Where are we going?

I really like beamng.

The physics are good. Nowhere else can you get this level of detail. Nothing is predefined, there is so much potential. This game will /should be able to go somewhere.

The open world aspect is fun. You can do anything, as long as you can come up with new ideas and are willing to wait for a couple minutes everytime you make a change.

The content is good and highlights the potential of the game. Anything, possible or not in real life, can be built in beamng. We have diverse maps of varying quality, art style and performance. The cars are realistic, although cheap clones of real life brands. And in the future, we are going to have even more diversity. A trophy truck sounds nice, and would of course fit the career mode.

The gameplay is fun. We don't have anything to unlock, no progress can be made, the is no story, all you can do is whatever you come up with. Drive alone on a bumpy road, race alone on a bumpy track, or understeer. The career mode sure is coming, keep your hopes up.

The modding community brings life to beamng between updates. Automation exports are considered good enough by a surprisingly large amount of people. Modding is supported officially, which means modding is easy. That's what kept me playing beamng. I got to make my own content, because the base game wasn't enough. The real solution would have been to get a job and spend all those hours working instead of modding and then buy a real game.

The community is friendly and inviting. Just look at this thread. Mainly because you want to see it before it's only found on archives. I made some friends here, but luckily there are other ways of contacting them.

The developers seem to understand where their priorities are. We got a new sand texture. And a lot more...

I really don't like beamng.

 

Alright... I guess it's time to weigh in now that most of the drama has died down.

I feel that:

• There was an inexcusable and unprofessional breakdown in communication over the last year as the scenario system being completely torn apart and reworked so that it can eventually support career mode gameplay. There were two posts made on the subject by @tdev , but they came far, far, too late and were either in obscure threads or overshadowed by other information being provided in the same post. The end result is that the majority of the community (including myself) missed them entirely, and spent the entire year wondering why updates were very light on scenarios, campaigns, and quickrace tracks. Scenarios are surprisingly central to BeamNG drive at this point in development - they allow players to quickly set up and experience existing vehicle and prop content in ways they might not normally try. They're one of the best showcases of BeamNG in its unmodified state - it's where the game feels most like a game. Had the entire community known ahead of time to not expect scenarios while the system was reworked, and that it had to be reworked in order to make preparations for career mode, then I think this last year would have been a little easier on everyone involved. As it was, the lack of fairly simple new content that built upon existing gamemodes like scenarios was very unsettling for the community, and in turn, the development team as reaction flooded in.
• A similar issue happened with vehicle development - we knew that @gabester had a very good reason to not directly create new vehicles. His injury was something completely understandable, and I personally am very grateful that it was explained to us. What was inexplicable was that nobody thought to mention exactly who was taking over the reins, and whether they were continuing with the promised Bluebuck and Wendover or opting to develop other vehicles. With the benefit of hindsight (and one post by @Nadeox1 that came in October of this year, more than a full year after Gabester announced his injury) , we now know that Gabester has (at least temporarily) stepped into a management role, that several "surprise" vehicles were in development, and that work was continuing on the promised vehicles. But just look at the panic that happened because we didn't have information that was common knowledge to the dev team. We had no fewer than three threads devoted to whether or not the Wendover had been cancelled (it has not), and general community unrest as vehicle development slowed dramatically due to a variety of factors.

In short, not only does there need to be dev-to-community communication on a regular basis about the small, specific things that are being worked on, we also need to get a feel for the general trajectory over the next 2-5 updates, and crucially, we need to know if something unexpected happens that changes plans and dramatically affects update content. Otherwise, we're just delaying (and in many cases, enhancing) the frustration caused by uncertainty.

 

to everyone arguing here:

 

what you have to understand is that if the game comes out of early access, then every single thing must be meticulous and perfect, down to the billboards in WCUSA, yes it takes more development time, but that's just the way it is. The maps aren't released and guaranteed to have no work made onto them, JRI has had some overhauls, the gavril V8 which is donkeys years old is now getting an overhaul.

You could say this is technical debt, or just rushing out updates, but I'm pretty sure the devs didn't know what their finished game would be, it is constantly changing, and arguably that is a good thing.

To be fair, I don't think this game ever had a focus, that's the beauty of it and these little updates are artifacts of the BeamNG team allowing us to experience the maps and etc early, then it is given updates and little finishing touches later on.

People would complain that updates would take so long if we waited all the time for them to perfect the updates, it's an alpha game, it's not the worst thing in the world

But when the game is released and is not early access, then I do agree with you, releasing updates that require optimization wouldn't be good, unless there would be a way to sign up for a beta.

 

OK am read a bit. I have to disagree. I Think that the the game is amazing. And maybe there are issues that make they cant just focus on just one thing.

Or maybe they want to give us a mix of game plays.

I do admit new cars will be sweet. But i will ALWAYS play beam. Untill Beam 2 is out ( When ever that is HAHA )


I think they do a fantastic job. And Yes last update no new car or map that we all wanted. But not there fault, I enjoyed last update. The new Gavril engines are sweet as is the tow Turck

Over all ( am not fighting ) I am happy where we are going here,
hell i just spent $400 on a Logigtect g920 wheel

just to enjoy This awesome game.......Well Worth it ....

 

I love how civil is this thread btw. I mean, from the posts I've seen, no crazy fight has appeared, and everyone respects their opinions. As I see by far...

 

@Nadeox1 I think you covered pretty much everything there, I find your input on the forum matters to be some of the most informative out there

Its a pity about the Staff not being able to get the message out more and having that Disconnect between the users and the Staff, I feel something needs to be done like that maybe a section of like say weekly updates and stuff I know about the Devblog area but also I understand about the development being torture itself, but maybe setup a day say call it for example "Staff Saturday" where the staff try and be very active on the forums on a Saturday for a couple of hours and provide more information about what's going on and the current state of the 0.15 update.

Which should provide the forum with as much information as possible about things, or you could have a monthly AMA section for the forums say once a month it opens up and the staff and everyone gets a chance to post questions for the staff to answer, but those are just two ideas, I think the Staff Saturday is a bit more inconvenient rather than a monthly AMA session or even bi-monthly AMA section, those are just some ideas I had to say.

I hope I make some sorta sense here, but I could be spouting garbage here, I value any input on the Staff Saturday or Monthly or bi-monthly AMA sections on the forums

UPDATE!

Also I am editing this now just to add a thought on this, I have seen a few mods out there on this forum that have been of such high quality (ETK S-series for example) that they do deserve their place within the game itself, I mean is it possible to get permission from the mod maker to add in certain vehicles that started out as mods but make it official game content, for example, like how Piston started out as a mod in minecraft and then got officially supported?

 

I just wonder that if like the dev team will tell the "good" and the "bad" modders that the new update will breake the mod so the modder will be prepeared for "flamewars" that will be like on the reviews like etk S series. People tell me that I am underage because I got bad punctuation and english. What the hell!

 

With last update in regards of powertrain they did warn about that breaking mods that used certain features and it was really nice.

Sometimes it is of course bit harder to tell, especially if mod uses practices that don't follow modding guidelines or ways original content uses for example textures.

 

And speaking of mods becoming official content, that one about Minecraft interests me.

I heard a more animals mod paved the way for official horses, but I didn't know that about the piston blocks.

 

Info about trip computer app says "Metalmuncher".

There are a lot more I believe, I think that origin of original automatic transmission was a mod too? I think that there was a thread, it's really old though and I'm not sure how to find it, but I remember reading about that, thread was 2012 or something like that, really old, or then my memory is mixing things up again.

But there probably is surprisingly lot mod origin content and especially ideas that were first presented in mods and then improved to dev quality content.

It's just that in BeamNG it is not made to a thing, like in some games it is made a thing by bringing it up.

Presentation of awesome by modesty is humble, but perhaps more boasting would also be good at times?

Is gamebusiness kinda showbusiness these days, I mean when looking videos of games in Steam, some rather simple slow paced strategy game has big orchestra movie music playing, video is made with short cuts and presented as a action flick. So maybe awesome is nothing today, it has to be unearthly godlike event of changing texture saturation by 5.

I find it bit amusing, I guess this would be exteme of presenting normal as something big, which might be something needed at this era or else awesome can appear as lame:


Ok, nobody probably gets what I'm trying to say, again...

 

Yeah it was just something I remembered from the early days of Minecraft that got my attention since I am a minecraft player even though I do a lot of world editing now and stuff its just how I am I suppose but I still remember when the Piston Mod came out and then it was added to the game, shows you what can be achieved with a bit of brain power and the devs notice it

 

Are you not getting out of topic this is beamng not minecraft if you want to talk about this go to other games part. Minecraft is nothing to do with beamng.

 

From a development standpoint it kinda does. Popular game from a small company that took a long time to reach full release and has a fairly important modding community. Also, Drive is BeamNG’s first game and Minecraft was Notch’s first game, so it was/is a learning experience for both parties which lead to some strange quirks in the foundational code that has to be dealt with.

I wonder what the folks at Microsoft thought of Minecraft’s code the first time they took a look at it. Must’ve been a mess...

 

I was using another example to display a point, it was the only one I could remember okay, so are we all clear on that now?

 

If you hate this game so much, why the hell did you buy it?

 

I wonder what the game will look like in 2 years, especially in 5.
I reckon by about 2020 BeamNG will probably be halfway/quarter halfway to 1.0.
Probably by 2020 we'll hopefully see atleast 3 more vehicles.

 

Because in 2014 i was expecting to have much more progress than we have now

 

TBH when I first saw the official videos in fall of 2012 I didn’t think this would get anywhere. I was shocked when KurtJmac first made a video about it just because I never thought a public release would ever be realized. Looking back through all the discarded UI’s and the content dryspell that was the wait to the pre-race update and thinking of how few features or vehicles the game had when I first downloaded the tech demo, it feels like things have come very far, even if there is still a long way to go.