I have no idea about terrain making, or even beams or nodes. But isn't it possible to have a deforming terrain just by using soft body physics as they are now? mud, sand, and other stuff could deform under the weight of tires and allow something like pavement to be strong enough to not budge unless something falls on it. The deformations for some of that stuff might look strange, but it's a start right?
Start by asking NASA their PCs and then get 100 more coders for their team and maybe, just maybe it could be done...
To be honest they probably don't have the gpus for running games. It could be done but it wouldn't be trivial. The only ways i can think of doing this would need the terrain heightmap to have a much higher resolution and then the vehicles tires have the ability to extrude the ground. But Torque 3d would be a massive limiting factor if this was the case. You could use some sort of height map LOD that only loaded nearby tiles but currently you can only have a single height map with collisions. The problem here is the guys who are making spin tires have put a lot of effort and focus on the system they are using. I believe it has taken them years. Tdev and estema however have spent many years working on soft body physics, that is where the focus of this game is. To ask for both features in one game where the primary focus isnt finished yet is pushing it a little, especially when there are only 2 devs who are likely to program such a feature.
Some of NASA's hardware is actually NVidia Quadro based... They require massive parallelism. Although I don't think they use x86 for all of their machines so you might have a problem immediately
While Quadros are really nice for the sorts of things NASA needs to do, physics calculations. They tend to suck a bit for gaming, you could run BeamNG graphics on one but its not really optimal.
its probably still better than an IGPU, besides, really all we'd need is the CPU, RAM, and so on, we could just install a gaming gpu on it (and install windows on it, asking nasa for driver's for there hardware for windows
Would be interesting to see how this game would run if it could leverage a Quadro for physics as well as a secondary gpu for graphics. Especially if you had a gtx690 with one core setup as graphics and the other as a Quadro with (hacked) drivers. The ability to share ram between the two could be awesome, one can dream right (not only of the possibility but also owning a card like that).
hmmmm, yeah, well, i believe that openCL support is planned, so if the nvidia quadro series has openCL support, im sure you could have beamng off-load all the physics to the quadro, then have it run graphics on the actual gpu
AMD doesn't make OpenCL. They helped develop it along with Apple, IBM, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia. Then they all submitted it to the consortium the Khronos Group which develops it today as an open standard.
Love the idea, realistic road/dirt deformation would make races on circuits that much more interesting. And as a added bonus we could cook dinner on our GPU's while we play!
uhh, no, it would be the cpu that would be cooking, the gpu has NOTHING to do with mud deformation -_-
How do you know that? It could be calculated through CUDA and would therefore drive up the temperatures of the GPU as opposed to the CPU.
still wouldnt cook it though, as gpu's tend to be a lot more powerful in terms of calculations (otherwise, why would nasa use them for that)
How does being more powerful have anything to do with how hot they get? Every single GPU I've ever encountered works a lot hotter than its partnered CPU.
Have you seen how hot an r9 290x gets with its stock cooler, It makes the cpu's with stock coolers look so cool that it would be more appropriate to measure them in kelvin.
thats because amd doesn't know how to make a decent gpu cooler -_-, besides, were talking about nvidia anyway