Grandpa asks how to program BeamNG

Hi, sorry for a possibly stupid question, but I need to teach myself how to program BeamNG for my grandkids. I'm a retired computer science teacher, so I'm not a computer idiot but I am pretty badly out of date. My 2 boys watch Griffs Garage on YouTube and want to make stuff like that. Is there a training video or online guide I could read? Thanks for your patience and kindness.

 

The first thing you need to know is what do you want to do in beamng ? create a whole new car ? create new customisation parts ? simply change a few values of the engines to make them more powerful ? There's a lot of things in beamng related to programmation and modding and you can't do much without combining several different tools and languages to edit this game

 

Hey there ^^

I dont know if you have a discord account but there is a discord server where you can find complete guides, live support by other creators and be able to share your work with others to get some feedback on it. the guides are pretty easy to follow and someone with your computer experience will blitz trough them i bet c:

https://discord.gg/prRZDWjp here is the link to the server in question. if you dont alread have a discord account its pretty easy to set up and requires next to no personal information. its also completely free to use.

My expertise is 3d modeling so if you do need some help with that you can just shoot me a message on here or preferably discord (Nacho (they/them)#7982 is my account tag)
what i can tell you is that you will probbaly need these programs to make good quality mods:

Blender (Open source 3d modeling software. You can get it on the website or over steam)

Notepad++ as a text editor (Also open source and free to get on the website)

and paint.net for texture creation. (Either free on the website or paid in the microsoft store if you want to support the creators with a donation)

Also when starting out you can also use the BNE NodeBeam Editor. its not the newest piece of software but you if you can get it to run properly its a great help at the start: https://github.com/RORMasa/NodeBeamEditor/releases/download/v0.37/NodeBEAM_Editor_037_002.zip

I wish you the best of luck on your modding journey ^^

-Nacho

 

Custom monster trucks like in the griff videos that came up in my search require at least passable understanding of everything there is in beam and the various programs that modify it, this makes them rare and of very mixed quality.

I would start with some flashy stuff for their favorite cars, like custom skins, bigger rims, extremely lowered or lifted suspension, a couple dozen police lights, ridiculous wings, no2 bottle so big it makes the rear sag, ect.

 

custom skins is quite easy, it's mainly a paint work because that's the longest part to do (normaly) as making the part visible in the part selector isn't complicated at all. Bigger rims needs you to create new models and materials and texture and jbeams, basically everything needed for beamng in short. I don't recommend doing that as a first modding project. Changing the suspensions is extremly easy, that's basically tweaking a few values inside the jbeam file and create a new part using these new values to avoid breaking the original mod. Sometimes simple things can be very easy to do in beamng and very funny (like making insanely powerful engines). At the moment that the changes aren't visible in game, it shouldn't be more than a few values changes inside a jbeam file. The problems comes when you want to make something visible in game and that looks neat.