Speed, Graphics, Engine limitations, Sounds - Questions i have

Been a huge BeamNG fan for years way before i bought the game. Only recently come to the conclusion that it's therapeutic for me in a sense. I really enjoy a long smooth drive or traveling at comfortable speeds on a satisfying physics engine however nothing is without it's criticisms and i suppose i have some questions that have sat on my mind. I'm not a wizard in all fields so i apologize if this may sound stupid to some or has been answered elsewhere. Finally before i start i would like to point out that i'm not bitching that these things should be addressed to make the game better. It's entirely for my personal insight on todays limits and tomorrows goals. I would appreciate any responses to some questions i have and hopefully maybe a beamNG dev to comment would be fantastic. If anything is unclear or stupid i can explain further or remove.

Graphics:

BeamNG is by no means an ugly game but it certainly is a few steps behind some big budget car games visually. I'm aware beamNG shits on its competition in terms physics calculations compared to any other car game which is partly why i struggle to play other games now. I can't fully put my finger on why this is either. I suppose sometimes metal doesn't have such a metallic look to it? or maybe Matte paint is just the absence of reflection instead of a matte texture? or maybe it's just the lighting used? sometimes dark areas are still too brightly lit? i'm not sure. Is it something that has just not been the main focal point or is it a limitation by the engine used?

Lighting always feels very dull. I remember years ago when GTAV came out and it was visually stunning and then with the PC release and some shaders/graphics mods it was almost as if they removed a grey-ish filter over the screen and the game lit up and became even more beautiful. I feel that same greyish vibe from beamNG. Not a question but just an opinion.

With Light sources which i won't go into it as i have hope that this will probably be worked on down the line but i feel they are quite poop. An example would be perhaps a light effect without it being a light source itself. I could go into much more detail but it's not a big deal.

Sounds:

It's great to see how far beamNG has progressed with this one actually. In a dev blog not so long ago i saw a post simulating the exhaust dragging on the ground and i thought to myself "wow i would have never even noticed". I'm sure sounds in general are still a massive WIP so i wont grill too much.
I will say some sounds feel quite weak to me. Why is this? The old SBR4 felt great. It honestly felt like a powerful engine which was changed for some reason. If we were to compare them, i would say the current one would be it's overweight weak younger brother. I also feel that most engines compared to other driving games and even GTAV sound quite artificial. Instead of this roaring 600bhp monster i hear a 30cc lawnmower pitch shifted accordingly. (I'm joking but hopefully you know what i mean). Why do i get the feel that engine sounds feel odd? is it because the different exhaust sounds are not being simulated with the engine or am i just weird? Extra: Turbo's sound weak also and sometimes you can hear the BOV fully stop if the turbo is taking in more air. It just feels odd and takes me out of the experience.

Speed:

Now this is an interesting one. I don't drive but i play lots of driving games and i'm sure for everyone who's ever played multiple driving games, each one feels entirely different even though they're all trying to simulate the same thing. So i dumped well over 2k hours into beamNG over the years and thought "this is what it must be like to drive a car" (i'm so cute sometimes i swear) but since i have never driven, what do i know right? so i invited my friends who drive into my setup with my wheel and gave them ago. Within seconds the cars they were driving had been bent around trees, lamp-posts and signs. They were attempting to corner things doing 70-80 mph where it was just not possible and they would say "this is not realistic" even though the corner could not be done at those speeds. They would swear blind they were not travelling that fast. My guess was that when driving in a game we're missing vital things that we would have in real life such as depth perception and estimating the speed they were traveling at from experience instead of having to to check all the time OR it would be down to incorrect grip calculations. What do you think? Does beamNG feel slow for the speeds you travel at or is it just the grip that is wrong? i wouldn't know. OR perhaps it's a graphical thing? could we simulate the feel of immense speed using motion blur?

Engine limitations:
I have probably touched on this slightly above but i would like to know just what some limitations actually are. Because of what beamNG is calculating per car, eventually it will lagg pretty badly with very few cars compared to other games. Is beamNG's fatal flaw that the engine simply cannot simulate that many things/beamns at one time? is the bottleneck the engine itself or the hardware it runs on? Personally i hope it's down to poor all-round optimization. Things like menu's in beamNG are unacceptably sluggish which is also in progress so i'm hoping that's the case.

Also, this is probably a stupid question but what causes engine instability? I'm sure that's a massive list to what might lets say we took some main ones just to look at for a while. I often get an instability error/warning when things glitch out a tad and textures/beamns (whatever) start to stretch across an entire map. What causes textures to do that?

I have seen some maps by the mod community which are completely amazing in my opinion. Not graphically, but fairly detailed and quite massive in comparison to beamNG maps (if we don't count simple grid map which feels never ending) but in these maps if we stray too far from the center you will notice cars to eventually have seizures. I don't know too much about why this is but i'm assuming it's just how the physics are calculated from the center maybe and it becomes more unstable the further you go? who knows. Hopefully i can get an answer to that one.

A BIG QUESTION THOUGH, there are certain games with spherical maps like kerbal space program. If beamNG was to create massive spherical maps to the point where you wouldn't notice the maps curve (like earth but smaller obvs) using the planet-like gravity physics displayed on a dev-blog could beamNG not counter that somewhat but also be the first full driving game with planet maps? What would be disadvantage of this? I think it's a cool little idea.

Please don't flame me if any of this is stupid, i don't know what i'm talking about half the time and can only ask in hope to learn more.

 

I'm no expert on how this game exactly works, so I won't be able to answer any of your questions, but I did want to comment on one point...

I think the lack of speed sensation is probably one of the larger visual issues in BeamNG. As you said, people find BeamNG unrealistic as the cannot sense how fast how they are actually going. Visually there is not much of a noticeable difference between 50 and 100 km/h etc.

I understand graphics aren't exactly on top of the 'to-do' list, but in the future it would be nice to see some motion blur or some visual way to demonstrate the speed you are actually travelling. Other (high budget) games seem to simulate this quite well, I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but whatever they are doing they are doing it right...

 

Let me jump in on the speed feel thing. Youre on point when you say that it doesnt feel like going that fast. Been a problem through games in all times. Some games speed up the game, some use motion blur and so on and some just dont do anything. Ive mentioned this before but RBR (Richard Burns Rally) was one of THE hardest games ive play, due to this very factor but when i got used to it it was one of the best, if not the best at that time. Motion blur can absolutely help if you dont have a huge driving experience (btw, your friends, did they drive from behind or inside the car? 100% from inside the car and they would probably get away much better). I remember an old homebrewed game called T-Rally, it got alot of complaints about just that but he ran the game at 1:1 and released a sped up version which 'felt' better but now was more arcade, less sim.

 

i dont get the whole "lack of speed sensation"....If i am in 3rd gear going 80, i know that Im in 3rd gear going 80....motion blur is annoying to me, it doesnt happen in real life, i guess a lot of people havent driven real cars or something because in the game, its not hard to negotiate turns and navigate them going an appropriate speed. In my opinion, the tire grip is still off a little bit, hopefully thats refined as time goes by (as it has been)

 

FOV and suspension setup makes world of difference.

 

When ingame i would always set the camera to the driver seat just for the sake of the realistic experience. To be fair, they aren't racers or rally drivers so maybe they're not the people to judge such a thing but their word would have more credibility than mine. I also used to be a massive fan of Need for speed underground 1 & 2. You genuinely feel like you're going fast but again arcade have always been good at that.

Just because of the hours i have dumped into beamNG i do not have a problem with roughly guessing what speed im going and i pride myself at being quite an amazing drifter considering how much i've had to practice on this game lol. To someone who has not played it, it's a new experience and i guess i was naive to think actual drivers would be better than me at a game even if the game is realistic. I always thought that motion blur does happen in some sense when it's something you're not focusing on or if you're passing objects at such a speed you cannot make out the details unless you try to focus something as it passes for the fraction of a second it is in your vision. It's not entirely accurate but has been used over the years and is popular with a lot of people.

Thanks for the comments so far guys.

 

Being inside the vehicle is the only way to drive unless you're editing the map or something similar or positioning vehicles precisely. I've driven, and crashed (not crashed in last 15 years almost), several vehicles. Not many folks can say they've gone through 3 feet of water in a 1992 mercury sable AT 70+ MPH, and lived, the car lived too! Boy was it clean (AND it didn't miss a beat, loved that cushy car). Boated right over the water. I spoke up about this a year or two back and after showing some demos of 'thicker' water (where the car boats over it for a bit, loses speed, and then sinks just a bit after, front end first). You now don't fall into water like it's just air, the developers listened to a valid point, and they do listen to the community in general. So your article/review/feedback here is/was not wasted.

The graphics sometimes leave a little bit to be desired - more-so the lighting, but I believe these things are being worked on and this is early-access as we know all-too-well.
There's a per-map setting inside the f1 object editor for how dark shadowed areas are. This is basically the flat background lighting. That doesn't work for underground though (it does but doesn't look good), though I think you can set gameplay zones in the f1 object editor to remedy this.
There's some other threads about the possibilities of game-engine work like you mentioned wanting in your post. While I am not on the team, info I've read from other forum pages from the developers, as of very recently, seems to indicate that some of the things you made a point to bring up, are known.

So no worries buddy, just wait it out a bit more. You might be surprised!

 

Last car i tossed around a track was a 2017 Nissan GTR and i must say that the ETK K-series Track version is not far off from that experience.
Ive owned a bunch of skylines, rx7 and so on, some street drift spec and some track. Drifting isnt quite there yet for me in Beamng BUT that is imo down to chassis geometry in Beamng and FFB. Drifting irl requires alot of feedback, right now (with my setup) i cant seem to get it just right. Its not talking to me as much as id want and there still seems to be a slight deadzone when driving straight. Ive solved that by using the Grand Marshal due to it long wheelbase its way more controllable and forgiving on the edge, as in real life.

 

Again, thanks for the replies. For a game that imo is a revolutionary driving experience, it has come a long way indeed and i have no doubt in my mind that the majority of the community concerns will be addressed.

I'm not big on forums so i don't really browse threads for details unless it's more mods but it's nice to see actual drivers say that the game is going in the right direction in terms of realism.

Again since i haven't driven i'm not sure what to really expect to feel. I will say that when driving on beamng i turn my FFB to the strongest settings for tracks and laptimes and lower when drifting. That way i can play with the wheel a lot more with 1 hand as it really is stiff otherwise. I'm sure it'd feel miles off compared to real life but it's what i have "mastered" so far. As for the Grand Marshal i feel like that car is a tank that always has a bed of mar-balls under its wheels. I probably have 5 minutes drive time in total on that car

Honestly didn't know you could do this so thanks for the headsup. I suppose BeamNG's ability to customize really is a key player in its popularity even after being an early access since caveman times.

The cherry on the cake would be if a dev found this post and spread some wisdom i'll sleep like a baby

.

 

That is like making toothpicks with a chainsaw, surely possible, but lot of the time you get all the wrong things extracted from the log.

Worth reading:
https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/like-your-ffb-strong-think-again.30763/

 

A bed of marbles, hahaha I got a kick out of that. That's one way to put it.

The grand marshal will handle like cars typical of that generation, descendants of old full-size hate-tank type (boat!) cars. Like the Caprice, Puick Roadmaster, or the crown Victoria.
Suspension = soft and cushy, it's also got a higher center of gravity than smaller more sporty vehicles
Weight = Lots and Lots of long heavy car, with long over-hang front and back too, long wheelbase too
Drive train = rear wheel drive
=slides all over the place in turns but darn if that's not the best riding car going down the highway.
I had cars like this, you could corner with them, but everyone on the block likely heard (and possibly felt) you do it, as tires roared while sliding sideways under the weight of a 3600~5000 pound car! It's simple the "rules of motion", an object in motion (going a certain way at x speed) will tend to STAY in motion, until acted on by an outside force (be it gravity, rolling resistance, or someone cranking on the wheel or changing how far a pedal is pushed, or a tire falling off).

You don't take a Lincoln Town-Car to track day unless you're towing your race car or trailer behind it. Not unless you're Cleetus Macfarland, or similar.
But you'd sure love it if you had to drive through Detroit or any other number of depressed rust-belt cities that would otherwise high-side your track car with deep pot-holes.

Pick something appropriate for the day at the track, or pick appropriate vehicle mods for a lower, stiffer suspension, and throw some weight in the trunk of the vehicle, that will help. Limited slip differentials in pickup trucks can also help out a LOT with the light rear end wanting to step out as rear-wheel drive vehicles often do. Nothing a piano or two in the back cannot fix.
An 88 pessima handles well enough and is my personal choice, for map tester, but a covet can be better for track corners, if a little slower in the top-end, and the SBR handles great while being very fast - and expensive. Forget about the Bolide unless you have a wheel and pedals or analog controller, just don't even bother. I drive with a keyboard, but you'd be amazed it was a keyboard.
--Enjoy!

 

About that boat (nope not talking about the R33 Skyline) Grand Marshal, i used the drift missile config as a start, its light and down to a bare minimum in whats needed for a drift car. I added bumpes cause the dontway too much and it looks better. Suspension is as much race as it can be. Not alot of parts but choosing the highest spec'ed ones make a good base. Adjusted the camber, caster and so on. Choose Race tires, an important one, also bring the tire pressure up abit, will increase stability.

About the graphics part; Beamng isnt the fanciest around but Reshade can help with that.
Also, Jeff and the other guys working on the Torque3D engine has version 4.0 coming, with PBR (yey) which will bring graphics up to 2018 standard BUT not for BeamNG, since after talking to the devs, they made it clear that it would be a monstrosity of work getting the graphics from that version of T3D into BeamNG, since they broken apart the code and imporved it vastly, since hte beginning of time.

JeffRs blog about T3D development, for those who are intrested:
https://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=159&start=300#p10741