BNG questions

General Chat
1

Now that we can drive our fancy creations around in BNG, I’ve been playing with some different designs for both road going cars and some off roaders. Does anyone know the answers to these questions?

  • How is wheel/axle attachment strength calculated? I’ve had some mishaps from wheels deciding to have a sudden desire to explore a different area of the map than the rest of the car and I’d like to avoid that, particularly in dedicated off road vehicles. In one instance, I spun a car on a race track, and without hitting anything, managed to liberate one of my front wheels.

  • How is the behavior of geared/viscous/eLSD converted to BNG? I can’t seem to tell much of a difference, although I did notice that more modern ESC does work like modern traction control in that it can independently brake spinning wheels to get you over lighter obstacles. I think auto-lockers just translate as manual.

  • Can we control overall suspension travel, or is it just a measure of the ride height slider?

  • (Perhaps this should go in body suggestiongs) Any chance of adding morphability to the approach/departure angles on bumpers? This would help tremendously with off-roading without the need to jack the vehicle to the sky to get over bumps. (It would also be cool to have actual skid plates added when selecting that option in the car designer)

2

Yes, auto lockers just become manual lockers for now. I’m less sure about the other types, but viscous just seems to allow more slip than geared from my general messing about… although not ruling out placebo as of yet.

Suspension travel upwards is based on the room to the guard, thus the ride height compared to tyres size ect. From what I can tell you get the same extension as you have compression. Yes in the real world many road cars have less travel than this, running into bump stops to prevent geometry angles being too far out to to short suspension arms, and to prevent coil bind or finding the limits of small shocks travel… thus reducing costs and weight a little. And yes some real world offroad trucks can extend massively beyond what they can compress, often with shocks that are much firmer to compress than extend in order to absorb energy. However the real tycoon effect of this is essentially insignificant, and even in beamNG the handling effect differnce you’d note on actual production cars would be very minor… even vs ongoing bug fixes.

Some bodies already have morph-able approach/departure angles… but in game stats don’t seem to use them yet (beyond total volume\mass)… so this is already a thing. As for actual skid plates, currently there isn’t really much you can even damage, no radiators, hoses, drive shafts or IFS diffs, so while this would involve quite a bit of dev time, it would only really have visual impact.

3

Thanks! Interesting that the travel is symmetrical. Going with that, a smaller tire would give better articulation given the same ride height?

4

In theory, and based only on my experimentation (not dev statements) yes.

But keep in mind small tires will also give less ground clearance, especially to your suspension\diff, which ride height doesn’t effect. And smaller tires give you smaller contact patch, thus higher specific ground pressure and likelihood to sink in sand or wet grounds, (but conversely less control when you have loose dust or water on a firm ground like rain on a wet track) although thats not modeled in game, so you can make off road tires skinny for now for best offroad handling. Also due to the lower diameter vs objects of a fixed size, generally smaller tires will be worse for crawling over things offroad. Finally taller sidewalls overall and higher profile tires allow for more tire deflection, and allow large contact areas when lowering tire air pressures (which you can do in beamNG) to drive offroad.

So all in all your probably going to want to fit as big of a tyre diameter to your normal offroad vehicles as practical… massive flex looks really cool, but outside of competition vehicles that are looking to absorb the impact of jumps or have basically no panels down low to be worried about hitting when twisting up in rock crawling, its rarely as pragmatic a solution as lockers to avoid traction loss and larger tires to clear terrain… be it in real life or either game.

5

I’m familiar with many of the real life implications of tire size and some suspension geometry, just was unaware of their translation to either game. For the most part, I’m trying to build semi-sensible off road SUV’s like a Land Rover or Grand Cherokee analog that could be sold (maybe a bit more capable than the real showroom versions), so I’m not trying to go too crazy on the settings.

I saw the tire pressure setting in BNG, but didn’t know if it worked or not for Automation cars. Is the default arbitrarily assigned?

Thanks again for the help.