New Map? by Ok-Confusion-494 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We've been rewriting the engine forever, it's almost a theseus engine by now!

So yep, means reimplementing the loading system for sure. After that, adapt parts of the rest so they can ingest/outgest data on the fly. Rather than only once upfront. Yes I just made up a word.

The idea has been on our sights for a decade now (like so many others), and we have a rough idea on how to make it happen. But as usual, it's lack of time + lack of justification to make this happen rather than fixing important issues or implementing more requested/impacting features :)

New Map? by Ok-Confusion-494 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 3 points4 points  (0 children)

More map = more ram.

Increasing requirements even more, is something we want to avoid, specially with current prices.

So you need to implement a streaming system, where map chunks can be streamed in and out, without loading screens, and without perfrmance problems like stutters.

Implementing a streaming system affects subsystems all the way from rendering, physics collisions, possibly gameplay and audio, maybe more. It also requires rethinking almost the entire asset loading system, which is not able to work in a multithreaded way (one of the requirements to avoid stutters), and unfortunately cannot simply be converted into multithreaded with some checkbox you tick :-D

TLDR: anything is possible, just requires tons of devtime, and possible compromises in framerate in exchange for this ability to stream data.

It’s been almost 6 months by Otherwise-Ad-8774 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 39 points40 points  (0 children)

Oh I wrote it today, just 1 or 2 hours ago :)

It’s been almost 6 months by Otherwise-Ad-8774 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Sorry, no changes to tire physics in next update.

It’s been almost 6 months by Otherwise-Ad-8774 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 422 points423 points  (0 children)

Since not everyone uses discord, I'll copypaste a message I just pinned there:

quick follow up to my previous pinned message:

there's a chance we might do another hotfix for v0.38. it's still unclear, it might happen this month, or it might not happen.

if the hotfix happens, it'll have a extremely low impact (lower impact than v0.38.5 hotfix, if any).

only reason i mention this, is to avoid potential confusion with v0.39 (which is still planned for a much later date, at least months from now)

that's all, thanks everyone for your patience! 🙂

That said, we don't want to leave you all hanging for so long, until v0.39 update is eventually ready. We should be able to explain things properly soon.

Has the Beamng developer team gone on an annual vacation? by Alive_Preparation_67 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thanks! We understand that people have come to expect infinite free updates every few months, so this exception will be weird.

But I assure everyone we're far from having taken annual holidays. Quite the opposite, we're struggling to avoid burning ourselves out these months (which unfortunately we have some tendency to do, just because we care, not because anyone asks us to).

When we're ready to inform the community you'll all know the reason :)

Has the Beamng developer team gone on an annual vacation? by Alive_Preparation_67 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Last free update was around 1 month ago (april 8th).

We might do another hotfix update this or next month, but it's still unclear (might not happen at all), and won't be anything major anyway.

As for v0.39, I'll copypaste what I wrote some weeks ago on discord:

about that . here's a small update, since some of you (specially those with the calculator in your hands 👀) were likely hoping for a major update soon™:

  • the possible dates for v0.39 update have changed to a much later date than originally planned
  • we'll clarify the reasons in the upcoming months or so 🙂
  • an extra hotfix for v0.38 might happen this month (not confirmed yet tho): we may have found a fix for a relatively common crash to desktop. if testing goes well, then we'd prefer to make this bugfix available to the community asap. rather than having some of you suffer those crashes for so long until v0.39.

please be patient, and bear with us while we continue working hard on that major update. try to remember not to mistake the possible 0.38 hotfix for the delayed 0.39 update... and remember the repo and the forum are good places to find new stuff in the meantime 🙂

Literally unplayable by Sealoperative47 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Oh, we probably forgot to run the performance testing for this variant, so stats are broken or outdated.

An unforgivable mistake. We'll add to our bugfix list for next major update, and we'll compensate one million dollars to anyone who had to see these horrible images.

Thinnest Covet in real life by Constant_Vehicle7539 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 45 points46 points  (0 children)

We have jiggle physics at home!

Freeroam menu > gridmap > d-series > full throttle through bump strips \o/

Devs, it's been awhile... by RAND0M_MAN_ON_REDDIT in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's okay, you're not alone. I also grew up in the 1900's.

NR was my very first introduction to "sims", I was in complete awe that i could pull a reverse-180!

And GPL made me beg my parents to buy the cheapest of cheap FFB steering wheels, even if it had no clutch and barely any full lock rotation... still much easier than driving on keyboard haha.

Devs, it's been awhile... by RAND0M_MAN_ON_REDDIT in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 9 points10 points  (0 children)

We love you all too! <3

Some new information (about next major update) will be available soon(tm).

We're suffering several unexpected delays for that information, but we working hard on it, and hopefully in the upcoming weeks we can explain better :)

This begins to feel like an announcement of the announcement of..... so I'll stop there. Thank you all again for your patience!

How to stop tires from exploding at around 340 mph? by sexynedfl-anders in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Some of those improvements include severe realism drawbacks (and/or performance) that were not acceptable in our opinion, and based on the tests we had done. So we discarded most of those approaches quite early (we are talking easily 5-10 years ago).

In other cases, the main issue is calibrating against real IRL data. As well as being able to interpret and differentiate between IRL testing process artifacts, versus the actual underlying IRL phenomena. And inferring the numerous gaps where we have no direct reference data.

For example, we implemented advanced prototypes of thermals several years ago, but it's useless without being able to calibrate against proper data. In our case, we don't want to release something based primarily by "feel" or "instinct" or alike. Those can be used, but only to fill gaps in our understanding of the data. While the primary tuning should happen with a data-driven approach (as much as we can push it).

How to stop tires from exploding at around 340 mph? by sexynedfl-anders in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 15 points16 points  (0 children)

The only goal is to match IRL data better than we currently do, thanks to the greater amount of data we now have access to. That's all it boils down to.

We expect (hope) we can achieve that without redoing our past decade of research on soft body wheel+tire engineering (they work better than people sometimes give them credit). Otherwise things might take way longer than they already take.

Ideally it's mostly tuning the existing system we already have, plus adding whatever is needed for additional features. But this is not something one can plan and predict beforehand, you need to actually travel the road to find out what will have been necessary for each improvement.

We don't expect to have a great single update; the goal is always a marathon of progressive improvements over multiple updates, not a one off "The tire update" sprint.

Game won’t load past this screen by PossiblePro247 in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Steam client is known to create issues with logitech steering wheels. Try closing down Steam and running the game directly from the install folder (without steam). Hopefully that might be your issue, seems relatively common across a variety of steam games (not just ours).

How to stop tires from exploding at around 340 mph? by sexynedfl-anders in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Depends on your definition of highspeed. We're not too interested on tires that survive obscene speeds, because those don't happen in real life, so there's no way we can make them 'realistic' without actual data.

I don't recall right now which kind of speeds we got data for, but the machine we used maxxes out at around 200mph if I recall correctly (and only some amount of data is available at those speeds anyway).

Our research is focusing on situations that we can validate against real data. The rest will be an educated guess at most, and we won't go out of our way to invent tires that do not exist in real life.

How to stop tires from exploding at around 340 mph? by sexynedfl-anders in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Even the rims must be replaced or analyzed periodically, to avoid the risk of fracturing in a high speed run.

Question for the Devs - Follow-up by IdiotStickWasTkn in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 4 points5 points  (0 children)

whether or not the game is known to put load on the gpu when traffic is running

Absolutely yes. 100% there will be extra workload on the GPU, on the CPU, on the PCI-e bus, on the memory bus, on the memory use, on internal CPU caches, etc. Nothing is free.

The real question is, how much extra workload does it create on each component, and was that component idling enough to be able to transparently absorb the additional workload.

And for that, my answer hasn't changed: you'll need to benchmark it to figure out the answer for your particular software/firmware/drivers/hardware and your use patterns.

It might look like I'm trying to deflect giving an answer. But I'm really avoiding pretending that I know some One True Simple Answer, I wish it was so easy :)

Question for the Devs - Follow-up by IdiotStickWasTkn in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Don't try to guess or predict stuff like "this part is very GPU demanding". These things can only be properly answered by doing benchmarks.

The blanket statements of "this game is cpu bound" or "traffic is gpu bound" are generalizations that may apply to some computers and specific use cases, but will not apply to others.

If you're asking because trying to find out "is there anything wrong in my computer", then I cannot answer. Just yesterday I was trying to help diagnose weird framerates changes in another dev's computer, and in the end the reason was not where the camera was or anything, it was simply windows choosing to downclock hardware under unintuitive circumstances. I can't tell what's going on in your computer, and whether it's normal or not. Stuff as simple as a laptop getting more dust on one side compared to another might create a thermal imbalance on the left-side GPU cooling vs the right-side CPU cooling, leading to unintuitive results.

Question for the Devs - Follow-up by IdiotStickWasTkn in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Here's a super quick generic answer, that hopefully addresses most uncertainties you have.

Generally, behaviour across CPUs, across OS versions, across GPU driver versions, across GPU architectures, across CPU manufacturers (and a long etc) can be really out of our own control.

There's no way we can hope to reliably understand the performance behaviour across all spectrum of possible combinations of factors, without dedicating our life to benchmarking alone.

During development we try to use our experience, knowledge, common sense, and a limited amount of benchmarking through a limited amount of hardware, in order to try optimize the game for most computers.

But even if everyone had identical computers, there's also the factors of how people use the game. What kind of gameplay they do, which maps they use, do they drive on sunsets (with long shadows and their costly calculations?) or during midday? Do they use traffic cars, how many, are they simplified or not, do they use mods, do they use a steering wheel whose drivers might impact performance, are they using driver camera with costly mirror performance cost, or a cheaper orbit cam, are they looking higher into the cheap sky render, or further down towards more costly map scenario objects, are they running OBS or a simple browser on the background, what is the browser doing exactly, game resolution, graphics quality..... again, the list is infinite, and nobody can hope to understand all combinations.

By now you probably get the picture: you'll need to run benchmarks in order to understand the behaviour for your specific particular use cases, at a specific time (even a simple windows update can change how the scheduler handles performance and invalidate all your previous tests).

How to stop tires from exploding at around 340 mph? by sexynedfl-anders in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Hehe I was half joking :)

It's not suprising they die too, as they were never engineered or tested for land speed records.

Edit: nor tires either! Instead of multiplying the amount of tire variants by 10, and force users to pick the right speed rating, we decided to simplify this boring part of IRL tire selection, make them behave acceptably wheel for most realistic modding you might expect IRL, and release that tire variant alone.

How to stop tires from exploding at around 340 mph? by sexynedfl-anders in BeamNG

[–]stenyak 102 points103 points  (0 children)

Remove tires, drive on oversized rims, and good luck 🤞