Development Media

Also relevant:

 

A little something for you, this time with an actual car
This ETK 800 is using all open diffs with a clutch based transfer case.
Both diffs and the clutch of the AWD system are electronically controlled, meaning that the open diffs try to minimize unwanted speed differences via brake application and the AWD clutch only engages the secondary axle if needed.
You can also see some drive mode work in there, which is what controls all of this at a higher level.
As a little bonus, I added a drift mode that disables the AWD and locks the rear diff a bit more aggressively for better wheelspin (If a top end model of this brand would continue to use open diffs with e-locking is debatable of course, you know the drill with my test platforms by now...)

Sorry for the two-screen-recording, but there's so much data, can't show it otherwise...

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

As always, no guarantee for when this will be released, it's part of a massive ESC, TC, whatever overhaul, and I'm literally showing you almost all of the currently working things (notice the lack of ESC and TC...).

BTW: These are results of almost a year of research and planning, slowly things are starting to come together, what a great feeling

 

Ok, we got the tire eating issue fixed with the roller ramp prop, so all that is missing now is a mesh. You asked for it, so here's a look at just the jbeam viz, not pretty, but that's all there is

It's a long video showing some of the things that can be done with this prop and how the next generation AWD system works when doing various tests.
You can also look at the powertrain debug app in "Power" mode and see how the system dynamically puts more power to the wheel(s) with more grip.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

*drinking coffee*
*spills*
*keyboard short circuits and accidentally uploads some sweet crawler pictures*

 

Just a little AWD demo

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

Notice how little throttle I need to get out of the two rollers.

 

A bit more AWD stuff, trying to show how reactive AWD control differs from proactive control.

Reactive: (Note how the front wheels start turning way later than the rears)

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

Proactive: (The AWD clutch is already closed before the car goes, making the front and rear be more or less stiffly coupled right away)

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

Interestingly in a launch scenario the proactive version is barely any faster (0.05s) than reactive, probably because my stuff here is very reactive

 

Here's some more "kinda boring" AWD stuff, showcasing our nice roller prop some more.

You can see a comparison between my dev platform ETK800 and an ETK I 3000ix, doing various roller tests.

The tests get progressively harder each time, starting off with just blocking the main axle, continuing to a fully blocked side and finishing with 3 wheels on rollers, the remaining one being on the secondary axle (that's the hardest it gets for these tests)

While the ETK I does the first test just fine, it struggles with the remaining ones, however, the 800 with full electronic control over what the AWD clutch and the open diffs do, fares much better.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

For those wondering how the rollers changed from ETK I wheelbase/trackwidth to the 800.... Well, they adjust to the nearest car automatically

 

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

Enabled and configured the lights on all lightbars to illuminate the surroundings.
One of the reason this wasn't there earlier was the missing support for PointLights via Jbeam (being there for a while),
but also the need of a way to avoid anything directly under the lightbar from being illuminated (no use shadows there for clipping and performance reasons).

Also this old issue with the SunFlare not being properly occluded was solved (there's a new parameter in the sky settings for it), as well some overall tweaks for all flares.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Finally had a chance to look into improving the shifting behavior when jumping, the DCTs where doing some weird things there so far and the other transmissions where also fairly easy to confuse.
Should be better now

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Vivace leaked...

 

Spent the past few weeks researching ways to optimize our vehicles materials.
One thing that is heavy on performance is the amount of layers an object uses in its material. Every layer correspond to a draw-call. The more layers are used, the more drawcalls, which is more work to render.

Made a quick tester to help with that:


The three cubes uses three different material setups:

• Classic
  • Stage 0 with Null Textures
  • Stage 1 with the actual textures
• Improved
  • Stage 0 with the textures, using a reflectivityMap
• Something in-between, but the results were not good enough

As you see, between the first two there is no visual difference, yet one is faster to render than the other, as it's using a single layer to do everything.

Additionally, this kind of workflow is simpler and cleaner to use, as instead of removing reflections using the Stage 1 opacity, they get added by using the reflectivityMap.

This is a basic change that we will start to bring to our vehicle's progressively. On high-end machines it's not much of a difference, but it should help low-specs players.

Vehicle's body (with colormaps) are a different and more complex matter, that will be a story for another post

 

Port? Industrial?

Spoiler

 

Very extreme, unrealistic and definitely not serious use of torque vectoring:

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

It's fun though

 

Finally finding some time to give this beast some much needed love

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Photomode, new stuff.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

You can toggle and adjust several effects settings directly within the photomode interface for ease of use.
You can also toggle dynamic reflections and adjust the time of day directly from here to get your scene just right

There are also filters (aka color correction) to change the look of the game in a more drastic way. The selection can be easily expanded with your own presets (very easy to create).

 

placeholder thumbnails go bye

 

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Tuning TC for the new [redacted]

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

 

Sometimes they still make them like they used to!

 

We teamed up with TraxionGG podcast for an episode covering BeamNG's history, development, and community ❤️‍

Take a listen, and let us know what you think ⤵️