The online racing simulator
BeamNG - Soft body physics
(298 posts, started )
Quote from atledreier :
I agree the driving off road is enjoyable and believeable enough to be fun. Driving on a hard surface just expose so many underlying issues that it detracts from the fun.

I am amazed how little the devs seem to understand about tires and their inner workings, though.
They literally said that they didn't undestand where the low speed wobble came from... "uhm, you 12-segment tires, perhaps?"

oh, god omg they are still learning the working of the tyrs omg omg. I mean seriously, they concentrate on the soft body physics. That's what they are good at, not tyre physics and their working. It's not a racing simulator man, it's crash physics. Also it's still in early alpha, so they have enough time to understand the tyres.
I think ^ is on to something. BeamNG seems more like an experimental project, rather than an simulator. I think we are demanding too much of the devs.
Alltho I hope the driving physics gets improved over time
I grew tired of the crash physics pretty quickly. If you use the cockpit view you hardly notice anything happening that doesn't happen in other games anyway. It's not like the steering column flies into your chest or the airbags go off. In fact the passenger compartment structure always seems excessively strong.
As a driving game it's average, and I've very little interest in the new maps and cars because of that.
Quote from atledreier :The thread turned into a pissing contest, as usual. There is another thread that seems promising, where we back stuff up with real life videos and stuff.

I agree the driving off road is enjoyable and believeable enough to be fun. Driving on a hard surface just expose so many underlying issues that it detracts from the fun.

I am amazed how little the devs seem to understand about tires and their inner workings, though.
They literally said that they didn't undestand where the low speed wobble came from... "uhm, you 12-segment tires, perhaps?"

Quote from CodeLyoko1 :oh, god omg they are still learning the working of the tyrs omg omg. I mean seriously, they concentrate on the soft body physics. That's what they are good at, not tyre physics and their working. It's not a racing simulator man, it's crash physics. Also it's still in early alpha, so they have enough time to understand the tyres.

He has a point. atledreier, there's the door, now get out.
Quote from The Very End :Alltho I hope the driving physics gets improved over time

definatly this. It has potential for a great destruction derby and/or racing racing game (if they are gonna implement multiplayer with crash detection, unlike RoR). I guess they are gonna do that since they alreade have an destruction derby arena and rallycross and racing tracks
Why are you guys so hostile? atledreier makes good points here, and you guys just flame him off like he's the biggest hater of this game.

Besides, what's a driving game with bad tyre physics?
Quote from Bose321 :Besides, what's a driving game with bad tyre physics?

need for speed
Need for speed, TSU, DiRT, Grid, flatout etc etc.
From the devs:

Quote :The main problem with our tires seems to be that they are losing grip too easily, and regaining it in a strange way. So for example, in a quick slaloming maneuver, the car takes too long to respond to the direction change, and when it does, it responds quite violently. It makes the car feel slidey and twitchy at the same time. We will continue to investigate and work on this problem. The cars are making the correct amount of static grip compared to real-world vehicle measurements, so the issue is not the amount of grip, but how it is lost and regained.

Quote :We are aware that the tires are not perfect, but you are totally exaggerating. The cars all have a realistic amount of static grip. The weight is correct (we couldn't make it wrong even if we wanted to). The supercar is a supercar. If you expect perfect grip while flooring it you are playing the wrong game. I am not sure what makes you an expert on cars hitting trees at 80 mph that you can say our physics are wrong.

To put it simply: We don't need to defend the realism of our physics against people who clearly don't know anything about physics

Quote :There is no wheelspin past 60 mph. I don't know what game you guys are playing where the car does this. It starts to pull one way or another around 100 mph due to resonance within the tire but if you get past that speed it is stable again.

Quote :He comes in acting like his intuition is worth more than the years of research that have gone into the physics. His ego is astonishing. We have dealt with many people like this, who somehow think that their opinion of how things should happen is more accurate to reality than a physics engine built by experts. I see nothing polite about his post, just a constant ill-informed shitting on our hard work and demanding us to fix imagined problems. Most of the bitching and moaning about poor handling is nothing more than a lack of driving skill. There is a difference between smooth racetracks and kiddie suspension physics in Forza and GT5 and bumpy back roads and real suspension in a game like BeamNG.

You'll find no complaints about our physics from actual physicists and engineers, just people who think they know everything because they played a racing sim or GTA 4. The tire physics have room for improvement but there's nothing wrong with the suspension simulation. The cars are not too bouncy. Your driving is too reckless. And after dealing with the same ill-informed complaints from the same people over the past year and a half it gets tiresome. You know how suspension works in GTA and Forza? It magically absorbs most of the force into the nether. Go airborne or catch a big bump and the force simply goes away, magically absorbed by some extra layer of suspension that isn't really there. The car doesn't really lose grip or get unsettled at all. We don't cheat it the way they do to make it easier to drive.

It goes on to a rant about bouncing cars after jumps, which culminate in the gem:
Quote :There is nothing we need to change about our suspension/chassis dynamics to make them more realistic. All of these videos just validate the accuracy of BeamNG physics.

It goes on with a spinoff about burnouts and irrelevant console comparison, and then we get back to a discussion about the Bolide (a Ferrari-lookalike supercar) that won't drive straight at anything over highway speeds (even on a mathematically flat surface provided with the game)
Quote :I, and many other people, have no problem controlling the Bolide, even with keyboard. I just don't understand what's so difficult about it. Be precise with your steering and throttle. Yes, it veers at 100 mph. If we could wave a magic wand and fix it we would. But most of the time you're way below that speed and I think the handling characteristics are fine.

This just to show a little about the attitude you get on the BeamNG forums. I try to stay reasonable, but it gets hard after a while when opposed to this ignorance
If the forum is not open to public, can we get a full HTML copy or something?
tl:dr
Rigs of Rods physics were never designed to be realistic, and it was never intended to be. That they now think they are is sad.
Quote from PeterN :Rigs of Rods physics were never designed to be realistic, and it was never intended to be. That they now think they are is sad.

early alpha mate
It doesn't matter if it's alpha if they're claiming it's realistic and fine already.

Anyway apparently an update is coming with tyre changes so we'll see what the people who say it's fine already make of that, how can you fix something when it's simply a "lack of driving ability" which is the problem?
Once FFB is implemented I think it will help a lot.. can't see how people can comment on the tyre physics when you can't feel anything? lol
Quote from atledreier :From the devs:

This just to show a little about the attitude you get on the BeamNG forums. I try to stay reasonable, but it gets hard after a while when opposed to this ignorance

That was exactly the thread I was watching a few weeks ago. This gabester dude really has an attitude problem. There were a few people that had valid points, but he just claims they're bullshit. He's pretty much terrorizing the forum from how I see it. If you have comments about his work he will claim otherwise.
sounds like hes the phil fish of simulators
Quote from lukelfs :Once FFB is implemented I think it will help a lot.. can't see how people can comment on the tyre physics when you can't feel anything? lol

+1000

Theres no way to measure realistic physics with game controllers without FFB or even a Keyboard. I do also share the opinion that it has a bit too less grip though, but as long as we don't get FFB I am not gonna say that it is or is not realistic.

BeamNG is in early alpha and I think we will see many improvements over time (hope at least)
Quote from lrk-racer :+1000

Theres no way to measure realistic physics with game controllers without FFB or even a Keyboard. I do also share the opinion that it has a bit too less grip though, but as long as we don't get FFB I am not gonna say that it is or is not realistic.

BeamNG is in early alpha and I think we will see many improvements over time (hope at least)

You don't need FFB to know that a slight turn of the steering wheel in one direction won't send a car spinning. You may need it to judge the feel of the finer points of the physics model, but right now, there are no 'finer points' in the physics model. It's just crap.
I think the physics model is "okay". It's not on par with any sort of 'simulation' but I would say it's easily above an arcade level.

But I agree that you don't need ffb to know when shits not right.

It's like a kung fu movie. You may never see anyone do a back flip off the back of a truck in your life, but when you watch a kung fu movie you still know that something isn't right. You don't need to have even experienced it before. The human brain is actually a calculator. Every element of physics behaviour is logged in your brain. That's why you're always surprised when you handle aluminium, because you brain tells you it's supposed to be heavier than it is based on the size of it or how you could pick up a ball that you've never handled before, only knowing the weight of it, by it's feeling and throw it accurately.


Quite facsinating.. although a little off topic.
The chassis physics seems pretty good, but applying those rules to tires just won't work.

I also suspect there might be something wrong with inertia, as the cars seem to take a while to change direction after a bump, for instance. Very evident over small sharp bumps where my real bumps right back down and the BeamNG cars will make a jump. I haven't analyzed this indepth though, might be another issue.
With the tools given, is there something we can do to experiement with the physics itself? You seem pretty capable to understand physics (at least on a level where it sounds resonable to me ), so maybe worth a try if possible?
I will try to find time to do some simple experiments and compare them to real life. Somehow it feels like the physics, and especially inertia is in "slow motion", or in low gravity. But speed is very hard to judge on a computer screen, so until I have some solid data I won't claim anything.
There's been a new update released today which apparently fixes a lot of the handling issues. I've not tried it yet as I'm at work, but will give it a go later.

I've found myself modelling for this game more than playing it recently. I've never done any 3D modelling until just over a week ago and so far I have this, pretty pleased so far, but still a lot to do.


BeamNG - Soft body physics
(298 posts, started )
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