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. 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. 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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