Environmental damage factors...Lava melting jbeams ?

If that was ever made, then it would be possible to mod a light saber that could slice up a car quite nicely.
Other environmental effects besides the water that is already present...
Tornado torrent winds or hurricane force winds. Which I think that could be done with a gravity LUA trigger if it was made possible to move a trigger in a path like a spiral or link it to the Forest Wind Emitter somehow.

I suspect there will be a weather overhaul in some update... Be cool to see a map with some crazy wind that is unpredictable affecting the cars handling. Blowing over 18 wheelers, or sucking up cars like the just cause 4 tornado.

 

You can make tornados with wind ui app

 

Just tried using an invisible river to create a gust of wind . The water splash effect ruins it for now. Maybe they'll add air to liquidTypes in the future.

Spoiler: pics

 

What an innovative way to make a wind, I really like it

 

That's really great there !

 

Localized wind zones might be another solution. If those could use variable speed forest and ground cover wind + flow magnitude which would then move both flora and vehicles.

 

I never figured out how to make the wind effect for the Forest Wind Emitter sway the trees farther away. They only blow the things vertex painted when you get pretty close. The grass/ground cover has its own wind and settings from what I messed with. I think it would be cool if they made it where the trees blow farther away.( I will say here I doubt there was any thought to stormy weather for the quick cut off implementation. Which looks fine for regular breezes) And make the cars react to it as you say with either wind effector.

 

Localized winds might be possible (though I disagree with using gravity for such an effect), but melting or fine cutting are not. Remember that BeamNG is a simulation of structures, not a simulation of matter. There are several leaps the program would need to make to support such an effect.

 

Thanks ! I was thinking of that ship cutting game from space. It would be cool though I bet if it where possible it would really eat into that CPU.

 

Agreed... although while it isn't simulating matter directly... it does simulate using material properties... so... in theory... if the devs REALLY wanted to add something like this... they could technically just calculate a change in spring and damp ratio due to node temperature. This would make a structure soft and technically "melt" but if I am honest... unless some new tricks are made in flex body deformation when node/beam angles get very narrow or deformation gets very high... I think the result would look pretty darn bad currently.

 

Well... in my head you would have to specify a melting point in the JBeam for specific sections... so like plastic would have a relatively low melting point with a rather quick transition period (from solid to liquid) where as something like steel would have a very high melting point with a long transition period (going from solid to liquid has a very large temperature gap in steel where it is just "soft" but not really melted). These could just be specified as melting point in Kelvin, and then transition temperature range which would just be a set number of degrees that it would transition across. And then for compatibility reasons, obviously if the section isn't there... well... then the parts don't melt.

Also while engines and exhausts do get very hot... it is usually pretty rare that they actually melt. Steel has a very high melting point.

 

I would think that this was possible. I mean, we already have brake thermals, so they could just bring thermal measurments to other parts of the cars and apply the same formula they use for brake thermals(of course with some tweaking.) At least it seams like they could do that in my mind. But idk I don't know anything about coding or any of that.

 

Well.... yes and no. While they do have brake thermals, that temperature is basically nothing but a physical temperature acquired through brake calculations. That is a completely different set of equations which is only kept internally in the actually brake calculations. It isn't actually applied anywhere in the JBeam effecting structure.

To do what I was suggesting, you would need to apply thermal radiation to the environment, and then apply thermal flux calculations to the nodes (as that is where the temperatures would have to be monitored at as they are the points with the coordinates). Once that calculation is made, you would also need to make a calculation based off what type of material the node is trying to represent (thankfully that section is already defined in nodes) so that you would know how good it is at absorbing and transmitting temperature. Once that is done you would have to do additional calculations off the nodes mass to make sure that it is absorbing heat at that point at the proper rate (seeing as surface area isn't really an option with a point mass) and then it would have to pass heat to other nodes that it is connected with beams to.

Once you did all that, you could then calculate the temperature of the beam based on the average temperature of its two connecting nodes. Once that is known, you would take the material properties I specified in my previous post and do the stiffness and damping calculations from there.

It really is a pretty complicated ordeal to say the least.

 

Oh. Well, like I said, I don’t really know anything about j-beams and stuff.