It's mostly poorly changed jbeam. That's what makes meshslaps so bad. I know theres a guy who has put next gen latemodel stuff on a 4 year old Dummiemans Late-model instead of making a new one. I feel like mesh slaps are what people do when they are too lazy to do the actual work of making a new mod.
Id still say it depends, if the beams haven't been edited and its just the nodes thats a meshslap. and if theres absolutely no changes otherwise.
I totally agree, but the thing is, it takes lots of time to go through hundreds of mods and test them out, and it would be quite tiring since you have to spawn EVERY single one in. or load one in. my only suggestion to beamng forum devs, is that they can properly use ai algorithim or community driven one, where each person depending on their choice to leave a properly review (a complete breakdown of the mod) and leave it, depending on a persons choice, (this is a real suggestion) I would probably use ai to correctly organize what people LIKE and what they DONT like. its basically like youtube. or twitter or facebook, whichever one of those has these type of algorithims. but I guess we are missing out on good mods that just need proper testing and imagination.
Meshslapping is the process of replacing the .dae of a car with a different one, that's pretty much what it is. Most of the time it looks pretty horrendous.
how long does it usually take to make a mod from scratch? I mean usually i'd believe it would take hours, like just creating a simple, new brand, new car, with just the same standard quality of beamng vanilla cars?
If your making something simple, it can take just about a few hours. But making a fully detailed car can take more hours of work (at the earliest) a few days, or even months depending on what you are creating. It really just matters by how good you want your mod to be.
About a year of consistent work, but if your using existing mechanical components it will take much less time. My PT Cruiser, using a edited version of the LeGran platform, has taken a few months. I am almost finished, just needs some polishing on the interior. --- Post updated --- Even meshslaps take more then a few hours.
Tbh, a great example of this is Fillman86's Elfin T5 and the amount of work it takes to make a car from scratch and put into BeamNG
I kinda agree, but a average mod with same quality as anything in beamng vanilla could take as much time as 10 hours depending on how experienced the person is. it really depends on how hard you wanna make it better than beamng devs standard or just below average. but I guess for mods like that one super customizable car (I forgot the name) it would take 3 weeks, or maybe a month or a year.
Imo I think it depends on the quality of the finished product, some mods stay close to the vanilla base and still turn out great Me and my friend made the first release of the PUR Goldfish in a one long weekend. Currently I have spent over a month on just 3D modeling various stuff for my next upcoming car. Granted, the quality and level of detail is above vanilla and anything I've made previously, but it still shows how long stuff can take if you really want it to be good
10h will be the outer shell alone, unless you're modeling a brick. The level of detail doesn't matter much, as you bake a lot anyway. Some of the bumpers I made for my Bolide packs took a while to model, and I already had a base. The Voltex wing I got for Sunburst took like 6h total with textures.
Even if you wanted to model an individual part it will take ages just because of those darned textures (man I hate dealing with materials and textures so much.), I've got multiple projects in my "dead projects" folder because of such problems, all I had to do was change the textures, but instead they refuse to show up (even with correct material.json files) and break whole projects. Funnily enough, that's the reason why I haven't posted any big mods in the past 3 years.
I would say that modders have done what they wanted to a certain extent, and when people who mod are looking for something, it already exists, so there aren't many cars left that haven't been made into BeamNG yet, so that could also be one of the reasons for the mods decline (of course, the time may now come for the creation of heavy machines, which Beamng almost does not have).
There's still plenty of cars to be remade in BeamNG, it's just that those remaining are the ones no one cares about, so nobody will ever make them, even seen a Citroen Ami mod in BeamNG? (wait... that's not a car)