Hello, My name is Matthew, 29 years old, I'm from Poland. I'm playing Beam.NG Drive since 2014. I have a few ideas to make Beam.NG Drive better game! (and maybe more realistic?) EXPLODING CARS: When fuel will ignite, the car will explode like in real car with jump to the air and more parts will fall off. At this moment, everything just crumples and burns. It hurts me a bit that in such a perfect game there is not any explosion when the fuel ignites, I miss such realism terribly. EXAMPLE OF EXPLODING CARS, CUTTING CARS IN HALF, PULL TREES OUT OF THE GROUND BY FORCE, ETC: LIQUID FUEL: When the fuel tank is pierced, the fuel will spill onto the surface, leaving a trail until it evaporates and the car finally stops. Something similar as it is in GTA5 when you fire a fuel tank or damage it, fuel is poured out and creates a stain or fuels that you can set on fire. REAL GLASS PANES: At this moment when we crash the car, the windshield and the rear window do not break down into pieces like a real window just bend like plasticine or plastic. It hurts me so much to look at something like that. I know from experience that when I was simulating a real glass in Blender, it was not difficult and it did not burden so much the CPU. POSSIBILITY TO CUT THE VEHICLES: Playing countless hours and watching many YouTube videos about Beam.NG Drive I noticed that in this game there is no way to cut a car in half! Or cut it somehow! Already in Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now! game in 1996 year, really old technology was used such as cutting in half or many more parts of all vehicles. Is it so hard to add such a possibility to play? EXAMPLE OF CUTTING SOMETHING, SIMPLE EXAMPLE: REALISTIC TREES: I know that when we crash in a very thick and large tree, such a tree will not even move or twist. But in order to crash into very thin trees, probably of thickness of my finger, they would still stop the cars like a concrete pillar that can not be destroyed by any force? This is very weak in Beam.NG Drive. I will give you the same example again - in 1996 in the game Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now! it was possible to run into thin or thicker trees, break them into a few pieces and pull them out of the ground. If this technology was used in such an old game that had a great performance, what's the problem adding the same option to Beam.NG Drive? COMBUSTION OF THE VEHICLE: At this moment when the vehicle is in the flames, it can burn forever, and we will never see the effect of burned a car on any car in the game. All the time our car will be perfectly beautiful, although it is in flames. My goal is to create something simple, for example to create a new texture similar to a burnt texture and just after a while, the texture of the burnt car would appear on the car with the original flawless texture of the car. It was already something like that in GTA3 when cars burned and exploded, just the texture of the car was turned into a completely gray texture. In present times, we can do something such that the texture of a burned vehicle with a passing time will increasingly appear on a burning car. Something similar like in POSTAL2 game where we can set people on fire and after a period of time their texture is turned into a burned one. That's all from me for now. I am waiting for your answers. Best Regards, Matts a.k.a Zajec.
Dear Matts: Your mail comes in short notice but the US federal post office will be quick to adress its due urgency. Let me make clear that some of the features that you are asking for like the possibility to cut cars in half is not very easy to implement in the engine. I should also make clear that cars dont explode when there's some fire getting into the fuel tank. That's GTA magic. Explosions require air, please refer to how the AFR in cars is usually 14.7/1. Much more fuel than that and you would run into less power. The issue that your card also runs into is the issue of the windshields, however considering how most car windshields are not made out of pure glass but rather a material that never breaks, this is a very realistic feature. I will be pleased to hear from you. Best regards, Dr. Death. 14th of July of 1892.
Like it was said ^. The explosions that you see in films and so on are made by setting explosives under the car and basically filling the whole interior with gasoline jugs. If so I'd say that the in gamre vehicles go up in flames way to fast. Untill priper liquid and gases simulation is going to be possible (it will require a whole new game engine) fire isn't going to be possible. The same goes for ability to cut cars into pieces... Current game engine technically is capable of making it work, but it would make vehicles quite laggy and really fragile which could lead to cars breaking in half across speedbumps. Terrain modification and full map destruction with current game engine would also be really laggy which leads us to the requirement of a new game engine for implementing most of the really advanced features that you want. What you see in carmagedon is a whole different system which wouldn't allow for handling as great as in this game. Cars in carmagedon are more like piece of clay with levitating wheels as simulated suspension isn't a thing there. And after all BeamNg isn't all about crashing.
Hello Matts, welcome to the forums! Thanks for your suggestions. Some of them already partially exist. Exploding Stuff - Here's a fun mod that makes things explode: LINK Cut the Vehicles - Here's one mod that incorporates this concept: LINK Realistic Trees - I'm currently working on some realistic tree props:
Nice! How are those trees fairing for performance? Simmilary to lamp post I'd have thought. Sadly it will take a long time till I'll be able to plow threw a forest in a T-series
Hello bros. Thank you all for your posts. Some of you say that we need new engine for making new stuff - so let's make new engine, shall we? This game needs to evolving so maybe it's time to make new engine for implementing such a things what I posted. If they made something like my examples in 1996, so why we cant do that now? Let's make new engine and then after implementing my ideas, this game will be perfect for everyone!
i just don't understand why people think this first of all, in my experience, literally every single back window in the game shatters properly second, windshields aren't made of the same kind of glass as every other window in the car, and SHOULD just crack/bend unless you were simulating tempered glass and special layered glass/vinyl that windshields are made out of, "simulating real glass" in blender is hardly any experience literally watch car crash compilations and see how various windows behave unless some projectile smashes through it, but that would fall under the general purview of "you can't arbitrarily separate objects into multiple pieces" and is unrelated to windows specifically
It's not that simple, you can't just say "Oh, let's make a new engine. Done." Doing so requires a substantial amount of time, money and effort, and would mean that large portions of the game would have to be re-made entirely. And IIRC, this game has already had one engine switch. Evolution of technology is great, but this game is already pushing technical limitations of what we have to day. I have no doubt the advanced simulation you wish for will arrive in the future, but not in this iteration of the Beam series, and not for a long time. Carmageddon 2 was released in 1998, and as it is so old, it is much simpler. From what I've seen, it doesn't have any deformation, it just replaces parts of the model with parts that appear destroyed. Similarly, when cut in half, I'd guess the game replaces the model with another that has been cut. BeamNG uses beam simulation, and it would be much more difficult to implement such deformation and destruction into it.
I think the carmageddon 2 demo has a bunch of configuration files that contain the parameters for the ragdoll stuff (including ragdoll dogs, I think). Maybe this config stuff got turned into binary format in the release... I'm almost certain that the vehicle physics would have been done by calculating the forces on each wheel (i.e. not parameterising the behaviour in terms of turning-torque curves etc). Apparantly their physics coder was/is allergic to "cheating". I'm sure the force on each wheel could be done, that's not too expensive - it's just one body joined to another. Whereas ragdoll physics has many bodies joind together using complex joints. I worked extensively on developing a system recently. They could have very simple dolls - like limbs as one unit - I guess. The psychics in Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now! weren't faked, there were real so we can also implement them in BEAM NG Drive.
But why if the system that we already have is better? The only thing that is better in carmagedon is the ability to cut stuff into pieces, but basically everything else is done better here. + the vehicle splitting isn't even that big of a deal... I rarely get into crash hard enough to split vehicle. Most of the crashes that happen to me in BeamNG are 30-60mph and from time to time there is an occasional wrap around the tree at 130MPH.
I might add blood and flying body parts to that, now who would not want such? Okay, I guess I should seek help But seriously Carmageddon had quite nice ideas in gameplay department, can't remember if it had deformation though, SLRR had deformation of some sort, just moving vertexes and who knows what calculation was used to figure out how much to move vertices and what direction. Lot of stuff in Carmageddon might be possible to add to BeamNG I think, those special equipment for vehicles etc. Only problem is that AI is bit simple and does not quite get idea of gathering speed for ramming. SLRR, I76, Carmageddon, Hot Rod, all those have great ideas which if you could combine to one, would make one insane game.
Look... It's not that splitting cars is impossible in this game... heck... in theory, as long as the beams aren't made unbrakeable, you can split each car into its individual nodes... It can happen already, that isn't the hard part. The hard part comes when you start to try and decide what to do with the overlapping mesh once you start tearing things apart. As many of you know (and it seems the OP doesn't) when beams in the underlying physics structure break, the current solution is to delete the part of the mesh (or make invisible... I don't know which) that is between those two now free nodes. If the physics structure was much much finer, this would be a great solution, but, right now, sometimes there can be as much as 1 or 2 meters between nodes... even more depending on the size of the vehicle you are simulating. That means that when nodes are separated, HUGE amounts of mesh end up being deleted... which doesn't look good at all. Granted, if you leave those parts of the mesh in there, and then drive away, that can lead to horrendous spiking due to the game trying to deform the mesh to the nodes which are now extremely far apart... and it looks terrible. That is also why you sometimes see people complaining that the cars feel gummy sometimes. The cars have been specifically designed so that each solid mesh (like the unibody or cab for instance) can NOT break. The devs don't want those spiking issues, nore do they wand giant, disappearing meshes, so they artificially bumped up the strength on some parts to make sure that they never break... ever. This is also why we don't see much simulated fiberglass or carbon fiber in this game either. They both shatter and tear when broken... and the engine does both of these just fine... its when the beams start breaking and deleting parts of the mesh that things start getting ugly. So that is the issue at hand... we don't need a new game engine... it's not impossible to do... it's just we need a solution as to what to do when the mesh needs to get split. Right now, the solution is pretty good, but it does have some holes.
Thank you good people for answering me and thank you all for explanations, this mean a lot for me. I know now a lot of things from dev site - I will help you to find a solution about cutting vehicles :-D What about combusted materiales? Can we add some explosions when gas tank is on fire and make the blending texture of burnt metal?? What do you think? I found a very creative and satisfying video about BEAM NG Drive but in this video there aren't any cut scenes because this is for now impossible and this make me a little sad :-( But this video is great!
Unibody is not that hard, at least if Audi or BMW, I have seen several Audi's cut in half and once I happened to be one of the first in a crash scene where BMW has slid to oncoming car and that BMW was cut half, emergency people came only after later so those had no chance to cut it yet.
You know... that's a good point... for a body on frame vehicle... just how insanely fast would you have to be going to actually cut the thing in half? I feel like the forces would be so tremendous that it would probably just end up crashing the game anyways. For reference... this is what it takes to do a unibody car (the hard way)... granted it also split the engine in half as well... so imagine having some nice thick frame rails in there... That's probably what it would take... A heavy steel blade traveling at 500+ mph... how often does that really happen in the game though for this to be necessary Edit: I just realized I made it sound like it was impossible to do... so let me add to that. Unibody cars can be split from accidents pretty readily.... like so... (this person survived... I won't post it on here if they didn't) and a Body on Frame vehicle can as well... (granted... not actually split... I get that... but it wouldn't take much at this point) BUT... the vehicle has to be severely weakened or otherwise compromised for this to actually happen... Rusty of cracked frame over time and you will get this result. That being said... If you took a brand new or in like new condition truck and tried to split it with just a collision... I think you would be pretty hard pressed to actually make it happen.
