trucks seemed to cause massive FPS drops which I thought were CPU bound problems, assuming the higher amount of beams to be the issue, until I noticed that it only happened when I'm looking at the trucks. Switching Texture Quality to low fixed the problem. My GPU is quite weak so that's probably not something that will affect everyone, but you should give it a shot if you have low performance with traffic especially if using trucks. If you favor performance over looks on a mid range PC I think this is a good tradeoff. In the bottom left of this next image you can see the performance I was getting with settings: Extreme Traffic (18), High Police (3), High Trucks (3) It's quite playable and this amount of traffic is already too much in my opinion, so overall I'm fine with this type of performance for now. That being said we should see improvements as more simplified variants are added. Keep in mind the numbers for different traffic densities don't exactly represent the total amount of active vehicles of each type as pooling is used to allow more variety. The amount of pooled vehicles is tied to the amount of total vehicles spawned so using higher densities does work as expected to spawn more vehicles but in reality the values represent how many variations of each vehicle group will be ready to use as traffic. More variants also mean higher chance of running into that type of vehicle. The options menu was also updated to allow more options and is now organized in categories, of course Truck Density has been added as a traffic parameter. I've also fixed a few bugs, one of them was related to integrity loading on vehicles causing gas values to be reset in a few of the places where the scenario would save then reload a vehicle, another I believe was the cause of unfair damage that happens when loading beamstates however that bug is quite elusive and I'm not entirely sure it's fixed since I can't reproduce it reliably. It's like in some cases something happens during the saving process that causes some beams to break when loaded and wheels just fall off, yet still seem to rotate and fly off randomly when you try accelerating like they're still attached to axle. With my previous workaround this is only a problem if you save a damaged vehicle as pristine saved vehicles will be fixed when this occurs. I have no idea if this is something I'm doing wrong or if the beamstate system has issues as it's a part of BeamNG that's rarely used so it could have some bugs remaining.
The concept of a daily RNG seed has been added to BeamLR which allows for more realistic vehicle dealership and gas station game mechanics. Before this new feature was added clicking the "Buy" button on the vehicle store UI would generate a new set of vehicle every time. With daily seed the same stock will spawn for the entire day like in SLRR. Since the same vehicles will spawn again I've also made it so buying a vehicle will remove it from the available vehicles in the shop and keep the slot empty for the rest of the day like the vehicle was actually purchased. Gas Stations also use daily seed, this system is paired with modular triggers to give each station a different daily gas price. Daily seed is updated dynamically as time crosses midnight so the gas price will change as that happens. Daily seed is used to offset a base seed which stays the same for the duration of a career. A setting will be added to change the career seed however that new seed will only take effect after a career reset. This base seed can be shared between players to experience the same daily RNG rolls. A few days ago I took some time to fully populate the vehicle stores by adding 1 to 3 configurations of every vehicle as possible models to spawn. Some vehicles like the Scintilla and the Bolide can only be purchased from the new vehicle store. Brand new vehicles are more costly and have odometer set to 0 while used vehicles have prices and odometer values that are randomly generated as mentioned in the previous post. Prices are likely to change as the mod is tested, I've mostly relied on prices shown in the car selection UI to make value ranges. In fact most price values in BeamLR are currently placeholder and will be for the first released version of this mod as there are way too many parts for me to go through and fairly give a price to and I don't even know what values would be good. This video also shows two features previously mentioned in text posts being the WIP vehicle painting UI and the wait message. Still no ETA on release as there are a couple issues remaining I want to fix and I'm not sure how long that's gonna take, however this is probably the last showcase video I upload until a first version is released. This seeded RNG feature is the last major mechanic update I'm going to add to the project before release. I had not planned on adding it initially but I noticed how a purely random car shop could be abused to get better prices with no penalty and gas price difference had been in my mind for a while so this was a good opportunity to get that working while also using the new daily seed to get daily changes in gas price.
This is a great idea. I love the realism it will bring. Looking forward to driving an extra 10 miles to maybe save a few cents a gallon like in real life, how immersive
So real you'll forget you're playing a game Realism aside I'm also planning on giving a gameplay purpose to gas price changes by letting the player stockpile gas canisters in a basic inventory system, with first aid kits to restore HP after a crash and various other consumables. Also this is something I thought about while implementing the gas station, possibly the combustionEngine.lua function "scaleOutputTorque" could be used in conjunction with more expensive types of gasoline to give tiny performance boost to certain vehicles. Though I don't know how to best implement this feature to please realism enjoyers and make for fun gameplay, I think a very slight boost to the engine when using the high octane gasoline could be fun to add. The "Drain Tank" button was for my own testing but I'd keep it in as a way to make sure you have a high octane fuel mix before going on a race in a drag fitted car. Being in a forum of car enthusiasts I know someone will correct me here but I think in real life it's technically not giving a boost and just letting high compression engines hit their peak performance? I guess it could also be implemented as a handicap when you're not using high octane fuel in those vehicles.
While recording the previous video I found a bug with the Covet causing doors and other animated panels to become bugged out after beamstate is loaded. This is unfortunate given beamstate is a key part of this project. The feature is rarely used by players so I don't know how long it will take for devs to fix that problem. It also seems to be worse with the Scintilla which can also result in the vlua instance or the game crashing. This is likely related to the new "Advanced Couplers" shown in one of the newest dev videos, I'm guessing some beams related to advanced couplers aren't being saved or loaded properly. Weirdly with the Scintilla the door coupler still seems to work fine but given what happens after loading something is clearly wrong. The Covet I don't mind including in the first version of the mod even bugged since it's fixed by a trip to the repair shop at no repair cost since the beams aren't deformed they're just missing completely. I'll add a notice for it in the home menu. The Scintilla I might have to keep it out until this is solved since it can crash the game at random, I think it would be sad for someone to buy that car only to have it bug out so hard when taken out of the garage that BeamNG crashes. Hopefully the devs can fix this issue soon enough, at least before more vehicles are using advanced couplers.
Dang, good catch on the strange bug. I probably won't have the cash to buy the Scintilla for a long time due to my driving habits so no rush getting that fixed. I hope the fix isn't complicated and comes in the next hotfix.
I'm currently planning on releasing the first version of the mod by the end of the week, it seems stable enough although sadly some bugs can't be fixed on my end. I've been adding as much content as possible to hopefully keep it interesting for a decent amount of time. While race files with more complex race paths take a little while to create drag races using the same path can rather quickly be duplicated and tweaked to create this "Pure Drag Race Club" starting from the end of the highway. Each league has opponents of increasing difficulty, currently one config per vehicle model except for the fastest vehicles (bolide,scintilla) which are only present for gold and hero leagues given even the slowest configs are crazy fast. Basically bronze league has the base models, silver league has moderately powerful configs, gold and hero leagues use the high performance street tuned and drag configs. Overall this amounts to a bit under 100 different opponents throughout the drag race club. Only did a bit of play testing but I think it's pretty fun betting money to figure out if grandpa's old car is faster than the opponent. It's another gameplay element from SLRR except there are some differences like how you can choose your opponent, and the opponents in a same league aren't sorted by performance so you can still race other cars even if you got outmatched by the previous vehicle. I've also been adding race layouts to the other clubs, trying to use the entire map as best as possible so that there are no useless areas which can make for some great endurance type layouts. Utah in particular has this area with the construction zone, not a lot of interactive stuff to add over there but the dangerous windy roads on the side of a canyon make for a good path for a long endurance race. I think I've mentioned this before but since I have absolutely no idea what prices are good for parts, vehicles and rewards the first version of this mod will be unbalanced. Due to default part price it will be possible to build a very fast car for cheap until a complete part price list is built. I can't do this alone due to the sheer amount of parts and due to my lack of car knowledge I don't know what values would be good so hopefully if there are enough people interested in this project we can do it together. Still, this project is currently a decent vertical slice of the gameplay I'm going for, so I feel confident the first version will be releasing by the end of the week!
Awesome news! Unfortunately I will be traveling this entire next week, but I look forward to getting a taste of what you have been working on. I can't wait to push grandpa's jalopy to the l i m i t.
i love to try your mod, since i'm slrr fan for years, also beam, but in your github only exist readme file on bng_beamLegalRacing
BeamLR version 1.0 has just been released on github! https://github.com/r3eckon/BNG-BeamLegalRacing Please view the readme on the repository for install information, tips on getting started, modding info and a list of current known issues. I will be patiently waiting feedback! But please keep in mind this is the first release for this mod and it's still rough around the edges. If the game freezes when loading into the scenario (happens while resetting the career) restart BeamNG and try loading into the mission again. This bug apparently doesn't happen every time, I've been looking for a while but I don't know what causes it. As far as I tested it, dragging the mod zip directly in your mod folder seems to works but may cause some problems with mod files not loading properly resulting in "nil" showing in some interactive UI menus. If you experience this problem the "advanced" install should solve it. This only happened on 1 of the 3 computers I tested this mod on so I'm still not exactly sure what causes that.
AWESOME! So excited to try this out. May not have time before I leave this Monday, but if I do I'll be sure to leave some feedback. Great work r3eckon
There is a parts shop in the ui menu called "BeamLR Main Menu". And to view this ui, please read carefully the mod description on GitHub one more time. Well, I didn't know where it was at first either lol
You have to add the BeamLR Main Menu to the UI, as a scenario app. Then, in the game, you can go to car dealerships to buy parts, and go back to your garage to equip them.
