Hello drivers, both veterans and those of you joining us on PS5, and welcome to Version 0.40! We’ve got a big one for you this time, headlined by one of the community’s most-requested features.
Version 0.40 comes packed with local split-screen multiplayer, physical occupants (say hi to Bob, everyone loves Bob), a brand-new truck, an entire suite of upscaling options, a native Windows on Arm build, and a host of optimizations. For the full list of changes, check out the patch notes!
🎉PS5 Launch🎉
You heard that right, it’s PS5 time! Along with PC’s Version 0.40, BeamNG will also be making its debut on console by launching on PS5. It’s been a long road, but we’re delighted to be able to celebrate BeamNG’s PS5 launch with you all.
Welcome to BeamNG and happy driving!
Split-Screen
Local split-screen multiplayer is here! You can start a multiplayer instance from the Main Menu by adding participants and picking Freeroam or a game mode, or from inside a level by selecting Split-Screen in the Pause Menu.
Split-Screen supports up to 4 players on PS5 and up to 64 players on PC. If you have that many friends, and the hardware to handle 64 players, you’re living the dream. Please send us a photo of your record attempts, it’ll brighten our day!
Freeroam and Game Modes
In Freeroam, players start together at a random location. Each player will receive a random vehicle suited to the map, with automatic per-player vehicle colors and per-player settings for gearbox mode, clutch assist, and throttle assist. Explore the map with your friends, go on a roadtrip together, or create elaborate crashes. Everyone gets their own vehicle, but using the new occupants system, you can actually get out of your vehicle and enter your friends’ - they drive, and you get to mess with the interior of the vehicle.
If you’re looking for more structured gameplay or to see who is the better driver, you can play any of our seven split-screen game modes:
- Race - race your friends across a variety of track layouts, with support for over 85 existing Time Trial and AI Race layouts.
- Drag Race - head-to-head over the quarter mile.
- Pursuit - play as chaser or runner, and either make the arrest or escape.
- Derby - be the last vehicle moving.
- Drift - aim for the highest score within the time limit.
- Rock Crawling - race through challenging trails, with optional penalties and recovery rules.
- Soccer - team up and push the ball into the opposing goal.
Each mode has its own settings, so you can tweak track layouts, lap and score goals, penalty rules, and more to suit your taste.
Walking Mode and Occupants - Behold, the Coming of Bob!
Walking mode now has a new character mesh. While walking around, the character’s head will follow the camera, and more importantly, you will now be able to see yourself in mirrors.
Occupants will now actually sit inside vehicles, affecting the way the vehicle handles, and being affected by the same physics as the rest of the game. The addition of Bob and co is purely in the service of realism just like everything else we do. The fact that they’re a little silly-looking is a happy coincidence, we swear. Each occupant adds 89 kg of weight to the seat and the vehicle, and seated occupants are fully JBeamed, so they wobble and react to how the vehicle is being driven. Character colors are preserved when entering vehicles, which makes players easy to tell apart in split-screen.
We’ve also moved the traditional driver camera into a generic “occupant” camera, which can be used by any occupant of the vehicle - driver seat, passenger seat, hanging on to the wheel…We’ve also made a number of changes to this camera mode to accommodate Bob and its compatriots, including increasing rotation limits so that every trigger in a cockpit can be reached. Switching to free cam now happens automatically when you remove the last vehicle, and spawning a vehicle while you’re on foot returns you to the vehicle camera.
Vehicles
New Vehicle: Cherrier Percheron
The Cherrier Percheron is a full-size European cab-over semi truck from the early 2000s, and it is our most interactable vehicle yet - a full complement of internal and external features to play around with, including interior lighting, door lights, a night light and a functional sunroof with a sunshade. There are openable storage lockers, an openable front fascia pane and, a left side spoiler panel, and foldable side skirts so you can get to the fuel tanks.
The Percheron is highly modular, available as a fifth-wheel tractor or a rigid with upfits: a platform configurable as a flatbed or insulated box, concrete mixer upfits in multiple sizes, and an interactable tanker upfit with custom liveries as either a fuel or foodstuffs tanker.
Cabs come in three sizes - S, L and XL. The S is a low-roof day cab for daily and vocational work, while L and XL include a sleeper bunk for longer trips. Each cab is suspended separately from the frame on coil or air springs at all four corners, and can be unlatched from inside and tilted electrohydraulically from the control panel on the rear right corner.
Frames are offered in five lengths, from 6.17 m to 9.80 m, with air and leaf suspension options and axle configurations from 2 to 5 axles - more than 50 unique chassis setups, from road-going 4x2s to 8x8 all-terrain trucks. Power comes from a 12.8L turbocharged I6 ranging from 310 to 500 hp, mated to a 12-speed manual or a 7-speed automatic.
Rounding it out, the Percheron has its own new horn and reverse beeper.
New Trailers: FPU European Truck Trailers
To go with the truck, we’ve added a new range of semi and rigid trailers: platform upfits as a flatbed or insulated box, two sizes of fuel and foodstuffs tankers with unique liveries, and modular construction with various axle layouts.
We’ve also added a Muhten Tag milk brand with liveries for tankers and trailers, and fixed and rebalanced some very high price values on various trailer parts.
New Prop: Tyrannos Dinosaur Mascot
Weighing in at 86kg of fiberglass, the Tyrannos Dinosaur Mascot can often be found near Tyrannos fuel stations. It comes with an optional 560kg base for stability, which can be dug into the ground, and is available as a load option across a vast array of pickups and truck beds. The statue can also float on water. Do with that information what you will.
Other Vehicles
Lest you think we’re ignoring the existing lineup: police lightbar modes have been reworked, parking brake triggers have been added to all vehicles, racing seat stiffness has been reworked for better attachment, and the drag and lift of most vehicles has been refined. Light intensity has been re-adjusted across LED, incandescent and EU/US lightbars for realistic falloff, and license plate retro-reflectivity got some attention.
We’ve also added Statue load options, trigger fixes, seat mounting improvements and physics structure updates across a long list of vehicles. Check the patch notes for the full round of vehicle-by-vehicle changes!
Graphics
Anti-Aliasing and Upscaling
We’ve added a full set of new anti-aliasing and optional upscaling techniques: SMAA T2x temporal anti-aliasing, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR™ 3 and FSR™ 4, and Intel® XeSS, plus a sharpness slider for upscalers and multi-monitor upscaling support on PC.
Lighting, Shadows, and Reflections
Stochastic screen-space reflections are now available for vehicles, glass and water, joined by Specular Occlusion, which darkens environment reflections in cavities and on sheltered rough surfaces using bent normals.
We’ve also added light-source radius support for more natural soft shadows from point lights, spotlights and vehicle lights. Cluster shading, SSAO and screen-space shadows are all faster and more stable too, so shimmering, flickering and ghosting should be noticeably reduced, and we’ve fixed missing ambient lighting at night. Check the patch notes for the full list of graphics fixes!
Under the hood, we’ve implemented bindless rendering on Vulkan and Direct3D 12, lowering CPU overhead in scenes with many objects and materials. As part of that cleanup, we’ve removed some obsolete post effects – chromatic lens, flash, turbulence, old motion blur, edge AA and the old SSAO shaders.
Redesigned Graphics and Display UI
The Graphics and Display settings have been redesigned. Settings are now grouped into Image, Detail, Brightness & HDR, Framerate & Sync, Multi-monitor, Lighting and Reflections. We’ve added a Resolution Scaling slider and a Screen Space Reflections quality option, merged Ambient Occlusion’s toggle and quality into a single option, and simplified Dynamic Reflections and Dynamic Mirrors into single quality presets.
Virtual Reality
VR now supports Direct3D 12 through OpenXR on PC, alongside improved performance and visual quality and fixes for rendering glitches. Head-bobbing is now automatically disabled when VR is active, because we like you and don’t want you to suffer.
Input and Controls
On PlayStation 5, many common steering wheels will be supported with force feedback:
- Fanatec ClubSport DD+ for PS
- Fanatec Gran Turismo® DD PRO
- Logitech G29
- Logitech G923
- Logitech RS50
- Logitech G Pro for PS
- Thrustmaster T248 for PS
- Thrustmaster T598
- Thrustmaster T98 FERRARI 296 GTB
- Thrustmaster TGT2
- Thrustmaster T300 RS
Other PS5 steering wheels have not been tested yet, and may or may not work correctly. We’ll be improving support over time.
For PC users, the work on PS5 support helped us notice some potential improvements. As a result, several PC steering wheels have received some tweaks to their default controls, and included new ones for Thrustmaster T98, Revosim Pure DD, Revosim Initiale DD, Logitech RS50 and Logitech RS shifter.
Throttle and brake trigger linearity on gamepads has been rebalanced — the old curve was heavily geared towards extremely gentle driving. We know our players. Gentle driving is generally not what they’re here for.
Rally Mode
As a side effect of the new occupants system, rally cars now have a more realistic weight distribution. Turns out that adding the weight of a whole person to the car changes things. Who knew?
We’ve implemented support for dynamic in-world 3D modelled countdown clocks. Modders can build their own clocks for rally stages with complete freedom — analog, 7-segment, matrix, bulbs, whatever you like — and they’ll be used for the 3D preview panel too, if you have it enabled. There’s a new option to choose between a fully realistic clock with no visual aids, a zoomed view of the clock, or a plain UI representation, so you can decide exactly how much help you want.
We’ve also changed the default pacenotes from Pro to Enthusiast. This wasn’t a cosmetic decision: Pro notes come from per-stage, fully tailored freeform recording sessions with no metadata linking speech patterns to predefined pacenote triggers, which means visual pacenotes aren’t available with them. This makes them unsuitable for our non-English community and for quieter play, such as streaming. Enthusiast notes use predefined pacenote metadata, so that visual pacenotes will work, and they’re typically available even in mod stages.
Additionally, an example pacenote call now plays when browsing codrivers in the stage start menu, along with an intercom check when you first arrive there.
Levels
West Coast, USA received a large round of general fixes: holes closed, sidewalks adjusted to garage and door heights, with terrain and asphalt no longer popping through them, buildings and meshes repositioned with collisions fixed on many buildings, broken materials and textures repaired, decals cleaned, power line UVs fixed, and a new backdrop with an infinite plane.
Italy has raised building LOD distances with fixed LODs on roads and traffic signs, plus fixes to materials, trees that were too close to the road, highway line markings, the hospital entrance and a bridge over the highway.
We’ve made additional changes to some of the other maps, like updated terrain backdrops, infinite planes, and removing the old invisible-walls map limit folders, among other fixes and updates.
We’ve also done a general cleanup pass across maps and art/common, removing duplicate materials and textures, fixing broken texture links, retiring old unused materials and fixing collision meshes on some common props.
We’ve optimized foliage soft collision on almost every foliage object in the game, which should result in improved framerates in areas with dense foliage like Jungle Rock Island and Italy.
Gameplay
First Drive Onboarding Tutorial
“First Drive” is the new onboarding tutorial, replacing the Freeroam Tutorial. Many lessons have been moved over and improved, and the associated achievements and trophies have moved with them. You can start it from the onboarding popup, the Quick-Start Menu or the Gameplay Selector. On first launch, the popup helps you configure language, measurement units and UI scale.
The guided lessons cover vehicle recovery, driving assists, spawning vehicles, customizing vehicles, vehicle interactions, the radial menu, map view, challenges and the environment.
Missions
All Italian trucking missions now use various Percheron configurations, and Abseiling Fuel and Trailer Ferry have been converted into Freeform Delivery missions using the Percheron as the main vehicle.
We’ve added a new Freeform Delivery mission, TastiCola Driver, rebalanced objectives and star requirements across many Drift, Delivery, Knockaway, and Time-Trial missions, and made drift mission rewards more accessible while adding bonus goals for experienced players. Route guidance, hints, descriptions, names, images, weather, lighting, and starting positions have all had attention, and “Run What You Brung” races have a wider pool of eligible opponents.
Photomode and UI Improvements
In our ongoing quest to improve the UI, we’ve done some more work in that area. To start with, we’ve redesigned the Main Menu to make it easier to navigate. The new layout offers large tiles for Quick-Start Experiences, Freeroam, Split-Screen, and others, while preventing overcrowding with a [More…] option that will show the other options. The Extras page has been removed and its contents redistributed - Credits can now be found on the Main Menu, Stats in the Pause Menu, and the rest can be found in the Options menu. We’ve also improved the performance of blurred menu buttons.
We’ve given Photomode some attention this version as well. We’ve given the Environment Settings tab a bit of love this round. The layout has been changed so that more frequently used controls are easier to reach while the advanced controls are in a collapsable section, not taking up space when the tab opens. This is in addition to a number of other fixes and changes, like adding a temperature profile graph and wind direction control, and adding the Level Default and Realtime day length options and making the Day Length follow the value set by the level.
We’ve also added Low Performance notifications. In Freeroam and Split Screen, you’ll now get notifications if your FPS remains below 25, and you’ll also be able to see a this warning in the Pause Menu. Trying to spawn another vehicle will also trigger you a performance warning if your system is already struggling.
The Trip Computer app has been overhauled with updated visuals and an optional multi-strip mode that displays up to three different stats at once.
Improvements to the Minimap code mean it’s now part of the default user layout — it runs in far less time per frame and produces no extra memory allocations, which removes a source of frame hiccups. Elsewhere, the Level Selector has gained filtering by location, size and author, the damage UI no longer swaps left and right tire indications, Main Menu navigation now works during the initial fade-in, and Photo Mode supports upscalers and temporal accumulation when they’re active.
We removed the “show possibly broken mods” button. The false positive rate had gotten so high that it was creating more confusion than it resolved, so rather than keep apologizing for it on your behalf, we banished it to the Infinite Void.
We also added an Early Preview of the Photo Mode Overlay editor, if you’d like to try it out. Using this, you can edit Photo Mode overlays or create your own from images in your User Folder and HUD apps.
This is by no means the full list of changes to the UI in Version 0.40, have a look at the Patch Notes for the complete list.
Modding and Editors
World Editor
The World Editor has a new Editor Render Settings window, which can either follow your game settings or override quality, post effects, anti-aliasing, resolution scaling, and FPS limits for the editor itself.
We’ve also made some changes to the Terrain Editor, Material Editor, and Sites Editor. Have a look at the Patch Notes for the full list!
Modding and the Groundmodel Debug Panel
The Groundmodel Debug panel has been fully revamped. Checkboxes and their options are reorganized with contextual visibility, there’s a new slider to tweak polygon separation, an alternative debug color theme for when models were assigned colors that are too similar, the realtime coltri count is integrated into a single listing mode, and default groundmodel visibility is smarter about what has been seen in the current level so far. We’ve also fixed several bugs with loading and saving groundmodel configurations.
Optimizations and Platforms
Optimizations took up a big share of this cycle, and this time they’re the sort you’ll feel in the menus as much as on the road.
Some of the improvements include the speed at which the game mounts and unmounts mods, loading times in the Vehicle Selector, performance while recording a Replay, and various other options. Vehicle AI and traffic have also been optimized, and we’ve eliminated a bug that sometimes caused dramatic framerate drops and crashes.
We’ve also improved video-memory usage, including reduced allocation overhead and memory-leak fixes in DirectX 12, as well as improving synchronization in DirectX 12. This should result in better GPU utilization, fewer stalls, and better frame pacing.
Windows on Arm
We are delighted to announce native Windows on Arm binaries. On compatible devices, you can now choose between the native version and the emulated x64 version, with the native build bringing performance improvements mostly in CPU-bound scenarios. Our launcher supports Windows on Arm too.
Please note that the Steam SDK and Steam overlay are not included in the native version.
Of course, this is by no means all the changes coming in 0.40. For the full list of changes, please check out the patch notes here!