Like a lot of long-term BeamNG players I came over from Rigs of Rods. Over the years BeamNG has developed to match and generally beat RoR at everything it did. That said, one major place where I feel Beam is still not there that RoR did well is securing loads on flatbeds or in cargo boxes. If I loaded up a vehicle on to a flatbed in RoR and hit the "secure load" key, it was going to get strapped down nicely and isn't going anywhere unless I'm really bashing around. In Beam on the other hand, that same load is held in place by little more than hopes and dreams. One of the top posts over on /r/BeamNG as I type this demonstrates the problem quite well. https://www.reddit.com/r/BeamNG/comments/e93mon/we_apologize_about_the_damage_to_your_vehicle_sir/ I would like to see something like what RoR had, where load attachment nodes can be placed within a cargo area that will automatically connect "strap" beams to nearby nodes on arbitrary cargo. It should allow for potential cargo to specify certain nodes as tie-down points but should still have a fallback method to support cargo that has not been updated for this purpose. It's annoying for example to try to use the tow truck upfit for the D-Series with vehicles that don't have the right kind of node to automatically connect the tow hook, so I'd like to avoid that situation.
It should grab the four corner nodes at the furthest edge of the cargo that's touching the cargo bed, for a car that'd be the bottom of a wheel/tire and for cargo that'd be, well, the outermost corner.
Yeah, I was thinking something pretty similar to that as a heuristic for cargo that hasn't been updated to specify which nodes should be secured to. The vehicle doing the carrying would need to have attachment nodes defined for sure, but the the cargo being carried shouldn't need to be changed. I'd probably add a special case that if the point your rule finds is on a tire, the attachment ends up going to the hub area where the tire connects to the vehicle rather than directly connecting to a node on the tire. Maybe also have it look for other kinds of attachment points like trailer hitches and consider those to be high priority locations where if there's one within some reasonable distance it'd prioritize connecting there. I don't know if the game's Lua support is capable of determining the relative position and type of nodes between two nearby vehicles but if it is it seems like this sort of thing could technically even be implemented at the vehicle level rather than necessarily requiring the game itself to change.
