Ill start by saying i taught myself how to use Gmods Hammer..... HAMMER. I have plenty of patience for making maps in less than ideal software, however beam.ng's world editor is basically unusable for people who haven't spent hundreds of hours learning how to use it and i think that's a big problem. The biggest things that need to be addressed is ease of use and bug fixes. I have been trying to make a simple circuit map for about 2 weeks now and even while following several different tutorials, it has been a stress inducing nightmare. Doing the most basic of basic things is usually a complicated nightmare and very very often doesn't work as intended or randomly breaks for no reason. Everything from making a terrain, to importing assets, to importing textures, to setting up textures, to USING textures is just massively overcomplicated and unintuitive. (and prone to break.) This is such a cool program to include in the game and it seems like the devs want players to use it but it also feels like they put no effort into actually making it usable. It feels like a tool they just had laying around from development and just decided to throw it in the game, which is better than most devs dont get me wrong! But the unintuitive way you have to use it and the fact it is just RIDDLED with bugs feels like thats all they did, drag and drop it into the project and forget about it afterwards. I'm typing this up because after weeks of trying to get a very simple project started, I finally got a functional terrain in the level that i could edit. However 2 days later, after saving and reloading, all the textures on the level broke and it seems unfixable. And they broke without me touching anything to do with textures. After a couple hours of troubleshooting i just dont have it in me anymore to fight this program. All i wanted was to get some of the ideas for a track out of my head and see how they feel in game, but it just isn't worth it anymore. i don't feel like im fighting the limitations of the editor, i feel like I'm fighting the devs who made it. There's so much I wanna do with the tools provided but I know ANYTHING I try to do will break in 15 different ways and be 10x more complicated to implement than it needs to be. IDK if they can hire a UI designer or someone who specializes in ease of use (not sure what that professional would be) to work on improving the world editor but i think thats necessary if large numbers of players are gonna make content for beamng. (large as in relative to something like GMOD.) please please PLEASE work on the world editor, there's so many cool things i wanna do
Hi I understand your frustration. The World Editor is the most important part of BeamNG.drive for me, and I have had so many crashes, data losses, and inexplicable behaviors that make debugging incredibly difficult. Every time I think, 'This can't be true.' To tackle projects in BeamNG, you sometimes need nerves of steel and an unbreakable love to keep going, navigating the many inconsistencies, learning the bugs, and taking crashes in stride because you have a sophisticated backup and versioning system. You need experience to understand the many connections and build a workflow that allows for serious work. On the other hand, it is incredibly fun to see great results, design landscapes, and race around on your own super cool map with your favorite car. BeamNG is officially in the Alpha stage. This means that we are officially testers of software that is still in its infancy (unlike with other software companies, where this happens without consent). It is thanks to the many modders who, without any compensation, enthusiastically endure the torments of a shaky software that BeamNG can maintain and further develop the Alpha state over such a long time. Any other game would be immediately criticized and torn apart in the press and by users. With BeamNG, it’s somehow different. A peculiar business model that lets an entirely unfinished software gradually and steadily improve without any rush. Economically, this only works because we love BeamNG. Because we accept this gigantic bug and signal that everything needs to get better. I have no idea if the devs know what we have to endure to make a project a reality and keep working with deep hope. It is only fair because BeamNG.drive is clearly labeled as a 'Technical Preview' or 'Early Access.' Otherwise, it absolutely would be a reason for fighting even on a legal level! I hope you will keep up your work somehow, maybe the community can halp you solve the mentioned texture problems or you could use great tools some brilliant members provide, to make everything more easy and maybe have a new better starting point. Thank you for bringing up this topic.
