Newb questions.

Hello all, i'm currently thinking of getting into beamng. but first i would like to know few things before i buy it.

1, what is the direction for beamng ? are they gonna focus on rallying or circuit racing or something else ?

This is important for me because I prefer a focused simulator (like how ACC and rfactor 2 are for gt endurace).

2. How realistic are official cars ? while i understand that there are no real licensed cars but what about accuracy of tyres , suspension geometry, chassis, aero etc are these things based on real data or real cars ?

Recently RF2 as partnered with goodyear tyres to provide realistic tyre behavior and similarly ACC has pirelli data...so is there something similar going on for BeamNG ?

sorry to sound like physics elitist, but i highly value it.

What am i looking out of beamng , is open world driving, some rallying , hillclimb all this on both tarmac and offroad.

 

You have to remember that BeamNG is both a softbody physics simulator and a vehicle simulator. Not just a car simulator. There is trucks, busses, trailers etc.
It is very different from a game like AC.

 

I agree with what the two people above me said. BeamNG is a driving simulator that allows you to do a whole plethora of things, so it's not just about sim-racing (although you definitely can ... check out Erwin Hamsandwich's videos). You can create police chases with the AI, and just customize the life out of the cars. The part selector itself is a very in-depth car customizing tool, as you get many part options and a whole lot of engine/suspension tuning options. And then some.

Also, the majority of the mods are free, so you don't have to pay for extra content/DLCs.

 

Thank you for detailed answers, seems good enough.

Also thanks to @Zero and @Matt_890s

To be clear i enjoy the choices beamng provides, but i hope it doesn't overwhelm small dev team to make content on extreme ends of spectrum.

 

Well i bought and refunded the sim unfortunately, i really wanted to like it. But this is not a final goodbye, i will revisit it maybe in a year or 2.
Following things disappointed me enough to make refund.

1. The UI. Now this is actually my first time in my 10 years of sim racing i was put off by ui its slow, unresponsive,etc.....i just don't know how to explain it, but it felt quit off compared to other sims i play.

2.The FFB, again i put up even with what people consider "bad" in other sims, here it just couldn't manage to get it working. infact i only wanted to do simple thing and that is turn down strength little bit (from default 200 to 150 or so) and somehow doing so just made my ffb completely dead like no feedback while turning, sliding etc. the steering ffb was dead until ~90% of its rotation is reached then it got stronger in direction i was turning.

3. Now this is most important reason physics , I tried ibishu 200bx normal and its drift varient for this test, it gave me iracing vibes....i.e too much grip under the limit and complete snap oversteer with very low margin to continue sliding.
I 100% understand that i'm no driving god, but in AC i never had such trouble drifting road car/drift cars also I have gotten closer to alien level lap times after all these years (generally 1-2 seconds off)
another car i tried is ibishu pessima touring race car version, this car felt super light, it turns with very low efforts.....like no momentum or inertia (not exactly saying these things are wrong, this is just a way to express my feedback).

that being said i have seen drifting videos on YT, so it not completely impossible but IMO it felt unrealistically difficult. sadly 2 hours is NOT enough to try all the cars, configure sim, troubleshoot problems (I got crash msg everytime i exited beamng and game crashed in my first time boot as well .My pc is 95% empty and only used for gaming so , no unnecessary programs , windows services etc running in background to cause such issues).

 

If you don't want to have a bad time, do not consider BeamNG.drive a racing simulator, Beam is more like soft-body sandbox physics simulator focused on vehicles. Playing endurance race in BeamNG is not recommended(running several hours nonstop may cause the game to lag progressively), please be nice to yourself. 90% of the player who bought the game, including myself, are for the spectacular and realistic crashes.

Many people who thought that players who criticize the UI in 0.24 update are unfamiliar to the recent UI changes. They are not correct as shown in this case, as Maximum_tyres who doesn't know anyting about the old UI also shows dissatisfaction towards the new UI.

I'm not a wheel player I can't tell my experience.

The 200BX has low constersteer window, the Grand Marshal and the Miramar has better drift handling. Also, do not fully reduce throttle during a drift, otherwise the weight will transfer to the front, making the car very snappy.
AC you mean Asseto Corsa? Although the game is a simulation, it's too old to be consider realistic with modern standards, many modern players consider physics in AC "cardboard" or "chalk box"-ish.

Most BeamNG players use keyboard driving. Do not try to do many things at the same time. There are steering mod and acceleration mod for keyboard players in this forum.

No, that is NOT the reason why they don't make boats and planes. The real reason is that it's simply not possible to simulate aerodynamics or hydrodynamics in soft-body simulators realistically.
In terms of fluid dynamics, not only an object on upstream can affect the flow on another object downstream, but also an object on downstream can also affect the flow on another object upstream as well. BeamNG's aerodynamics simply adds up the forces acting on the collision triangles, one by one, one object cannot affect another. If you put ten wings on a vehicle the downforce will be ten times at a given speed, this is not possible IRL. If you put more wings in tandem, they will lose efficiency as the airflow loses energy as it passes each wing. In BeamNG, removing windshield or opening tailgate reduce the air resistance, the opposite is true IRL. In terms of flight simulators, the Cessna 172 in Flightgear has one of the most realistic physical model. This is because the physics uses existing data from CFD & wind tunnel test. In terms of CFD, it costs weeks for a supercomputer to calculate the airflow for each frame, doing 2000 frames per second is simply not possible. Thus, air/naval simulators use rigid-body simulation. If you lose a part, the game will load the windtunnel/CFD result without that part installed, instead of calculate physics in real time.

 

I'd like to add on that suspension geometry is truly where this game excels. Where other games lack the geometry of links and beams and arms, beamng has all of them. Axle wrap happens very realistically, along with axle hop and alot of other things that other games fail to replicate.

 

Yea i have not treated it as racing sim in any way, i just wanted to do some driving around in open world, rally.
i was afraid that most of the attention is on crashes (thats what i see mostly on YT too ) and less on driving side, while i don't know how underlying physics are but driving certainly did not impress me.
regarding your advice on drifting , all i can say is i know all that stuff been sim driving for 10+ years now....doesn't qualify me as physics expert but i generally feel when something is just off.

 

Most of the attention is definitely not on crashes, it's simply that it's one of the strong points of beamng and what it's the most known for. I'm no expert but the physics does seem pretty realistic, and simulate stuff that no other sim simulate, such as all the beams and rods that are in a suspension. There's a reason they have a partnership with Audi.

 

the beamng really does seem like a good physics engine, for this time i didn't like it thats all. I will check it again maybe in a year or 2.
I hope u are right that getting driving model as accurate as possible is also the goal, i'm not really into crashes and stuff. i think dmg simulation should be good enough to determine driving and setup choices after that it is pushing useless territory IMO, i much prefer having strong driving aspects.

 

In this podcast they say the objective is to make it the most realistic driving simulator ever, so don't worry on that. In a year or two i'm pretty sure te tyres/aero model will get much better so i hope you'll enjoy it.