I think I understand BeamNG's predicament with tearing now. All their structures are beam and node dependent. A node is a bit like a ball joint. So if a beam were to break, it would loose all its integrity and just flop around. The beams must stay in one piece and their deformation is controlled via various parameters etc, but the whole thing starts falling apart if connections actually break.
Right... so? I don't think people want BeamNG cars to rip apart at 40 MPH, I think people want the cars to rip realistically at what ever circumstances are correct, spinning out into a pole to at 200 MPH etc.
The only reason the structures are acting extra stretchy is because they are set up that way... it is a trick that Gabester has been using for some years now. Basically (as he already said) if the beams connecting the nodes that deform the mesh break, then the mesh that is across that broken beam will disappear as to not end up with one of the famous tentacle explosions that we used to get back in RoR... back then to avoid that problem, he would make it so that the beams would stretch realistically at reasonable forces, but never break... that way the mesh still looked normal, but if you took it to extremes, then the trick would make it seem as though the vehicle could stretch unnaturally because it would stretch way past its real life breaking point. Still better then a tentacle explosion though. Long story short, I am sure that this is how he still has it set up to keep a mess from being made, along with the fact that once the mesh tearing problem is resolved, I know that it is completely possible to set up realistic material stretching and fracture... I have seen it done before with less advanced code... I don't see why BeamNG couldn't do even better! It is the different code that the Devs have worked out as a possibility for mesh tearing so far. If the beam in between the two nodes is broken, the logical tear that the computer would follow would be to take out all the mesh between the two nodes, that way there is no uncalculated mesh... everything is still accounted for. This also keeps the mesh from potentially looking like it was passing through itself when the structure, with its now missing beam(s), collapses. This means that there is no excess mesh to overlap with itself when things get to close. That is exactly right
C2 doesn't have softbody physics. Cars are just solid bricks which can change shape during single simulation frame when collision occure. Vehicle bending and twisting is done through some kind of mesh modifiers that are applied to whole car when some impact energy threshold is exceeded. You can see it is final and the car can't be visibly damaged any further. Same applies for tearing. One brick just turn into couple of bricks. Somehow its decided which triangle stays where and that's it. Cars' visible meshes in beamng are constantly adapting to underlying soft skeleton and if part of it is gone, part of the mesh has nothing to move and deform along.
