Early Experimental Preview of Career Concept

Great ideas and feedback as always everyone thank you!

Thanks for the questions, let me try one at a time:

Regarding your first question for "ungiven unlocks" I'm not actually clear on what you mean by that, sorry!
Second one regarding save files over multiple updates; work is being done on this bit by bit to try and prevent save-loss/deprecation, but it's still WIP and we still recommend players keep in mind that they risk losing their saves. The Career Mode is still hidden for the fact that we know it's not ready for long-play yet, hopefully we can improve this soon!
And thirdly, regarding a filter list for the big map, there are filters now, but simplified for type of gameplay - I'd love to have more robust filters setup, but at the moment the biggest issue is making an easy-to-use UX for it while incorporating more and more controller-friendly UI elements. I'm with you though, I'd prefer to have as much control over the map as possible, let's see what the team comes up with!

Lots of great brainstorming here, I'll try and get someone from the team that works on these systems to respond here and hopefully help you out!

Yup, this is a problem that's deeply routed in the AI pathing systems, and although there have been improvements, it's one of those "fix this, and cause a new bug, fix the new bug, and break the first fix" it's circular like that it seems. We're aware of this, and hopefully the AI team will come up with a solution soon, it's a problem many creators face when making smaller areas like this.

This is something I'd love to see in the game, many of us chat about it and dream of the day we'll have it! I'm certainly pushing for it from my end, I can't promise anything other than, "I'll keep trying to get it!"

Yeah it's been really fantastic to watch the success of progress of the RLS mod! They're great folks doing great work, I do everything I can to support them! The best part about modding is that you can rapidly prototype and iterate, daily if you like, so you can really push the envelope and try out new exciting things, the progress really comes quickly with a workflow like that! For the official releases, we have to make sure as many things work for as many people across as many game-wide systems as possible, so progress is very slow. The marketplace is something I wanted to see in the initial Career Mode offering, but time limits and priorities haven't allowed it to develop just yet. Again, first iteration is still going to be light and better more feature-complete features will be coming down the line I'm hoping!

It was a struggle to get fuel stations into the game, it required many people across multiple teams - gameplay, vehicle systems, art, UI/UX, and even physics. I'm so happy we did it though, everyone seems to love it! I'm especially glad we didn't fake it and just say "fill up 50L for $5 instantly" or fudge the fuel efficiency to force players to always have to fill up after 5 minutes of driving. I'd love to see this realistic approach for things like brakes, transmissions, coolant, oil, and more. I've pushed for vehicle paint fade, that's there now based on vehicle mileage, and it works on a per-part basis already, so you can have an old fender, next to a new door etc. It's a long road ahead, but I'm all for it!

 

Can you please upload a picture of what you see in the game now?

Are you referring to this panel?


If so that's not Career Related and I've been mistaken reading these - I thought you were referring to the Career Mode's Performance Indexing stuff.

Let me know so I can help clarify, and get the right people on it =)

 

Alright glad we're on the same page and yes sadly this is outside of Career Mode and more "general gameplay" which Career Mode isn't involved in atm as it's still "behind the scenes, WIP" and needs to work with it's own systems for now.

Hey glad to hear you're making enough $$ to buy these, but sadly no you aren't doing anything wrong. Due to missing sand-physics style gameplay, there is no way to store sand and similar materials in these trucks. I know, it seems strange that they're there and don't do their job, but that's a limitation at the moment. To at least get *somewhere* with this style of gameplay, we've introduced the aggregate boxes that you can install into your vehicles - they can carry sand, or water, or oil/gas for instance. You need to install those boxes instead for now.

This is something we've held off in the past for two main reasons:
1) Would be expensive, people often complain they don't make enough $$ in Career Mode at the moment, so suggesting, "Buy this house for $1,500,000" is out of the question, and since all other prices in the game are realistic from cargo delivery to vehicle purchasing to refueling, it wouldn't make sense to suddenly fake these.
2) Purchasing a house wouldn't provide any real benefit yet - the ability to dynamically make it a garage with it's own inventory etc, ability to buy/sell/tune parts and other similar questions arise. Then there's the fact that the houses are very low detail for performance sake, many of their collisions and overall structure weren't meant for "up close and personal" interactions. I did refactor the house everyone loves in the court/cul-de-sac though, so you can role play there fore now. So for now, no it's not on the near horizon, but the modding scene has done a fantastic job of filling in the blanks here and if it's house-buying you're after, I highly recommend going that route - for now =)

Great post, thanks for taking the time to create it. This thread is now over 80 pages long, but basically all of those questions/ideas have been answered here already, but for a quick recap I'll provide bullet point answers

Income Balance

Day/Night Cycle
- Due to the game's tech and art, this isn't enabled on purpose and although we would love to see it in-game right now, the quality and performance is too low so we've restricted it for now. A lot of us across the teams here at BeamNG want to see it though, and there is a push for it and we're hopeful, but for now the modding scene has taken care of this and if you try it out, you'll see there's a lot more missing within the game itself which is preventing us from just "turning it on" or even jumping into it at the moment.

Different Maps
- Career Mode is still WIP, limited development at the moment (only a few developers working on it part time) so I've made it clear that I want us to develop our core career systems before just tossing random gameplay into more maps. It's already a lousy experience to have to restart your career save with a new update, imagine having progressed through races and challenges in Italy, Utah, ECUSA, and more and losing all of that as well? So for now, it's limited to WCUSA as foundations are anchored

Uber/Lyft
- An original concept for Career Mode was a professional taxi-career branch. Plans have shifted to be more career-path oriented, and again the modding scene has picked this up very nicely to get the gameplay into users hands! For a long time I wanted to avoid having the GTA-style cellphone popping in due to BeamNG's realism, but as more and more gamers are asking for controller support, I think we're going to have to give it serious reconsideration moving forward - many gameplay systems would benefit from this, and with the new radial menu coming online and being constantly improved, it's showing just how many players are looking for simplified controls, rather than our traditional "every key on the keyboard does something!" approach up to recent. So for now, taxi-gameplay remains in it's simplest form "Garage to garage" where there are issues with invisible pedestrians, separate business ventures, new taxi-depot art/location, and a dispatch system etc. I really want to see this down the line, but it's not in the immediate plans at the moment.

Vehicle Inspection
- Due to ever-changing UI/UX we've avoided this, and instead I went with the simplified insurance-tiers. You need commercial insurance to drive your truck, or prestige insurance to drive your prestige vehicle etc. This system is clunky at the moment and needs polish and simplification for sure, but it was the "we can get this at least for now" solution to an otherwise more-complicated system.

Police
- In short, "yes please." At the moment the traffic AI and police behaviours are sub-par for this. Too many false positives, FPS performance issues, and general vehicle-destruction problems that we've left them out. From ramming you and destroying you for doing 5kmh over the limit, to traffic behaving oddly when engaged in police chases, the police within career mode have been disabled until supporting systems are ready for them. I want police, more than most, so don't worry I'll continue bribing whoever I need to in order to get them working well enough one day! Again, for now, the modding scene has filled in the blanks here!

Speed Cameras
- Have you tried passing a camera without a license plate?

Licenses
- This has been planned for ages, but not had attention put on it just yet, I certainly want to see it though and there is chatter flaring up recently about it's importance, so with no solid "We're working on it today" just know, "we're... excited to get to work on this!"

Jobs in Other Vehicles
- This has been flip-flopping seemingly daily. Today I had a chat with a co-worker about this and he was confused about the current state of things due to the flip-flopping. In short the initial concept was, "Shuffleboard Logistics" "BCPD" "Seal Brick" and many more businesses that are around, would provide you with their vehicles, and you'd make money for them and with them (they'd take a cut.) Currently this is partially implemented - you can rent/hire/lease Shuffleboard trucks and trailers for instance, and depending on your reputation with them they will take a sizable cut from your earnings.

If you have the time, please browse through the 80+ pages here and you'll see many more ideas, their progress, their inspiration and timelines etc, and hopefully only improve on the enthusiasm for Career Mode's future!

As always, the comments and questions here are fantastic, keep'm coming!

 

No.

 

Haha

There's always room for polish and improvements - the recent push across the teams has been for performance and file structure improvements. A more homologized asset system, no more duplicated meshes/textures, faster vehicle loading/swapping, and more. WCUSA already pushes the limits too far in regards to performance demands, especially with traffic active, so I've been slapped on the wrist more times than I can count in regards to improving WCUSA's gameplay potential. I was able to squeeze in the updated dirt track, race track parking lots and access, drag strip, gravel track, back roads through the forests, residential area, rebuilt the drifting/mountain roads, and many other little tweaks but short of *expanding* the level (requires tech that isn't there yet) there's not much more than can happen moving forward.

I'm really happy to see that everyone appreciates the transparency, I wouldn't have it any other way!

 

I'm forever optimistic in this regard!

At the end of the day, it seems to me that BeamNG has always thrived on, "what if" rather than, "must do" when it comes to specific features and innovation. I remain hopeful that one day we'll have much longer driving roads created in the vanilla editor(s) rather than imported meshes as they're done now. To be clear, this is my personal view/opinion of course, but things like motion-blur, suspension squeaks, PBR, and 101 other things used to be a thing of dreams, so who knows! =)