First of all, I'd like to say that I've owned the game for almost two years now, and I'm excited for every major update adding something interesting! I remembera few years ago people were saying "traffic is totally not gonna happen, this game can handle only one car at 60fps", then "ok, maybe we can do two cars, but not much more", and now look at you, running several cars at once without lags (even when crashing into them)! So please, think twice before you say something is totally impossible... I've been playing with transmissions (copy a certain vehicle's transmission to the appropriate documents/vehicles/vehiclename folder and edit) and here's what I noticed: - starting (taking off) with stock BeamNG manual transmissions always felt pretty weird due to the first gear being extremely long, that is, the ratio is not high enough, so a) clutch needs to slip for a longer time and b) accelerate longer before it is reasonable to go into second, third etc. - when engine braking I often found myself downshifting to the first gear down steep hills, when second gear wouldn't provide enough braking power and/or its top speed would be higher than the safe speed for that hill - with real cars, the first gear really is only for taking off, I never downshift to the first gear (the car would be almost stopped by the time it would be feasible to downshift due to high revs or the transmission physically resisting the shift) - there's something weird about engine braking in BeamNG. IRL, when you coast down a hill in let's say third gear, the car never speeds up so that it damages the engine (at least I never encountered such hill), however, in BeamNG, the engine often overrevs (and gets damaged), rendering the engine braking somewhat less useful. I think the engines should have more inertia than they currently have. So I edited a few transmissions, like the bluebuck 3 and 4-speed manual and I found that the ratios 4, 2 and 1 for 3-speed and 4, 2.5, 1.8, 1 for 4-speed work much much better and behave more like in the real life. Especially the three speed transmission: first gear: very short, just for the take off, second: 10-30 mph, third: past 20 mph up to ~110 mph (when it tops at 5k rpm). My suggestion: would it be possible to rework the ratios for all transmissions for all cars in the game? Is there any specific reason devs chose such long first gears? Secondly, I've been observing the traffic behaviour in this game and I noticed several patterns that are not quite realistic: - cars brake randomly even without any apparent reason (there's nothing in front of them, the road is straight, ...) - AI not yielding to the right side of the road when approached by an oncoming vehicle, which often leads to congestions (two cars facing each other, honking) - a more sophisticated approach would be for the AI to maybe wait before the tight spot so that the oncoming vehicle passes - AI overusing brakes downhill, especially for the trucks, which should rather use engine braking(*) - overall behaviour of the AI traffic should be smoother, reaction to police/ambulance light/sirene should be more clever (now the oncoming traffic stops and same direction traffic slows down, but sometimes they brake-check you and they don't yield to the side of the road) - AI often swerves randomly into the oncoming traffic for no good reason - the game spawns a lot of trucks, that's fine, but it would be more reasonable to spawn them with trailers. You don't see that many semi's without trailers on the roads... - not related to AI but sometimes after demolishing a car too much, the game says something about unstability, pauses on me and when I unpause the car I destroyed is gone. Maybe when a car is damaged too much, the game can despawn certain parts of it that flew too far away, or replace them with some props (like wheels that fly off, or doors etc.) so the simulation doesn't become unstable The third big thing I noticed is that it seems to me like the game loads the whole map into the memory, which seems like not exactly a good solution, because a) it takes quite amount of time b) it takes memory. Currently, Utah map takes about 1.8GB of RAM, Italy 5GB of RAM. I feel like until some dynamic loading is implemented (only the part of the map where the player is currently exploring is loaded), we cannot have much larger maps (like let's say any GTA or Mafia size map) without them taking too much space in memory or time to load. Realistically, it isn't possible to load EVERYTHING, especially in the future when you'll want more detailed environments, larger textures on buildings, larger maps, more roads etc. It simply won't be feasible to load everything, because it will take too much space. At least I was hoping that the game would eventually somehow merge all cities and countryside into a one huge map, with perhaps some quests or interesting stuff to happen, rework the traffic etc. Currently, the game is in a state when it demonstrates the mechanics on a few small demo maps. Now if you say, that this is how the game engine loads the map and it can't be changed at this point (period), I'd say the devs pretty much cut the ground under their feet and BeamNG will never go past the "tech demo" kind of app it is currently in and won't become a "game" (although it is arguable what a "game" is - I still enjoy just driving around in traffic, but I feel the limitations and I feel like it's not a game...yet). Another things I would appreciate: - huge thing: having a map and navigation. Yes, I know, there is the Beam navigator, but I want a real map, after pressing TAB it would display the whole map, where I can add waypoints and the navigator would display some route...I totally understand if this will only be added at the end, when there's one big map for which it will be worth to implement a map... - when repairing a car with a trailer, I want the trailer to be repaired, too and reattached to my vehicle - choose what to repair in a car, e.g. repair engine, wheels, but leave body damage or vice versa - choose what to damage in a car, e.g. pop a tire, damage pistons, overheat the oil, ... - more tuning control: transmission ratios, idle revs, in older cars: choke, controlling richness of the mixture, cold starts etc. - environment damage, at least lamp posts, fences and stuff - collision detection with street signs, currently they behave like ghosts - train tracks and trains strolling around the city, pedestrians (to make cities feel more alive), customize the cars with hanging key chains, have real reacting passengers (nagging you "hey, you ran a red light!" when you run a red light, or "slow down!" when you go too fast) and many more...
