Improvement to New Documentation

Hello all, I have recently been working on a project which involved me tracing the history and lore of several brands within BeamNG, as well as some of their design processes.

One big thing I have noticed is a distinct lack of old information in the new List of Official Content, a name which is taken a little too literally, as it now simply displays the name, year, body type, country of origin, a picture, and whether or not it is a Gas or Electric vehicle. This is opposed to the old style of documentation, which was discontinued but featured a much more rich trove of details in the design process, history, lore, and development of all vehicles, as well as configuration specific details, available engine specifications, extra trivia related to additional lore and easter eggs, and every ounce of information you could ever need when looking up a vehicle

For example, I shall compare the details for the Cherrier Vivace between both formats:
New Format:


Old Format:

Keep in mind, the Old documentation was discontinued before the Vivace was released, meaning this is all information that was known and published by the community before the car was even in an official release. Even for cars that are in game, the extra information can make a world of difference when researching a vehicle

Let's say, for instance, I wanted to determine the performance of all of the Grand Marshall models by examining their internal parts, such as engine, wheels, transmission, etc. With the new version of the documentation, this is impossible without booting up the game and scrolling through the parts selector to determine it myself. You don't even know how many cylinders its engines come with


However, in the Old Version, a complete table of performance comparisons was made up, featuring every inch of data you might ever need on the car.

This in addition to an even sleeker list of configurations, displaying the key elements of each

And even a vehicle timeline displaying when which vehicles where produced relative to others of the same brand!


Finally, it is especially useful for analyzing vehicles which are a mess to sort through configurations, prominently the D Series, which has an absurd amount to crawl through without mods. Let's say you want to find all of the D25 series for a comparison, by default all vehicles are classed by value, meaning you need to scroll through, find every D25 in the ~80 configurations, spawn each and determine the specifications of each. With the Old Style, they where sorted much more simply:

All D15's:

All D25's and D35's:

And every detail you could want: Transmission, Engine, Differentials, Weight, Wheels, It even has RPM for peak horsepower!

Finally, my biggest pet peeve is that even the outdated information is more useful than the new, updated information of the new format. For example: the Soliad Wendover articles. In the new version, no mention of any of its development or history is even referenced.


While the Old Version dives directly into the nitty-gritty development details, citing the change in body style and the reasons behind why these changes where made and even exactly when these changes where mentioned, by who they where mentioned, and links directly to the posts where these changes where mentioned.


And the references links to these:

This is a million times easier than trying to find the reasons behind these changes. In all honestly, without the Old Format, it would be impossible for me to try and decipher the design decisions undertaken by the developers without obsessive stalking of their posts. With a return to documentation such as this, community questions about things such as the styling of the Bruckell Bastion, easter eggs for new maps and vehicles, and other good to know information would be readily accessible without having to scroll through an ungodly amount of pages in the vehicle-specific forum, especially when the majority are shitpost-tier nonsense or vehicle suggestions.

And on a final note, the New Version of the documentation doesn't even include anything on the new release vehicles, which I found out due to attempting to compare the FPU Wydra documentation lore to that of its Documentation Thread, at which point I realized it did not exist, neither does the Stambecco or any other newly released vehicle. The newest vehicle in it is the Scintilla, which came out in June.

All in all, I personally would love to see a return to the old wikipedia-page style of vehicle documentation, due to its rich preservation of history and development, its ease of finding configuration and vehicle specific data and parts, the reference hyperlinks redirecting you straight to the source of the data along with other relevant conversations and details, and finally, due to its amazing accuracy both pre and post release of a vehicle.

The vehicle documentation is an incredibly important tool for all members, from modders looking to make lore-friendly vehicles and configurations, to content creators who want to discover and publish fun interesting facts about new release vehicles for their videos (hey, did any of you know the Vivace was internally called the Reverse Card Car because of its badge resembling the Uno Reverse? Or that it was originally planned as a Hirochi, which means that canonically they could be going down the route of Mitsubishi with a crossover-centric lineup? I certainly didn't till I went to make this thread and found out when I skimmed the wiki page for it). It could very well be the most useful tool on the forums for anyone looking to find information on anything in game, and sadly seems to be one aspect getting some of the least attention.

Please alter the new documentation to include the rich details that made the old vehicle documentation so useful and incredible. Thank you.

 

I know! The old documentation even had info on the owl statue in the castle in Italy! Like, how detailed is that?! And with BeamNG’s ever-growing team, there are definitely people who are able to do this.

 

With the new documentation being so shallow, not featuring some stuff at all and being pretty outdated on a quickly growing amount of pages I don't see the point in changing away from the old documentation.
The old one actually provided you enough information to know how to do stuff, especially for modding. I wish it was still being maintained

 

Exactly, it had so many uses beyond simply listing what existed, that it points to easter eggs that no one would even know existed without it

Same, the new one simply just displays vague surface information that is essentially just common knowledge to anyone who plays the game at this point. With the old version, you can learn things abotu vehicles you never knew existed, like:
-Scuderia, for the bolide, means stable in Italian
-The ETK I series has 2L engine badges, but no 2L engine configs
-The Roamer dates back to 2012 when the game was still in early development before release, in which it was hacked onto a D Series chassis

...and this is just from a first glance at 3 randomly selected vehicle articles
Information like this is incredibly important for development history of vehicles, helpful for modders, and just cool to know in general.

 

It seems like they are making that section more complete. I do a lot of advanced setup and programming and the new additions have really helped. It cuts down on trial and error as well.

 

Yes, while it sees some minor improvements it still never comes close to being as useful as the old documentation

 

I guess that was before I discovered it.

 

the documentation doesnt have the 0.26 vehicles.
--- Post updated ---
just noting.

 

Thank you! The streamlining part obviously makes sense, but certainly leaving the option for further important information to be added definitely helps out