BeamNG Pre-Race Update - Reviews Center

Thoughts:

• Very nice interface - though the key commands still bring up old dialog boxes and not items in menu.
• Car handling feels better, but still feels loose. I have yet owned a car that starts drifting all over the road at 40 to 50 miles an hour so that could be area that still needs fixing. Albeit, some of the cars sliding around are third party people, not BeamNG developers.
• Like new graphical changes
• Like the gravity option
• Crashed several times on me. Not sure if it was because FRAPS was running in the background.

Overall nice! can't wait for the race update and see what new cars get introduced by everyone out there since the update has been put into place.

 

Pros:
-Handling is really nice
-New automatic transmissions/Torque Converter functions
-The new way cars launch (i.e. Not bogging)
-New parts to play with
-Can do wheelstands/burnouts now
-Even the 450+ Horsepower Civetta is controllable.

Cons:
-Shift points seem wonky on the Gavrils, 1950 seems really low to upshift
-Performance (FPS) is up and down
-No more highbeams? Dash lights on always
-Grand Marshall shakes like crazy during highspeed braking

Will modify as i discover more.

 

Pros

• For once I can actually feel the difference in the tires and suspension
• Drift missle version of the marshal is awesome

• New particles / smoke is awesome
• New spec maps are awesome
• New maps are so so pretty
• FPS improved

Cons

• Boilde 390 GTR rips its self apart on acceleration
• If the pigeons wheels come off it stretches

Will add on this list the more I play, this is within 5mins of playing

 

Glitches That I've encountered

 

To be added to

Pros: Too many to list right now

Cons: Brake and gas on stage 2 Marshall snaps driveshaft. Glitch?

 

some more feedback specific to vehicle handling:

* braking
now that the handling is changed such that i can't get by with only ebrake/downshift/friction to slow down, i have to use the brakes. but there is a problem: it is basically impossible to use the brakes without locking them up or applying them too little. i'm using an xbox controller with a less-than-perfect brake trigger, but it is far too difficult to smoothly apply brakes. while the brakes themselves may be functioning well, the controls related to braking need immediate improvement.

* grip
the grip is now a lot better at medium speeds. particularly, i can now more precisely feel when i have lost grip. previously, i felt as if there was no grip at all times. this is a big improvement. i can now feel the result of applying the throttle and getting a little tail-happy when exiting a 50mph turn. grip is still not perfect, but very much improved. until there is force feedback and some refinement in the controls i can't be sure, but right now things still feel a little bit slippery.

the amount of traction when grip is lost has also changed vastly (see this thread: Is-there-a-difference-between-static-and-kinetic-friction-in-BeamNG ). it is now very apparent that when you go into a slide, your car is actually sliding and you have much less grip than before. much improved, but maybe this is contributing to the amount of understeer that seems to be happening. at the very least, sliding friction is far more realistic feeling than before when just slamming on the ebrake or sliding around a corner at low speeds. high speed sliding is a bit weird to handle right now, cars tend to straighten themselves out (oversteer -> understeer) for whatever reason.

at high speeds (around 70mph or above), however, not very much has changed. i cannot feel when grip is lost or regained, i feel like i'm floating the whole time and there is no way i can even take a light bend without having to countersteer. i have to make extremely minor oversteer corrections with my controller when trying to go around even a light bend at these speeds, and i feel that i really should just have control over the car - it's really not even that fast.

* understeer
while this is a function of grip, it deserves its own bullet point. understeer is very, very easy to induce, even at very low speeds. i'm still trying to formulate exactly *why* i think this is happening, but for now i just want it to point out that this might be an issue.

---

as a testament to the new physics and an example for these points, here's a very shaky full lap of the bolide 350 GT around nordschleife. hopefully you will be able to identify:

- how much i was struggling with the brakes (locked up just about every time)
- i am able to maintain decent grip through a lot of the turns (up to around 55mph)
- i have little to no grip at higher speeds (go ahead and compare to other street cars doing nordschleife laps, plenty on youtube)
- there are some obvious areas where i nearly crash due to understeer, and a few crashes because of it. some instances may be related to the braking or driver error in general, in which case force feedback and more rounded out controls would help.

it is your duty to compare this lap to other games, real life, etc and tell me how wrong i am about everything.



note that before this update, driving around this circuit would be an infuriating effort due to a complete lack of grip and performance issues. staying within the road for the majority of the track used to be a very difficult thing to do, and i usually ragequit trying. now it is at least doable, and i am happy about that. i first tried to use the bolide 390 GTR to do the lap, but found it had that feeling of "i can't tell when i'm losing or regaining grip". the bolide 350 GT, however, is very nice.

 

My T530 i7 Laptop is running a LOT cooler with this update....Any reasons why this may be?

 

Pros:

• New Gridmap texture
• Color selector
• New UI
• Pigeon
• In-game IRC
• Gravity settings
• much better collision
• Better FPS with multiple vehicles
• Improved parking brake

Cons:

• When the lighting's set on Low or above, disabling shadows make the game entirely black
• A bit of performance drop (in general)
• Can't have 2 of the same car with different colors
• Can't control the simulation speed from a vehicle that's not the default one
• Can't delete vehicles from the new UI
• Inverted camera and lack of option to un-invert it

Also, I have a question. I want my car to be automatic, but I want to change it from park, drive, reverse, neutral, etc. Can I do that?

 

Yeah, switch the control into manual mode with Q, and have an automatic transmission in the car.

 

The cars made by third party have not yet been updated. They need to be completely re-tuned to work properly in the new update. So that might explain it?

 

Can anyone tell me why this is still going? Already played it some but don't know if I should close it

 

Your download is finished, now you are "seeding" your downloaded files, so that others who are still downloading will have a source more, resulting in a better download speed!

 

pro: i don't know

cons: the updater is not working

 

I've done it a hundred times but nothing changes. my update log is now more then 400kb.... this is the only error I've encountered...

 

Mechanical/Computer engineer here, so prepare for bias:

Pros:
- Much easier to handle faster vehicles.
- Smooth

Cons:
- Traction is still a problem at speed (tires/suspension physics).
- High speed impacts still clip into objects.


Great job on many fronts. I particularly like the better CPU performance. I hope more tweaks can be found to push the simulations further.

My biggest concern is about the physics simulations, mostly surrounding the tires and suspension. I worry that as users start racing, they will complain the cars do not handle like real cars at speed.

The problem is clearly apparent when looking at the tire weight distribution. The weight between the tires the jumps around from tire to tire far more than they would in reality, even when moving on perfectly flat land or standing still. At low speeds this doesn't impact the handling much, but everyone wants to drive fast and this problem crops up as very odd traction behavior at higher speeds. It is apparently good enough to get a decent lap around Nurburgring, but the handling makes it looks impossible to put a time in that compares to what can be achieved in other quality simulation games (see deject3d's post, #26).

The main suspect for me is the tires. I have read that there have been quite a few tweaks to the tires and this is nothing new to the developers. I just beg that this gets another pass to see if this problem can be remedied before being released to the 'masses' on Steam. I have some experience dealing with semi-stable/unstable physics simulations and know it isn't always easy, but good luck.


P.S. Could adding ABS be looked at too? Could hammering on an off full breaks every few physics cycles do the trick?

 

I will only add up the new things I want to mention

Pros:

• The Blogpost where it says the Graphicbugs were fixed. I thought " okay , well, barely noticeable " . But it's very noticeable while playing! Great!
• Cars really feel better now, somehow.
• All the rest, already mentioned

Cons:

• Huge Performance-impact after loading new Maps, sometimes the Game stutters for about 10 seconds. ( i7 4770k, 760gt) But okay, after that it get's better.
• Performance really seems to have changed in both ways. Better and Worse. When Driving around the H-Series on the USA Map, my FPS drop down to 20 oO. Something seems to be very very demanding there
• Some of the new.. "Apps" that can be displayed while driving do not work yet? For Example the Dashboard Lights. The Performancestats don't recognize a car change.

 

My only cons is that the Game crash sometimes
The water on a Map is black
And I cant change the camera with the mouse anymore
The rest is still fine
I like the gravity option
And the Crashes are more realistic now
less shaking and stack in other vehicles