I was thinking (I'm not a modder myself) that for those people who want to create vehicle mods, must create custom jbeam structures for each vehicle. My idea is that you could choose the most important/significant edges for each vehicle (such as mirrors, corners of the vehicle, etc) and the generator would create it's own beams and nodes evenly across the vehicle allowing for many vehicles to have similarly sized spacing between nodes. This feature can be disabled (obviously) and... yea.... This is just an idea I had for the game that I thought could help out the modding community. It could make mod quality more like official vehicles. (As it's known, the more nodes, the more flex the vehicle has, and some may be more flexible than that of others. This solution could make mods more similar in terms of deformation.)
I bet there'll be a lot of backlash against this idea but I would like to see this feature implemented, I would have a lot more motivation to learn Blender for making BeamNG vehicles when I know I don't have to try figuring out how to make the buggy jbeam editor work.
I think it would be a really nice idea (certainly in terms of helping to make mod creation easier and more accessible), but it would be a solution that required a lot of technical work from the BeamNG team. That definitely doesn't mean that it should never be implemented, but I think it does mean that a useful auto jbeam tool would be something that comes out closer to release once the devs have stopped making engine improvements.
This would be very difficult to implement. And your finished product would be filled in all the wrong places with beams. You'd be left with a ton of cleanup to do, and then potentially risking your JBeam falling in on itself after you clean up the inside. This could be useful, but I don't think it is possible to refine it enough for it to really be practical, as for you'd still need to either set a ton of parameters in auto generation, or manually remove and replace Beams in places such as the interior. Besides, while you could potentially auto generate things like the body or the frame, You'd have a really hard time auto generating things like the suspension. Sure you could generate the needed components, but connecting it to the frame properly would be a whole different story. The Node/Beam editor is not completely broken. You just have to set some parameters, and where you want your new nodes and beams to go inside of your JBeam file. It just has a hard time loading a few JBeam files for some weird reason that I can't figure out.
Alright, you guys ready for some shit? Check this out, you won't believe it. It's called NodeBEAM Editor, and it comes with the fucking game.
Imagination indeed. I couldn't use a visual node/beam editor if my life depended, but I had no problem doing any of my Jbeams in plain notepad.
The Visual Node/Beam editor is ok... but it is really rough... the only thing I use it for is to physically connect 2 jbeams together... that's it. Everything else I do in either Blender or Notepad. Honestly, if I am coming up with complicated, intricate structures for beam... I kick it old school and use the Editorizor from RoR and then convert it over to Beam. Also... while a Node/Beam generator would be... useful... it would either be really limited (generating generic suspension features that you then connect yourself) or insanely complicated to program. I personally am leaning toward the latter. Something like this (generic structure generator) is already floating about on the RoR forums right now, so it's definitely not impossible. Just extremely difficult. I do get where you are coming from with this though.
I understand this. This is simply an idea I had when looking around for new mods and realizing that less and less vehicle mods are coming out since early 2016. Yes This is already in game, but the main idea is that the spacing of the nodes and beams would be very similar between vehicles. Can help to reduce vehicles that are too stiff, or vehicles that are too flimsy.
