http://www.beamng.com/threads/realistic-dirt.53/ http://www.beamng.com/threads/terrain-deformation.709/ http://www.beamng.com/threads/trail-or-terrain-deformation-tire-ruts.185/ http://www.beamng.com/threads/mud-and-maybe-water-deformation.798/ http://www.beamng.com/threads/driving-surfaces.124/ There have been threads on the topic before. These examples i'm showing are old but i'm pretty sure that there was an topic about this not too long ago but i can't find it. Use the search function to find out if an topic has been posted about before.
As the OP seems to be more of an observation and a discussion point, I'll go ahead and beat the decaying horse corpse a bit further and just say Spintires type ground deformation will probably never happen with the current engine. The devs could ALWAYS surprise us but even then it's probably on a cold burner in a campsite in Nunavut.
If there is going to be ground deformation, you know how there must be excavator to dig dirt and fill that T-series dump truck, I'm not all that certain they want to go there, not even when there are no single proper simulation of the such kind. On other hand BeamNG.HeavyMachinery might be something that would go there.
That's taking it to another level for sure. Is there even a video game/sim on earth that does earth excavation even remotely like that?
I feel as if in small amounts it could be possible, though unlikely, I think that the developers could do something similar to what War Thunder did with their ground deformation(http://warthunder.com/en/devblog/current/738/). I know that Beamng Drive, and War Thunder are very, VERY different games, but who knows. I would have to agree with Aboroath with this! EDIT:http://coub.com/view/4x8pz
There was one, I think it was Construction simulator with some year at the end of the name, it was not very good as a sim, but only thing I know that had even some kind of digging simulation, you dug building sites, put dirt to dump truck and drove that dump truck if my memory is not lying too much. There was ground deformation and then rather fake looking bucket filling as you dug into ground, no rocks or anything complicated like that, in bucket there were something like 4 different fill levels without any blending between them and when you emptied bucket there was same 4 fill levels on bucket + animation that tried to show how dirt is dropping from the bucket, but really crude implementation. It might not be too hard to do, if you could connect terrain shaping tool with a bucket and that would allow you to use heavy machinery as a map editing method, but despite it might be rather cool, it is a lot of work and how much sales such would ever create, I guess it would be quite a niche at it's best. Certainly doable, but not likely to happen I guess, it has not been done often because it will not be even near to real soil digging and probably will not make sales as anyone wanting digging sim, would not want that simple level and not many others would want simple digging. In a perfect world there could be different kinds of BeamNG sims, which could share maps, you could make maps and roads with heavy machinery edition which you could drive in Drive edition, in that world BeamNG devs would have unlimited resources and coffee and as they know, such is a dream world, coffee will always run out Update: There seems to be now (Actually released 2014) Dig It! digger simulator, that has pretty much same looking engine as construction simulator had, there are videos on your favorite video site so you can see how it was done there, it is those low cost games from germany publisher that are not best in quality. Then John Deere has some professional level sim and I think some game was carrying label of Caterpillar, which had some digging I think. Probably some others which I already forgot again, nothing really proper though, but you can look videos to see how those have done it if enough curious. Proper getting stuck into mud might need some kind of ground deformation or manipulation of parameters for ground surface, it is quite complicated thing to simulate properly actually as there is so much things changing.
they don't have to go full spintires level, they could just do what Mx vs ATV did and just do it a little
The devs said they never want to compromise on realism, so this will either not happen or will happen. Not a little.
