So I saw a mod for tired with much higher jbeam counts, resulting in much smoother tire performance. This had me wondering, if I can handle 4 cars with no fps drop, why not just try having one car with 4x more jbeams? I can't do jbeams, but I was wondering if anyone's tried making something like that, and would it result in more detailed crashes. If not someone should give it a go. I'd be interested in seeing how the 'resolution' of the jbeams effects the physics.
The four cars are handled with no FPS drop because they're (or were last time I checked) processed as one car per CPU core/thread. This most likely will yield better performance than one car with 4x the beams because, for all we know, a car at the current level of detail could be maxing out a CPU core. Four cars are handled fine because they're on their own cores, but one single car with more beams might go outside the boundaries of a single thread's performance.
It is possible but problems ensue. First off cars are simulated at one per core. So 4 cores running 4 cars != 1 core running 4 cars. At best my 4670k at 4.3Ghz can handle a doubled moonhawk. Second, cars tend to get unstable past a certain point. Weight starts to get too high and tires explode. Some cars are more detailed than others though.
That makes sense. I didn't know it was threaded like that. Maybe when OpenCL is a thing it would make more sense to ramp up jbeams. btw i'm not saying the physics are bad atm, just relating my perceived improvement of the the tires through that tire mod to the rest of the car.
Also, as you increase the resolution of the jbeam, you have to decrease the weight of the nodes to make the vehicle the appropriate weight. Someone who knows what they're doing correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the beam physics become less stable if the nodes making up the structure are too light.
