This is a discussion thread for our latest devblog on tire physics changes: https://beamng.com/game/news/blog/tire-physics-changes Please keep it civil and constructive.
Definitely an interesting and informative read. Would absolutely love to see more of these in the future!
>>once we finish stabilizing and cleaning up the latest work, expect things to warm up a bit Tire temperature incoming?
This was an interesting read. I do hope we get tire thermals here at one point, it'll be like icing on the cake.
Finally! We've got a tire blog post promised since like 2018! Took much more than "Something is (still) on the horizon …" blog post haha Give us more (please!) it's too damn entertaining to read how you experiment, iterate, progress and experience it in game. Research must be overwhelming as hell, but I'm really glad you take this path and not "magic tire torque compensation" etc. While already speaking about "Horizon" blog post, maybe you could write a part 2 for us? It's been already 5 years. I think it's good timing. Spoiler: Something is still on the horizon … https://blog.beamng.com/something-is-still-on-the-horizon/ Past, Present, Future - summary and some sneak-peaks to the future of BeamNG.drive. I'm sure many would appreciate!
I love reading anything from the devs and this was one of the best dev blogs! I wish you were sharing more of stuff like this with the community. So the hint with tire thermals is awesome news and I wish you will consider adding flat spots at some point because it's adding another level of being gentle with the car (not only avoiding crashing). After the latest update cars feel so natural I put other sims aside and every time I'm trying to play any other driving sim I'm just disappointed and coming back to Beamng this is starting to be unhealthy considering how much money I've spent on simracing titles. I must confess to selling my vr and switching to triples because of Beam literally 2 days after .22 release. I started to be more active in content creation as well because I felt like Beam can finally replace other sims so why not do some maps, it's almost like an investment. Conclusion after this hype-full and messy post: There is still quite a lot of features missing but I do believe you guys know what you're doing and polishing the base will save a lot of time when time will come to add racing AI, scratches, generated dent normal maps, improved car paint, tire wear, official multiplayer (I'm happy to pay up to 5£/month to keep the servers going for this feature, kind of like devs of FRracing did {android}, dynamic deformable trees (use colmesh as jbeam and lod proximity to switch the physics off and on when close to an object (?) ), dynamic paint added to map editor for roads to speed up the process of painting asphalt surface underneath of decal roads. (Yes these are ideas and I know scrathes are pasé but it was never properly explained why it's such an difficult thing to add in this engine). I think live AMA would be mich appreciated by the community and if people will be asking about vr support and paint scrathes they could be just forwarded to the AMA, I really do think it would save you some frustration and time in the future
I love these in depth blog posts. Even though I don't understand much, it's still fascinating to read about. There are so many systems in the game, so there are plenty of possibilities for more blog posts like this. They also help to explain to people why this game can take so long to develop and implement new features, while other games can add things left and right.
Tbh the way my life is currently I can't play much, but seeing you guys progress and explain your process is even more fascinating than playing
It's fun to read a blog-post like that, going into detail, how the game even works. For the people who use BeamNG as a more serious driving sim, myself included, "small" things like this make the game more fun to play around with. What's the next step into the world of tires? Tire-temps and wear?
We do not share that much because the complexity we are dealing with often derails our plans. As an example lets consider VR support. To have good VR support two things are required, high FPS and low latency. High FPS requires reworking our base GFX infrastructure, which is a mix of systemic changes such as supporting more efficient GFX APIs (such as Vulcan for example), and rendering changes such as updating our rendering approach to use more unified shaders and such. Low latency requires work at all layers of the system to identify and resolve the lag issues. We also care about paint scratches but we have to plan them accordingly. The base GFX systems need to be stabilized and optimized first before piling more features on top of them and have the whole thing crumpling down. In any case, we are constantly working to push the whole thing forward in a principled way and we keep our eyes and ears open to see what the community wants and trying to find ways to achieve it.
Sometimes some updates felt unnecessary but then after years you realise Beam is close to simulating and having everything and this is probably why it holds so many users after so many years and I do sometimes feel like you can't possibly squeeze much more from this engine and then an updates comes out and I'm speechless. One thing that is confusing me is what's wrong with the graphics? I mean there's so many detailed objects, good quality textures, map editor is well optimized theres no problems with importing highpoly meshes as long as they do have LODs and Colmeshes, awesome looking foliage and yet there's something that's making it look artificial. Is it the lighting? Or reflections? I've tried to modify it using different skyboxes and sun settings but default seems to still be the best option. Are there plans to update the graphics so it looks more up to date? It's surely less difficult than moving to UE5 or Unity even though they both can simulate softbody? AL13 mod makes it look better but hits the performance too much to be fully utilised with traffic and more detailed maps
The colors and the paint needs more, well, metallic-ness, because right now it looks like- gloss/shiny gloss/Chrome/mirror. Is there any reason why we can't select metallic paint options?
Probably lag, look at the DeLorean mod and other ones with custom paint, the game takes a long time to cook those textures
Current system doesn't support that. That's the reason. Current BeamNG materials operate on spec/gloss system, so that's only what you can control with sliders. There isn't any metalness or roughness to control like in PBR systems. By the way, long time ago I managed to "fake" metallic, feel free to check it out Unsupported - Cherrier FCV Metallic Paint Jobs | BeamNG
I think burnouts and tyre slap from burnouts would be a cool thing, not to mention the actual popping of tyres