I have some instances where it would be logical for the car to be split in half or when some part of the car gets stuck it does not break, but rather stretch the whole car body. Will we see some improvement on that part or is the game engine not allowing that?
Well. It was possible in pre alpha because it was running on Unreal engine which is more advanced. Only reason they had to change the engine was price of license for Unreal engine which is astronomical.
Well you got basically nothing correct in your post, congratulations. The reason it was possible in pre-alpha was nothing to do with the fact it ran on CRYENGINE (they never used unreal), CryEngine and Torque3d are both used for handling the graphics, sound and inputs only. The physics are handled by a seperate library entirely which is independent of cryengine or Torque3d so totally unaffected by that migration. Nor was this ever demoed back in the pre-alpha days. THe only part you really got right there, moving away from a commercial engine due to astronomical pricing. As for the ontopic answer. It is possible. Its tunable within the JBeam. It leads to really weird results (sometimes weirder than the stretching) which is why you don't see it on many vehicles. The toyota chaser does it with the roof, the moonhawk and pigeon can have the body ripped from frame
Yeah I noticed the mentioned vehicles, but it's not really what I'm describing. It's more visible with high speeds, try crashing head-on two Marshals with 230+ km/h (stage tune 2) but with 50% overlap, most of the time you see them welding to each other and rotating in circles until the momentum is gone, rather than obliterating each other. One time I even bugged the whole physics engine - it paused by itself and when I unpaused it, one of the cars was totally okay, the other one went totally nuts (transformed into a really deformed pile of scrap), after that it paused again and when I resumed it, the whole game crashed. That won't happen if the parts rupture/split.
Parts splitting in 2 has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the nodes on one car have slipped through the coltri on the other and gotten stuck (the cause of the cars jamming together). That is an entirely unrelated and known issue which will be corrected in one of the upcoming updates.
Would any physics issues be solved with PhysX implementation? I saw someone going on about how the game would be better with PhysX. I know nothing about how it would be done, but if it were, would this and performance improve?
PhysX is NVidias own physics engine. Wouldn't help here. Unless you meant CUDA which is NVidias general purpose GPU computing technology (which PhysX can utilise). There are no plans for CUDA support, CUDA is proprietary to NVidia cards only. There are plans for OpenCL support instead though, OpenCL does the same as CUDA (allowing programs to offload highly parallel maths tasks to the GPU) but works on AMD and NVidia cards along with a few dedicated devices.
You can edit the cars to make it possible to break beams so you can cut cars in half and stuff (i did that some time ago). But it won't look that great because basically when a beam breaks you will get a missing square part on the car's body instead of a rupture
It would be great to have an algorithm to detect when an individual face of a mesh is deformed by more than, say, 100% of its initial length. The offending face could then be hidden or deleted. This could possibly allow the car to be broken into arbitrary pieces without showing the hideously stretched connecting faces. As the over-stretched face is removed, small predefined fragments with point based physics could spawned in its place to complete the illusion of that part disintegrating.
Not that I'm supporting his idea, but this has nothing to do with the quality of the engine, you can take CryEngine or Unreal 3 engine and make the same buggy shit. The engine does not magically understand what you want to do with it.