Update Speculation thread

Ah, we call those "speed bumps" here in the US

 

Yeah in EU we just call em a ramp lol im surprised we dont have these as a prop yet.

 

No surprises there. The T and MD are currently my most driven vehicles. I love utility machinery.

 

heres a wild thought, this update is definitely going to be a interesting one with all the random stuff and it almost seems the devs are just adding things that are either outdated, like props or stuff the community has wanted for seems like a decade, the limo and possibly others, and who knows maybe randomly we'll get airbags to go along with it all, even though i think they have said its impossible, but with the mysterious bubbles i wonder if their experimenting with inflation and air physics, which i would think is a key point to airbag function,
but as of course take it with a grain of salt.

 

The devs already have a merch store and dozens of partnerships with various companies through their .tech branch. I'm not sure if they're lacking for money at this point. I think that what's holding back development more is how much more complicated the game has become over the years, and how much higher the expectations are for each update. (They also have to do much more backwards-compatibility and maintenance work compared to their updates in 2016.)

BeamNG.drive is also quite a different game to develop for compared to a Unity or Unreal product. While hiring more modelers is easy enough (and the work for that's often been outsourced in recent years), hiring more programmers for the Jbeams likely isn't. So, even if they had 1,000 modelers, if they only have 5-10 programmers, new vehicle releases will still be limited by how quickly the programmers can work. And they have been hiring a lot more people recently. According to a series of posts by Torror on the Altfuture Discord (developers of Derail Valley and Switchcars), BeamNG grew from ~30 people in 2021 to ~80 people by October 2024. Considering they started with four people in 2013, that's some rapid growth.

Torror also mentioned the problems that come with that many people - mostly, trying to manage all of them:

From Slobodan, the lead developer for Altfuture (a studio comprised of ~10 people), in the same conversation:

I don't think paid DLC would change either of those things - and with how much of a passion project BeamNG.drive/tech was (and still is), I think I'd rather have 80-100 passionate devs than 1,000 people who don't know or care about what they're doing. Considering what happened the last time the devs had a failed contract for a vehicle, I think they'd rather have consistency and commitment than speed. (Especially for maps - although I will admit, it would be nice to get new maps more often.)

I also drove the T-Series a lot more post-remaster, and the MD's a nice middle-ground truck (although it still lacks some things).

 

The floofy panda is online

 

they got 6 million sales this year, that means over 100 million dollars

 

I've actually been thinking about the scalability of the game's content a few days ago. I've realized how slow and tedious it will eventually be to be backporting new features to older items, and keeping them up to date. We can already see the fragmentation with just the current roster. Take the halogen lights as an example. They first rolled out only for one car specifically, and later have been brought to many more, but there's still lots that lack them.

I'm currently most looking forward to a rollback upfit. D and H are too flimsy and fragile to be hauling larger vehicles, and the T can be pretty overkill for hauling just normal cars. The MD would fit way better for the purpose of having a solid and planted driving experience while hauling cars of any size.

 

Me: VIGILANTLY LOOKING FOR THE NEXT UPDATE TEASER
TIME: 9 PM
ME: DID THEY FORGET?

 

It's only coming up to 19 o'clock here in central Europe.

 

no teaser and that is the first time in years make a wrong call.. i dont know what is going on

 

smh why they gatekeeping

 

To be fair, that isn't taking into account the sales that steam occasionally does, but yes, they are still making a decent amount of money.

 

I hope panda wakes up and sees this. They were just here like 20 minutes ago lol

 

That is definitely one example. Another is opening side doors, hoods, and trunks for vehicles other than the Wentward, which were first added to the Scintilla (side doors only), then the Covet, then the Wydra/Stambecco, and finally all vehicles except the T-Series in 0.28. (The T-Series got them with its remaster in 0.31.)

 

I hope they do another epic teaser today soon

 

Honestly I wish beamng upped their price a bit, then we would get more content. I also hope the devs can find ways to outsource more stuff so that we can get more content. The game does lack modern vehicle diversity. Though if you count facelifts and different bodystyles there are over 70 vehicles.

 

I don't think I've even noticed that only some vehicles had openables and others didn't. I only specifically remember the T-Series, because I was using some parts mod that's added openable doors to it before it got remastered.

 

The Wentward I'm pretty sure used to just have the doors open.

 

i dont know how to say even more how bad that idea is