Yes, metal bends but materials like plastic and composites snap and break. Given enough force even metal shears. In a real crash, you see parts on the floor around the car, bits of plastic from the headlights, inner liners, grills and glass from windows and lights. I don't mean adding lots of tiny particles to make it look more accurate, just for the individual parts like headlights and grills to snap like they would if they were plastic. For example, the interior it just deforms in a really unrealistic way. In real life, interior liners and panels would pop off from the chassis and snap, not bend and stretch sticking to the chassis how they currently do. I know it may be difficult given how it uses the nodes to deform but I'm not a developer, I don't know if it's possible.
i agree, things like this would be nice to have. it would have a severe fps impact, especially on low end systems, so maybe these extra details like bumpers snapping and small bits of the car falling off could be an option you can turn off in the menu or something.
It is already there, in somewhat limited way, though. The limits are set by the core principle of the simulation. Technically the material is represented by particles. Beams are the forces that hold them together. Triangles are there for collisions and are programmed to disappear if the beams on their edges are broken. Now if this happens, what should happen with the visible mesh between those separated particles? There is nothing left to attach them to. So this part of the mesh disappears. As you can imagine - and actually observe - this is not exactly what you would expect and it lowers damage realism. I suppose that for this reason brittle materials are rather avoided in BeamNG. Personally I believe that adding just visual particle effects would make it look more like the missing parts are flying around shredded to pieces instead of being sent to another dimension. I particularly liked the debris effects in Burnout Paradise, it made the crashes look much more violent and less sterile.
