Hello BeamNg, A great find for me to discover this game, climbing a hill in first gear, it hooked me. I hope the game can be finished. I want to share some thoughts to improve the experience... - TrackIR - when I have climbed that hill I want to check the view out - Improve steering feeling - feels very light atm. - Traffic - Open world, I want to drive all day from A to B (and not crashing). ---- [dream game] use real maps*, use real traffic data*: then procedurally generate the decorations/environment. - Car radio - linked to Spotify? I really hope you succeed. Bringing the crash into a car game, is a winner for me. Regards, Crispy06 * if this appeals I may be able to help.
Some of those things are already implemented. * checking the view out - can be done by switching to an outside-the-car camera or free camera. * steering feel - can be adjusted in force feedback menu * open world - it's called free roam, already there * traffic - yes that's largely missing, but has been suggested already. It's limited by the complexity of the vehicle models. You can still spawn a few AI cars. I don't know about the radio. For now you have to play your own music if you want it.
- TrackIR is already available in BeamNG - Force feedback kinda sucks in game, since it runs on too low fps ("heavy" game to run) but you can tweak the FFB settings - The way BeamNG works, makes traffic impossible, since so far each separate car uses 1 core from your CPU because the way the cars are made... but you can let 1-2 AI drive the cars for some fun - It is kind of openworld, but for a total feel of that, I'd suggest a map mod called American Road (11x11km map, pretty resource intensive) Nah, game is currently too complex for that... Maybe in few years As for Spotify; I think there was a radio mod for that, but it was just an HUD app, rather than an actual car radio
Y Yeah, as you can tell, I'm still kinda new to the game. The traffic would be awesome for me. I like doing crashes and the traffic would make it easier and way less time instead of setting up.
Unless the devs implement my idea that I mentioned in the other thread or come up with a better one. My idea was to have a set of pre-spawned traffic cars that get positioned in front of you (one or two at a time) as you drive. Even if the traffic cars repeat, and they will with this logic, it would still be much better than no traffic at all as is the case now.
Just like they do in GTA V. However loading and deleting AI cars is still gonna be intensive, and you would have to reset AI pathfinding and logic each time. IDEALLY you would have to make the game perform a LOT better, not only because this allow for very realistic AI traffic simulation, but also because this could allow for big scale derby and racing scenarios with few framedrops.
In my implementation, the cars would not be loaded and deleted, just repositioned. As I said, they'd be "pre-spawned". However I do see your point about the AI pathfinding needing a reset each time, which could slow the game down a bit on large levels, unless the game is optimized further. On smaller levels it shouldn't be a problem. I'm saying that based on my observation of starting the AI in the current game. On small and medium levels it's instant, but on large levels it takes a second or so.
Well, you could have predefined few AI path loops which you could select one that AI would use, to allow more feel of traffic with less amount of vehicles and to remove need of computing general AI path. AI will calculate it's path realtime when driving anyway, but with limiting amount of roads visible to AI it might be bit easier to process. Then repositioning vehicles would happen only for that given road loop, which would then happen outside of your camera. That would minimize use of resources, but also limit AI to only part of the map. Many times AI goes to areas I would rarely drive, so having to choose upon spawn or so, which of the few loops map maker has done, could improve experience and resource usage quite a bit.