The demolition mode is pretty nifty, but is ultimately limited in immersion by its fixed and distant camera angle, which prevents the immersion the game is capable of providing from truly being felt. It also could use some fleshing out in terms of being able to select the number of players (humans only) and perhaps class of vehicles participating - but that is for another thread. I understand it is no easy undertaking, but a) is it possible in the engine, even with a severe compromise to graphics quality and b) is it planned at any point in the future? I can think of few things that would be more entertaining (PC local-multiplayer-wise) than blazing a course with a friend around any of the official or downloaded terrains while listening to music and knocking back a couple of cold ones, or racing to complete the same scenario, with or without inter-vehicle collisions (proximity ghosting, a la Forza Horizon 2?). I feel like local split-screen multiplayer is the happy middle-ground to tackling the absolute nightmare that would be multiplayer net-code, if it is possible at all. Hell, even if the graphics neared Rigs of Rods, it'd still be revolutionary. I of course don't know much about the engine that is being worked with, or whether little if any of what I am talking about is possible - I just thought I would put the idea out there - I feel like many ardent BeamNG fans would like to cross the divide from showing the game to others to playing it with them.
All of those discussions (with the exception of one) were quite a while ago, with the game having progressed by leaps and bounds in both performance and stability since then. Perhaps I was looking to see if the answer had changed or been updated, or if the possibility of the task had increased?
What do you mean? I saw in a previous thread that someone had run two instances of BeamNG simultaneously, but the problem then would be having both windows selected with a controller assigned to (and actively controlling) each at the same time. I imagine the biggest barrier to split-screen at present is the absence of aggressive viewpoint-based render-culling, which forces each perspective to render the entirety of the terrain and not simply what is seen on camera. The opposite sides of distant hills (within the view distance) are rendered because presently there is nothing programmed to tell the engine not to. With more aggressive culling (a la GTA IV-V), a lot of processing and rendering power could be potentially conserved by having everything not directly visible immediately drop to the lowest LOD, if it is rendered at all. That says nothing about the feasibility of the task, of course - or whether the trade-off would be stuttering and visual pop-in issues as the engine struggles to update render status for large and intricate scenes.
You're right in my opinion, but there's a myriad of things wrong with the graphics engine and adding better occlusion culling and split-screen functionality is probably pretty low on the list. Even though improving the engine should really a top priority...
