BeamNG.drive News

With the long weeks of winter coming to an end we're ready to release our update to bring BeamNG.drive to version 0.16. This release sees several improvements and additions to the game. We are releasing our first fully electric vehicle for BeamNG.drive, the eSBR. In addition to being fitted with an electric drivetrain and battery system it has also been given a major facelift, giving it an appropriately modern look and feel. Our team has had a lot of fun pushing this car to its limits and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Italy is also receiving some additions, as promised when we launched 0.15 in December 2018. We have completed the port area of the main city, added the small coastal village of Portino and improved the appearance of the airport, fortress and castle. Italy is now also dotted with petrol stations and electric charging facilities as well as having several new offroad trails for you to explore. The local residents are also happy to have access to a new hospital and the protection afforded by fire and police stations.

Under the hood the team has continued to optimise several areas of the game. We now have a UI that can render up to 60fps. Optimisations to our physics engine have resulted in performance gains of up to 10%. Combined with improvements to the rendering engine that have reduced stuttering, your driving experience should become a lot smoother.

On the audio side of things, we are releasing support for 5.1 surround sound. The team has also been hard at work to bring scrape effects, transmission whine and a new dynamic muffling parameter into the game to continue the work of making our cars sound as good as they handle. Work on tuning these new effects is still on-going so expect to hear improvements in the coming releases.

This release also includes new and tweaked game scenarios, enhancements to several vehicles and a bunch of bug fixes and quality of life improvements. The full changelog can be found below. We hope you enjoy the results of the team's hard work and as usual please let us know what you think on the forums!

• New vehicle: Hirochi eSBR
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTrTndxmpMg
  
  
• Italy improvements
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7rNYCtyj7Y
  
  
• Audio improvements
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZppWX_Oxh0
  

Full changelog (with lots more media) in our blog:
https://blog.beamng.com/electrifying-0-16/
(it's too big to put here completely)

Hello everyone,

As usual, we're diligently working on adding new features, more content and doing various amounts of internal research.

Since that work typically doesn't get visibility until it finally gets released in a major update, today we're showing part of it. Today's sneak peek is focused on the Italy map.

As we mentioned back when this map was first released, that initial version of Italy doesn't include everything we had in mind. In a future update, you'll be seeing more towns and official buildings, additional offroad trails, expanded seaport facilities and more, as shown below:





In parallel to the regular development process for major updates, we never forget about possible issues that the community brings to our attention. Today we're bundling a small selection of the resulting bugfixes. The idea is to solve only the most important issues, risking overall stability as little as possible.



This fifth update for version 0.15 includes the following changes:

• Fixed repository not working when manifest cannot be parsed
  
• Fixed crash when static render manager tries to render 30000+ instances in one draw call
  

An up to date list of known issues can be found in the dedicated Feedback & Bug Reporting Thread here. Instructions on how to update the game here.


That's all for now!

Some more fixes and improvements.

• Added guard for missing default.pc
  
• Fixed crashdump being saved to default userpath even after changing it
  
• Fixed default userpath being incorrect if Windows Defender "ransomware protection" is enabled
  
• Fixed crash on render related to shadow materials
  
• Fixed missing GPU meters on the performace UI
  

An up to date list of known issues can be found in the dedicated Feedback & Bug Reporting Thread here.

Instructions on how to update the game here.

The relentless march of technology brings with it many improvements but also requires us to make difficult decisions.

Adapting our rendering technology to utilise the maximum potential of modern DirectX libraries means that supporting older DirectX versions has become increasingly difficult and introduces instabilities into the game for all users. DirectX10 was first introduced with Microsoft Vista back in 2007, 11 years ago, and both Nvidia and AMD stopped supporting DirectX10 in their driver development several years ago

Though it has been possible to run BeamNG.drive on DirectX10 graphics cards, this did not meet our minimum system requirements, which have called for DirectX11 for some time. The developer resources required to maintain functionality on DirectX10 graphics cards has reached the point where continued support is not sustainable. It is for this reason that we have had to make the decision to cease ongoing support of DirectX10 in the same way we had to stop supporting the now 17 years old DirectX9.

We have made available a branch of the DX10 game client in Steam. This branch will not be updated beyond this point.
You can find instruction on how to use it here.

Third round of fixes and improvements.

• Fixed crash when rendering shapes with invalid details numbers
  
• Fixed initial window size of scriptAIManager
  
• Fixed autobello thumbnails
  
• Fixed custom groundmodel not being loaded
  
• Fixed Some utility function using default userpath instead of actual defined userpath (may have fixed issues inside the torque3D editor)
  
• Launcher: Fixed open dialog failing to open on some specific configuration
  

An up to date list of known issues can be found in the dedicated Feedback & Bug Reporting Thread here.
Instructions on how to update the game here.