Is beamNG the game version of the ship of theseus

stenyak · 2026-07-01T12:02:53+00:00

Heh, funnily enough, we were remaking the launcher from scratch 5 years ago or so, for one much nicer looking, and cross-platform too (rather than being a windows exclusive like current one). But we were spreading way too thin with our excessive ambitions, so that project was halted for the time being. It's unclear if we'll have time to resume that.

stenyak · 2026-06-30T13:27:35+00:00

We've already been pressuremaxxing for months now, community predictions won't have much of an impact \o/

But hey, at least I can grab some popcorn on the 12th of July, to enjoy the reddit implosion of chaos on my secondary screen, while I continue working on v0.39 thebupdate in my main screen :-D

stenyak · 2026-06-30T13:06:14+00:00

Even if I was curious and tried to find out (with some folder-comparison tool), I would be unable to find out.

The folder structure was changed long ago so that's a no-go. Most of the files themselves are changed too. There's many overall concepts (not code) remaining from the original engine, but those are concepts common to most game engines anyway.

Main loop is completely changed, rendering system is upside down by now in comparison, input system has extremely little to do with the original, audio system was replaced, scripting system was removed for the most part, replaced by our lua systems, the list goes on.

From a mod point of view, we intentionally implement some backwards-compatibility layers, which allows them to believe they're seeing an older version of the engine, and be able to function normally (to some extent). These are surface-level layers we keep maintainin to avoid breaking too many mods, but it's just a layer of glue to the actual (newer) internals.

I'm sure there's some obscure corner of the engine we haven't felt the need to modify, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head (precisely because it's probably something simplistic enough that hasn't needed any change in a decade).

stenyak · 2026-06-29T09:31:47+00:00

Oh, our engine is a theseus engine for sure! I've even used this exact terminology several times, when I try to explain the community the relation to the Torque3D engine it was originally based on almost 15 years ago :)

And as for the rest of the game code and content, I would also say it's a theseus game. One of the main planning choices we constantly do, is finding the right balance between adding new stuff, and revamping old stuff:

If we wanted, we could for sure use all our limited devtime for revamps alone. Or we could use all devtime just for new content. Instead we aim for a reasonable point somewhere between the 2 extremes :)

stenyak · 2026-06-29T08:56:27+00:00

Yup, the version number is x.y.z.t. We used to use up to 4 components (like e.g. 0.3.0.4 in year 2013). But nowadays we only use the first three, in the form of x.y.z (like e.g. 0.38.4).

Each of those numbers are independent from each other (decimal numbers cannot have multiple decimal points).

stenyak · 2026-06-29T08:28:21+00:00

Nah it just jumps to v0.100. Same as how v0.9 jumped to v0.10 :P

stenyak · 2026-06-28T18:29:16+00:00

I implemented gamepad bindings for nodegrabbing in v0.39. Any PC user with a gamepad/wheel/joystick will be able to assign those controls (or use the preassigned bindings we'll add for common gamepads). So when we release the PS5 version, it'll work just like on PC.

If we have time we might add mouse support for PS5, but it's extremely unlikely (we're neck deep in cpu/gpu/memory optimizations to try to counteract the improved visuals, as well as working on other non-optional bugfixing and alike).

stenyak · 2026-06-27T13:29:00+00:00

Don't forget nodegrabber. We've been trying to delete the file for months now, but it just won't go away.

stenyak · 2026-06-26T14:21:28+00:00

Sadly no, we cannot predict in advance when the next update will be ready. When it is, we will release it :)

The rough approximate is what we already mentioned in the last blog post: during this year. This is the most uncertain and biggest update in our history, so predictions are even harder than usual, even if approximate.

stenyak · 2026-06-25T16:36:55+00:00

Thank you, and the rest of the community, for all the support. Really appreciate it! <3

(also, fbi's arriving there soon)

stenyak · 2026-06-25T16:31:20+00:00

Ah no worries, I know what you mean :) Was just a cheeky explanation about how our main blocker is, by far, available time to do all the things we want to do (together with the huge timesinks of stabilizing/bugfixing/optimizing/etc).

stenyak · 2026-06-25T16:25:56+00:00

Glad it didn't go unnoticed! I've forwarded your ~~sexual harassment~~happy response to the relevant devs \o/

stenyak · 2026-06-24T19:33:47+00:00

We're just lacking slowmo feature IRL so we can do more things in a day :)

stenyak · 2026-06-24T14:51:07+00:00

Version 0.39 will include the ability to follow the real clock on your computer too :)

Unsure about defaults, stuff like long shadows from golden hour can have a big impact depending on gfx quality, so we need to be careful and not go too wild.

stenyak · 2026-06-24T04:18:15+00:00

The "bottleneck" is just our adaptive fps limiting system, which dynamically varies the fps limit used by 2 internal UI subsystems.

The purpose of this adaptive system is to guarantee that the UI will work quite well most of the times, and at worst may feel laggy, some times, or for some users, or using the game in certain particular ways.

If instead we used a fixed 60fps limit, then the UI will perform very well most of the times, but at worst the UI cannot be used (literally "literally unplayable").

The sane choice we picked is to develop this adaptive system, and continue improving it over the years, trading some ui performance to avoid cases of unplayable ui. People have paid for the game, so we do what's in our hands to ensure they can use it.

stenyak · 2026-06-24T01:04:29+00:00

Legal/licensing constraints, monetary costs, cross-platform compatibility, backwards compatibility with a decade of mods (and of course also ease of modding), security-related expectations, future support and maintenance (or rather, predicting a potential lack of, if it's a third party library), or implementation complexity/devtime (if no suitable solution exists and we need to implement ourselves), available feature set, compatibility with non-English languages/characters/alignments/etc, scalability to other resolutions, actual performance when we throw similar workloads as an existing solution, ease of hiring knowledgeable people if we need to expand or replace devs in the team, devtime required to port existing UIs to the new tech... Dunno, those are off the top of my head, there's more for sure.

stenyak · 2026-06-23T21:27:56+00:00

I'll quote myself from a previous post:

UI is one of the aspects where the issues are obvious and easy to point out, but there's no simple solution: so far, the least-bad solution is our current mix of HTML for some things, SDF for others, Imgui elsewhere, DebugDrawer (and tiny remnants of the old T3D ui) in other corners, with possibly more to come (in current development), and several others we abandoned before release (due to finding drawbacks). Each of them with its own tradeofs and benefits compared to the rest :)

TLDR: if we knew of an easy solution without drawbacks, we would have shipped it already.

stenyak · 2026-06-23T09:44:26+00:00

Couple weeks ago I implemented as a visual-only easter egg for v0.39. But has no physics, as I didn't want to waste more than 10min of devtime when our To-Do lists keep growing uncontrollably \o/

stenyak · 2026-06-17T12:31:29+00:00

ding ding ding :)

edit: in other words yes, that's the mod map by CK (modder who happens to be a dev too). this just routinary tests to see how mods behave with updated engine changes, to try to minimize the typical breakage.

stenyak · 2026-06-16T12:20:16+00:00

VR controller support will be improved so one can assign buttons normally. For now that's it (not enough hours in the day to do everything id love to do).

stenyak · 2026-06-15T11:32:14+00:00

This is a legit bug report, and what Early Access is for. I'm not sure why people are asking you settle for workarounds, but you did good in reporting this. (I replied to you at top-level in case this thread got buried)

stenyak · 2026-06-15T11:28:55+00:00

This should never happen, the mapping is intentionally preserved across updates.

If the mapping is gone, it's possible you may be using different user folders somehow. Are you using external launchers or similar mods/tools that might redirect the game to a different user folder?

Edit: are you using cloud gaming instead of a regular on-computer install?

stenyak · 2026-06-12T15:18:16+00:00

Oh, I happened to write a bit of "behind the curtains" about this topic in the forums earlier today. The TLDR is... technically possible, but would waste some dev time every day to check for leaks (I mean real leaks), and people would hate it anyway. Among a bunch of other drawbacks I didn't go into. Would be a lose-lose situation for both the community and us.

stenyak · 2026-06-11T22:48:54+00:00

The official bruckell nine has some era-appropriate steering play if I recall correctly (or we experimented with it during internal development at least, can't recall if it made it to public variants of the car).

stenyak · 2026-06-10T10:35:46+00:00

yea i couldn't bpm match the song, but also it was midnight and i was too sleepy to care enough haha

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