As we all know, BeamNG has some monster pc requirements, and according to game debate, the requirements are greater than that of GTA V. Now I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on jbeam physics, but I know the basics of how they work. What if when a car is spawned in BeamNG, the jbeam structure was super simple, so that there are as few beams and nodes as possible, but when you crash, the jbeam structure becomes more complex, and when a beam and node detect that they have been deformed to a certain extent, another node is added into the deformed beam to smooth it out. We already know that nodes can monitor how deformed the beams they have are because of some of the apps, so this is very possible. and there could be a limit to how many nodes a car can have after being crashed, this way there is no infinitive lagg. So that BeamNG can have more optimized pc requirements, and we can all be happier. There could also be a slider in the settings that controls the limit of nodes per vehicle even after a crash. Is it a good idea or is it bad? Tell me what you think.
Well, honestly, this would require to dynamically build a structure on the fly which... might end up using more computational power than just simulating the crash as it is. I know the dev team was thinking about adding in a feature that when a structure would rip apart (like a plastic bumper ripping in half) that it would generate two nodes along the beam that just broke. Again though... while a neat idea, would require some pretty intense calculations probably... and can you imagine putting the car in a blender? (hypothetically speaking now) There would be so many nodes and beams created from the car ripping apart that an average computer would implode and probably turn into a black hole. However... all this nonsense being said... BeamNG is actually REALLY efficient with its physics calculations already. For instance, even on my silly Core2Duo, I can still get upwards of 60FPS physics wise (on the grid map basically) which I struggle to do in almost any game... forget about GTAV... that would never happen on my computer... I can't even get GTAIV to run. However, the huge bottleneck seems to come when I open a map. My FPS tank to the point of being unplayable on almost any map other than the grid maps. This would point at my graphics card as being the bottleneck (which it is, old NVidea 320M). For whatever reason, the render engine that BeamNG uses (my brain seems to have totally forgot what it is right now) is really hard on hardware... Even with the physics paused, on any map I can barely get 10FPS if I am luck and my computer is cold still. My point is... I know the physics is part of the FPS problem on slower machines, but it is so optimized that it only starts to become a problem when you have more then 3 or 4 cars on the screen at once... and the dev team is making the physics calculations more streamlined all the time so it will get even better.
Aside from what @atv_123 mentioned, all the physics of the cars are calculated real time, so having less nodes while driving around would make the car's handling and movement less realistic.
Jbeam cannot be modified on the 'go'. Jbeam is what determines whatever is happening on the screen. If you use a simple one, everything regarding that vehicle will not be the same as if it was using it's normal complex Jbeam.
