Update Speculation thread

I'm saying laggier due to the size of the map, not the assets itself.

 

Longer to load and require more ram most likely, but overall gpu usage should be down because there's less being rendered, Italy is more spread out than wca.

 

holy cow i never really realized how big it was until you said it was 4 times the size of East Coast, USA!

 

Bus did came with hustle bustle, so probably it is not only car and map, but some kind of campaign that comes with it and testing those can take surprisingly lot of time.



Map size is not huge cause of lag really, sure it does contribute, but way terrain works is that it is not very heavy to render, but there are other things.

Problem is higher number of different meshes and especially ones that use many textures / shaders / layers.

Lag comes from the way engine and DX11 puts textures on meshes, you are fairly limited in how much different you can add, but it is not really big problem if there is lot of polygons with same UV map and texture as those you can put gigantic amount on map before any slowdown, especially with some recent GPUs.

That is drawcalls, for example Just Cause 3 manages 4000 drawcalls just fine, not hitting limits of CPU, while T3D which BeamNG uses is chocking at about 1000 less, there are many reasons for that, but it is one of the largest causes of lag, workarounds for that are then causing GPU load to become high and there are other reasons which cause that (culling for example).

Trick with this game and engine is to make sure your meshes, UV mapping and textures are allowing things to batch up, it is possible to optimize things further than WCUSA, dropping LODs actually improves performance in some cases (different lods don't go to same batch, so having one lod + null is faster for low poly objects that are not really plentiful), but now we must think further ahead, how long do you think this limit can be lived with?

tdev has mentioned working on Vulkan, which would help to share load from drawcalls to more than one core. (1)

Same core does all graphics processing and sending to GPU, UI, shadows, everything.

WCUSA is kinda unfinished business, when you examine it, it is very clear that it has made to work with current engine, but very likely it will be differently build for Vulkan version, if that version is within range of possibilities.

There are few challenges with Vulkan that are not so easy to come by, also they probably need to develop some new tools for developing which can take quite bit more time than making a map.

It can be that Italy is also laggy and requires very strong GPU at first, but most of the lag can be fixed with new graphics engine, that is if it is possible to make work, as it is not easiest or fastest thing to make happen.

BeamNG is in one way ideal use case for Vulkan as Beam is so heavily CPU bottlenecking, but on other hand way physics work etc. are probably making someone to have rather long nights with huge coffee cups.

I would be very surprised if Vulkan version would be released this year, along backwards compatibility with mods would require quite long time to adapt, I wonder if even shaders would be anything alike in current version, how to get everything to work will take lot of time, maybe few versions with some things like shaders become depreciated until they can be dropped so that new version compatible mods would be plenty.

Would be surprising to have Vulkan version even next year, but then again I'm poor at guessing and devs are good at surprising.

Anyway, one can be almost sure that Italy will lag on average or less than average computers, probably even on high end if using dynamic reflection much. Also current version of BeamNG is rendering lot of stuff that are not seen, behind camera or hidden by something else, which kinda guarantees lag.

However even WCUSA won't lag if devs can pull Vulkan support out from their sleeve, as that will allow much better use of LODs because of lower CPU load from drawcalls.

So that is what very likely will come, one way or another, otherwise devs would of made maps like WCUSA differently I think.

Compared to other games, this one has whole world calculated even if it is not seen, so that way map size contributes to laggyness, but it does cut off terrain rendering, however this is stuff on drawcalls when camera is near forest, where gizmo is, facing towards gizmo, you can see lods etc. all these are taking drawcalls at redwood forest though.
So sure there could be chances of optimizing, however no point doing as it is very much work and if same work is put towards Vulkan version, where this optimization can be done also, it is better to work only once.


There is still lot I don't know or understand, but laggyness is probably kinda intentional for now, solution for that takes quite bit of time, but as physics are optimized so highly, surely they will do something to graphics performance, it will be interesting to see what changes it will bring.

(1) https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-on-linux.53767/#post-833235

Update: Here is something about Just Cause 3 optimizations, which might be interesting to read for anyone wanting to know about DX11 ways of optimizations:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/ar...t-cause-3-on-systems-with-intel-iris-graphics

 

The Wentward DT40L has been the only vehicle so far to have a custom campaign. I wouldn't assume that campaigns for vehicles are going to happen all the time unless more vehicles get campaigns.

 

I would be upset if the new car didn't come with a new scenario or a campaign. Maybe something inspired by The Italian Job? Or Herbie the Love Bug?

 

22 of the 23 vehicles in BeamNG didn't have their own campaigns though...

 

If it does happen to get a scenario... maybe a race in Italy with a Pigeon?

 

an italian-job styled heist-race thingy as a campaign would be amazing

 

Remember, after 2 major updates, West Coast, USA only has 2 scenarios (besides the campaign).

 

It is car + map, I would be surprised if there would not be some kind of campaign, not sure if it is as stereotypical as pizza delivery, but that would certainly made possible to do lot of fun for relatively low amount of work.

Might be something much more creative though, like for example Italian job kind of heist thing which Acrain7 brought up, certainly would be fun

 

I'm bringing this up again, solely because it's quite suspicious that a developer would like a post speculating on a release date.

 

Maybe because your speculation might've been kinda/almost/somewhat correct.

 

Or maybe because it was so well written speculation that it was fun to read?

 

Hm...

I wouldn't be surprised if I was correct. This year's update schedule has been identical to last year.

 

How do you count Automation update, it did provide additional content and timing was published in advance, was it still part of normal schedule?

I too think that you can be correct about time of update, but I'm thinking if there should be Christmas update this year?

 

That would be over 4 months between updates, which is rather long. Remember, if we used the time between 0.10 and 0.11, the update would launch late October. Also, both Italy and the Autobello are in game, so a wait of that long might be excessive. I added an extra month because Thanksgiving has been used for update releases before and Italy and the Autobello are far more work than just WCA.

 

But Christmas update could be some small one, like there was Christmas mod before?

 

Just to be clear, you all are considering that the same people don't work on both the map and the car right? There's two separate teams, one can stop working completely and the other will be unaffected.

 

Likely just a re-release of the Christmas mod with the additions of Christmas objects on the Automation Test Track and Italy, alongside Christmas skins for the Autobello, Wentward DT40L, Gavril T-Series, ETK K-Series, and Ibishu Pessima.
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It's added complexity regardless, the more new content, the more potential issues and conflicts that might arise.