At least not outside of the German marque’s own testing facilities, and even then I bet they make you sign an NDA promising you won’t tell anyone how freakin’ cool it looked. In BeamNG.drive, braking too late could send you cartwheeling into the stands in a cloud of barely identifiable shrapnel, which no matter how lucrative the licensing deals with racing games get, you’ll never see a legally simulated Mercedes Benz SL-R107 do. Knowing that your vehicle is made up of hundreds of interacting parts – engine blocks and wing mirrors and axles and bumpers all held together with a set of inscrutable algorithms substantiated by the physical world – makes taking a tight corner inches from the tyre barrier all the more authentically thrilling. But there is an indirect benefit to simulating an eventuality you don’t wish to happen, and this is where BeamNG.drive stands apart from any other racing game I’ve played. Damage modelling is difficult when you have roughly seven or eight spare polygons to work with, and Gran Turismo was a uniquely serious game about keeping your car on the track and doing a good race without ever smiling or laughing. If that’s true, then Polyphonic probably made that concession willingly.
The protective car makers also stipulated that in no circumstances were the cars ever allowed to flip over, leading to some peculiar looking near-crashes as the laws of physics tussled with the laws of… well, lawyers. The real-world cars of early Gran Turismo games, according to some guys from a PlayStation magazine I used to know, were prohibited from showing damage as part of the developer’s strict licensing agreements with car manufacturers. Racing games have had some degree of simulated damage for a long time. The tinfoil chassis of luxury sports cars roll down canyons and become compressed like metal sausages as they go, each new impact revealing the hardened frame that sits skeleton-like beneath their lurid and aerodynamic, carbon fibre facade. Vans tumble over cliff edges and begin discarding their doors and tyres, like hot air balloonists desperately ejecting ballast in an attempt to stay airborne. BeamNG.drive is a meticulously detailed simulation of carnage, dropping into bullet time at the point of impact to treat the player to gory close-ups of metal panels popping and mangling, twisting and pinging off.
#BEAMNG DRIVE XBOX MOD#
Still primarily a toy box bolted on to a technical demonstration of a physics engine, it’s been enjoying a slow drip feed of new vehicles and tracks on which to drive them, more robust mod support, fresh campaigns and a couple of new game modes slipped into the main screen.ĭespite the content additions, this remains at its core a game about what happens when two or more objects collide with one another at high speed. This is how physics behaves in the real world, bucko, and if you don’t like how that looks, the early 2000s are calling and they want their standards back.īut you will like how that looks, because BeamNG.drive’s simulation of crashing cars is a consistently joyous spectacle, and has been for the nearly five years it’s been pootling around in Early Access.
#BEAMNG DRIVE XBOX SIMULATOR#
Car simulator BeamNG.drive deals in the physics of soft bodies, objects that, unlike the impossibly perfect “rigid bodies” of pure Newtonian physics, can compress and crumple and deform and twist. This week, he's getting physical in soft-body car sim BeamNG.drive.ĭon’t ask me to explain in any more detail, but I’m almost completely certain I understand what “soft-body physics” means having watched precisely one YouTube video about it while high in bed one afternoon, my own soft body draped inelegantly across the pillows and speckled in Quorn nugget crumbs, like some forgotten Renaissance masterpiece. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.
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