Where are we going?

Sorry but I dont clearly remember that I am afraid Danny

 

The thread is still there, but I never knew it existed until kind of recently. I can understand why modded vehicles could be both confusing and such though.

 

My counter argument is that if you get the mod makers permission and they provided help, it could be added to the game, I thought the devs were gonna do something for Narwal (I might have spelled it wrong) put something in the game for that but I am not sure about it yet, it was talked about

 

The issue is that you did sell us a game, not a research project. If you had sold me a research project I'd have still been a customer, but I'd have a different set of expectations. The marketting on steam you did about an EA testbed that will result in a kind of capitalist style buy used broken crap cars and earn your way into better cars sounded good. It's what I still want, and still expect, and we're no closer to it. What we have is this weird collision of inconsequential scenarios presented with comic book cutscenes. Something that doesn't make a game and I hope is going to be phased out later into a bigger more unified vision.

The thing is, the priorities seem to be off kilter too. It's lovely having this wonderful physics engine and all these weird features like spherical gravity fields. The problem is that there's a small list of relatively simple things that need dealing with and have always surely been a higher priority.

Things such as the long necessary solution to the problem of the engine spending the same amount of time simulating objects that are stationary as it does objects that are being interacted with. for a GAME, this is problematic in any physics engine. How do you expect complex scenes to be properly interactive if you have 2Khz traffic cones hogging limited resources to just sit in one place? why am I simulating a parked car that's on the other side of the map to do nothing? A physics sleep has been requested to solve this as a solution. Frankly I think i'd be happy with it as a stopgap till your years-in-the-making actual solution rolls out.

Or the fact we still can't save a gamestate and return to it later bugs me. BeamNG would stop being a sandbox toy and start being a sandbox game if I could hit save on a scenario I set up and load it later.

Meanwhile we're having another UI rework. I've lost count of the UI reworks. It's necessary due to being borderline unusuable in how laggy and unresponsive it is, but it is tiresome.

or the fact that when simple things like dirt handled through textures is brought up, it's not going to happen because of a research pending realistic solution. Well sure, and I can think of a few ways to use a splat map and some raycasting to do that. I spent the last 6 months learning how to code shaders and figured out ways to make dirt appear on objects using existing solutions within the game industry. What's wrong with an exsiting solution being implimented for things that are [research pending] in the meantime? Why can I do things in Unity that much more capable programmers than me haven't despite all their research?

I have a list of things I'm getting impatient over but I'm not here to rag too hard. The problem I'm seeing as an end user is the development team is in the middle of feature creep with no end in sight when it comes to a game. By the time version 1 comes around, I fully expect to see some implementation of an in-depth career mode and the ability to save and load gamestates, vehicle conditions, buy and fix broken cars as promised etc. and I'd probably be justified in getting narked off without it. We're quite high up in the version numbers but I don't see many of the features that would be necessary for the game you guys advertised in your greenlight video.

and this is saying nothing of the content slowdown.

With 2700 game hours in BeamNG my passion for BeamNG is still not exhausted. But certain things about the development's pacing and priorities have me perplexed and vexed.

 

BeamNG.drive was never marketed as a full game. It has always been early access, meaning the features that make it a game aren't complete yet. I don't understand why people are assuming that Drive should be finished by now. Sure, it would be nice for the game to be complete, but it isn't. It still is in Early Access, so it should be expected that features are missing. I feel like some people should change their expectations because BeamNG never promised that their product would be complete by now, nor do they advertise it as complete. I am sure that Drive will be completed eventually. I wish the devs would be more open about development sometimes, but I understand that they have very modest personalities. I worry that the community pressures the devs too much which could force them to release unfinished work and start an entirely different debate. It seems like no matter what the BeamNG team does, nobody is happy, people complain that things take too long to release, and in the same post complain about how WCA is laggy because it was rushed. These are just my thoughts, I don't intend to offend anybody, only wanted to speak my mind.

 

I agree with everything in this. The new features are nice, but what they really should have done is focused on the map laid out for development. What they should have done is added a working WCUSA on day 1 of the update, the Bluebuck, then the Wendover. And THEN added shit like the Hopper, the Wentward, Automation integration, and light runner. When I checked the forums to see the Hopper, yes, I was pleasantly surprised. But I was hoping for a Bluebuck shortly after. We have been almost a year from the Hopper if I recall correctly, no Bluebuck, no Wendover, and no career mode.

The new features are nice. Automation integration is great. It gives people with little skill on JBeaming a chance to make a car, but not a car of quality as the official cars or the S-Series, I like the light runner mode, even if it is a glorified time trial, it looks nice and has BeamNG's first in-game soundtrack. The Wentward is okay, my PC is shit so I haven't driven it that much. But it looks fun.
But all of this stuff needed to come AFTER the Bluebuck, Wendover, and maybe even career mode if you want to go that far.

Also, the S-Series seriously needs to be added.

 

I am dying for another autobello tease, speaking of which, it's been a while since we got a post in Dev screens

 

Oh man, this is literally the best thing on this thread. I really can't see anyone disagreeing with this.

 

I would like to emphasize this. This is almost exactly how I feel. I get that the developers like experimenting with their engine, but it feels like that's all they want to do.

 

I disagree, read what I posted a few posts up. I don't think its fair to expect an Early Access game to be complete or even have any in-depth gameplay.

 

This game is about to become DayZ, been in early access for almost 6 years now.

 

Well, it could be that because of they learned that career mode is not going to work way they wanted, they knew there is going to be longer time until they can deliver that and as opportunity of Automation collaboration came (which did not take much development time), it was a no brainer to be added so people can have something cool new stuff instead of nothing while new test versions of career mode were crafted.

There has been surprises, setbacks, opportunities, probably many things would be done differently with all the knowledge learned during the years, but even if order of content delivery has changed, my understanding is that nothing is cancelled, quite contrary, more is being delivered, some might take longer than was anticipated, so for added variety some vehicles have been coming that were not revealed early on etc.

There is not much known about career mode, but don't you think that it might contain buying broken cars and fixing them?

My understanding is that nothing is cancelled by developers.

There is that new senior manager too, I think it will be interesting to see what kinda of change to development he will bring, for me it looks like that devs have been improving points that have brought up here, but change takes time too, I think that change will start to show up during next year.

 

You have to remember, this game is a lot more complex than DayZ. Plus, BeamNG never said that the game would leave Early Access in 6 years when they first released Drive to the general public.

 

Exactly.

 

Might be the best post here. Also love how this thread randomly gets fired up for an hour when someone else posts.

 

It's great to remain hopeful, it's not great to endorse bad business practices.

 

Note: This may come off as snarky, downputting, or mean... I don't mean it that way... just trying to answer parts of these statements.

While they did say that in their Steam Greenlight video... I would like to bring your attention to this which is literally right below that video.

"Our goals
Our main focus is on how things move rather than how things look on the screen. We aim to bring our expertise in real time soft-body physics and soft-body physics model design to the forefront of game physics simulation, making available the technology and know-how to as a wide an audience as possible. To achieve this, we are designing the engine and corresponding assets, so as to be independent of the underlying game engine and operating system.
Right now the physics engine is running on a multicore CPU configuration, but we are also in the process of supporting GPUs via OpenCL.
Our mission
To have realistic, accurate, destructible, and malleable physics everywhere. To make anything possible."

Their goal... basically to create this physics engine and bring it to the masses... potentially selling the engine to be used by other companies... This physics engine could be used for cars like Beam.NG does, sure... but it could also be used for boats, trains, planes, buildings, spaceships... the sky's the limit really...

Beam.NG can basically be seen as nothing more than a demonstration of how the physics engine could be used by the mass market. Beam.NG is basically an advertisement of their physics engine prowess if you will. That would explain the odd features like...

... the spherical gravity fields. When you build a physics engine for potential use in many different games, you have to add in as many features as possible as to make sure that your physics engine will be ready for any occasion or evenuality. Not just driving around on flat ground all the time.

Point one there... the main issue with physics sleep in a simulation like this isn't actually putting the object to sleep (although it does create a lot of lag when your checking tons of JBeams 2000 times a second to see if it needs woken up or not). The hard part is bringing it out of sleep. Each JBeam you bring out of sleep would basically be the equivalent of loading it in for the first time. So each JBeam you would drive by would lag the game on load in quite a bit. RoR used to have this feature, but the vehicles it used to load in were nothing in terms of complexity to the vehicles that BeamNG uses as standard. Once the mods for RoR started to get much more complicated... lag on vehicle load in started to actually become a real problem.

So basically they need a way to quicken JBeam load in... which they are totally working on right now... They mention it several times in the Dev Blogs... If they can get the load in to be fast enough, I am sure they would try to implement this feature.

As for the save gamestate... I got nothing on that... I never really ran into that issue either though so I dunno there...

Having things fixed, then fixed again, and again can be tiresome, yes... but they are the ones doing all the work. They have found a better way to do it than they were doing it before so now they are attempting to implement it. Honestly I don't really understand the complaint here... as the dynamic of the game changes, so must other things be brought up to speed to keep up... it's only natural progression. Same thing with the new engine models... their skills improved to a point were they saw that they could majorly improve what was already there.

"Our main focus is on how things move rather than how things look on the screen."
Their attention has been focused on the physics engine and optimizing the code... they would rather have the physics engine completely nailed down first. Honestly, I am with them on that one...

One thing I would like to put out there... They are probably trying to save the career mode till it is almost completely done. By that I mean in house, fully fleshed out, working, mostly devoid of bugs, full story line, all vehicles that should be in it are there, all terrains that should be in it are there... but most importantly... all features that are necessary for the career mode to work... are all added in, working, and are there.

If they were doing that and trying to surprise us all, then it would appear like there just wasn't a whole lot going on. The most they could say about it is, "it is being worked on", and that's it... otherwise there would be spoilers that would ruin it for all of us.

Note: This may have come off as snarky, downputting, or mean... I don't mean it that way... just trying to answer parts of these statements.

Anyways... to all those out there wondering why when they make changes it breaks all the mods... think about it this way. It also breaks the in game vehicles too... they will need brought up to speed before every update they add a feature in. Every single one. So they aren't going to add in these kinds of features unless they deem it absolutely necessary as it causes them a massive amount of work every time they have to update all the vehicles to use said new feature.

 

There is a way to do that. It's more complicated than it needs to be at this point, but it's a start. I have faith that will eventually change for the better. Take a look at this:

Now, granted, that's not exactly on this same topic. But consider how much scenario creation relies on the world editor. It's a tool that's been held back by the old game engine, which the team is currently in the process of researching improvements for. Once that research is done and the tool is perfected, creating scenarios becomes much easier both for the dev team and the modding community.

Now here's where I get speculative. Once that tool is complete, it becomes much easier to incorporate it into a game mode. The track builder is an early taste of this - it's essentially assembling a series of checkpoints based on static map objects. If that gets expanded to allow for props, AI vehicles, and checkpoints independent of the track, then we've essentially got a scenario creation system.

It's something that's probably not too far away in the technical sense, but it needs research and optimization so that it runs at a reasonable speed.

 

I still feel like the vehicles team has just collapsed. Unless there are vehicles being developed behind the scenes that we don't know about (and there is no evidence that would lead me to believe this), there really is no excuse for how slowly things are going on that front, even with Gabester out of commission. The Wendover and Bluebuck are low-hanging fruits, so those should have taken precedence over the bus, Hopper, modern ETK's, AB, et cetera. This seems to me like a classic case of mishandled priorities. That's not to say I don't appreciate all the extra vehicles, but that's what they are - extras that were not promised or expected from the start. Development should always focus on meeting expectations first, then exceeding them once they are met. Think of it like having to finish your broccoli before you can have your ice cream. The Wendover and Bluebuck are broccoli, and everything else is ice cream.

 

This is the post I have been looking for, I couldn't have put it better myself. People need to understand this is what BeamNG is and this is what they paid for. This isn't some AAA game with multiplayer and an in depth career mode (yet), it's nothing more than an open world physics simulator.

Honestly I already feel I have got my moneys worth for the game, only $20 for over 200 hours worth of fun! I think people need to be grateful for what they get, you aren't paying $100.

Keep in mind they are nothing more than empty shells and still have heaps of work left to do. With the work left it's basically an equivalent of making a new car...

I admit, the S-Series is one of the best vehicle mods ever made for BeamNG, but even still it's far from dev-quality. For example the panel gaps are nothing like dev cars. An example of a dev-quality mod is @Stoat Muldoon's Dodge Coronet/Gavril Gladiator, the only reason this can't go in the game is the Gavril Gladiator is literally a rebranded Dodge, so BeamNG might get sued. Below are some comparison screenshots. You will probably need to click on them to be able to see the difference in panel gap quality.