BeamNG.drive: Split-Screen Multiplayer Arrives in v0.40

BeamNG.drive Version 0.40 adds local split-screen multiplayer, one of the community’s most requested features. The update also brings physical occupants, a new truck, several upscaling options, native Windows on Arm support and a batch of optimizations. The full list of changes is in the patch notes.

Split-Screen

Local split-screen multiplayer is now in the game. You can start a session from the Main Menu by adding participants and picking Freeroam or a game mode. You can also start one from inside a level by selecting Split-Screen in the Pause Menu.

Split-Screen supports up to 64 players, provided your hardware can handle that many. The developers ask anyone who tries it to send a photo of the attempt.

Freeroam and Game Modes

In Freeroam, all players start together at a random location. Each player gets a random vehicle suited to the map, an automatic vehicle color and personal settings for gearbox mode, clutch assist and throttle assist. You can explore, go on a roadtrip or stage elaborate crashes. The new occupants system also lets you leave your own vehicle and climb into a friend’s. They drive while you mess with the interior.

For more structured play, Split-Screen offers seven game modes:

• Race – race across a variety of track layouts, with support for over 85 existing Time Trial and AI Race layouts.
• Drag Race – head-to-head over the quarter mile.
• Pursuit – play as the chaser or the runner and either make the arrest or escape.
• Derby – be the last vehicle moving.
• Drift – aim for the highest score within the time limit.
• Rock Crawling – race through challenging trails, with optional penalties and recovery rules.
• Soccer – team up and push the ball into the opposing goal.

Every mode has its own settings for track layouts, lap and score goals, penalty rules and more.

Walking Mode and Occupants

Walking mode has a new character mesh. The character’s head follows the camera, and you can now see yourself in mirrors.

Occupants, including a character named Bob, now sit inside vehicles. They affect handling and follow the same physics as the rest of the game. Each occupant adds 89 kg to the seat and the vehicle. Seated occupants are fully JBeamed, so they wobble and react to how the vehicle is driven. Character colors carry over when entering a vehicle, which makes players easy to tell apart in split-screen.

The traditional driver camera has become a general occupant camera. Any occupant can use it, whether in the driver seat, the passenger seat or hanging on to the wheel. Its rotation limits are higher, so every trigger in a cockpit can be reached. Free cam now switches on automatically when you remove the last vehicle. Spawning a vehicle while on foot puts you back in the vehicle camera.

Vehicles

New Vehicle: Cherrier Percheron

The Cherrier Percheron is a full-size European cab-over semi truck from the early 2000s. It is the most interactable vehicle in the game so far. It has interior lighting, door lights, a night light and a working sunroof with a sunshade. Players can open the storage lockers, the front fascia pane and a left side spoiler panel. The side skirts fold away to reach the fuel tanks.

The Percheron is highly modular. It comes as a fifth-wheel tractor or as a rigid truck with upfits. The upfits include a platform configurable as a flatbed or insulated box, concrete mixers in several sizes and an interactable tanker with custom liveries as a fuel or foodstuffs tanker.

Cabs come in three sizes: S, L and XL. The S is a low-roof day cab for daily and vocational work. The L and XL add a sleeper bunk for longer trips. Each cab is suspended separately from the frame on coil or air springs at all four corners. It can be unlatched from inside and tilted electrohydraulically from the control panel on the rear right corner.

Frames come in five lengths, from 6.17 m to 9.80 m, with air or leaf suspension and 2 to 5 axles. That adds up to more than 50 chassis setups, from road-going 4x2s to 8×8 all-terrain trucks. The engine is a 12.8L turbocharged I6 rated from 310 to 500 hp, paired with a 12-speed manual or a 7-speed automatic. The truck also has its own horn and reverse beeper.

New Trailers: FPU European Truck Trailers

A new range of semi and rigid trailers goes with the Percheron. It includes platform upfits as a flatbed or insulated box, fuel and foodstuffs tankers in two sizes with unique liveries, and modular construction with various axle layouts.

A Muhten Tag milk brand now has liveries for tankers and trailers. Some very high price values on various trailer parts were also fixed and rebalanced.

New Prop: Tyrannos Dinosaur Mascot

The Tyrannos Dinosaur Mascot weighs 86 kg of fiberglass and often stands near Tyrannos fuel stations. An optional 560 kg base keeps it stable and can be dug into the ground. The statue is a load option on a wide range of pickups and truck beds, and it floats on water.

Other Vehicles

Existing vehicles got changes too. Police lightbar modes were reworked, and all vehicles gained parking brake triggers. Racing seat stiffness was reworked for better attachment, and the drag and lift of most vehicles was refined. Light intensity was readjusted across LED, incandescent and EU/US lightbars for realistic falloff, and license plate retro-reflectivity was tuned.

A long list of vehicles also received Statue load options, trigger fixes, seat mounting improvements and physics structure updates. The patch notes list the changes vehicle by vehicle.

Graphics

Anti-Aliasing and Upscaling

Version 0.40 adds SMAA T2x temporal anti-aliasing and optional upscaling through NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR™ 3, FSR™ 4 and Intel® XeSS. Upscalers get a sharpness slider, and PC now supports multi-monitor upscaling.

Lighting, Shadows, and Reflections

Stochastic screen-space reflections now work on vehicles, glass and water. Specular Occlusion joins them and uses bent normals to darken environment reflections in cavities and on sheltered rough surfaces.

Light-source radius support gives point lights, spotlights and vehicle lights softer, more natural shadows. Cluster shading, SSAO and screen-space shadows are faster and more stable, which should reduce shimmering, flickering and ghosting. Missing ambient lighting at night was fixed. The patch notes carry the full list of graphics fixes.

Under the hood, bindless rendering on Vulkan and Direct3D 12 lowers CPU overhead in scenes with many objects and materials. As part of the cleanup, some obsolete post effects were removed: chromatic lens, flash, turbulence, old motion blur, edge AA and the old SSAO shaders.

Redesigned Graphics and Display UI

The Graphics and Display settings were redesigned and are now grouped into Image, Detail, Brightness & HDR, Framerate & Sync, Multi-monitor, Lighting and Reflections. A Resolution Scaling slider and a Screen Space Reflections quality option are new. Ambient Occlusion’s toggle and quality are merged into one option. Dynamic Reflections and Dynamic Mirrors are each simplified to a single quality preset.

Virtual Reality

On PC, VR now supports Direct3D 12 through OpenXR. Performance and visual quality improved, and several rendering glitches were fixed. Head-bobbing is switched off automatically while VR is active.

Input and Controls

Several steering wheels got tweaked default controls. New profiles cover the Thrustmaster T98, Revosim Pure DD, Revosim Initiale DD, Logitech RS50 and Logitech RS shifter.

Throttle and brake trigger linearity on gamepads was rebalanced. The old curve was heavily geared toward extremely gentle driving.

Rally Mode

Rally cars now have a more realistic weight distribution, a side effect of the occupants system adding a person’s weight to the car.

Rally stages now support dynamic 3D countdown clocks placed in the world. Modders can build their own in any style, such as analog, 7-segment, matrix or bulbs. The 3D preview panel uses them too when it is enabled. A new option lets you pick a fully realistic clock with no visual aids, a zoomed view of the clock or a plain UI representation.

The default pacenotes changed from Pro to Enthusiast. Pro notes come from tailored freeform recording sessions for each stage. They have no metadata linking speech patterns to predefined pacenote triggers, so visual pacenotes can’t work with them. That also makes them a poor fit for non-English players and for quieter play such as streaming. Enthusiast notes use predefined pacenote metadata, so visual pacenotes work, and they are typically available even in mod stages.

The stage start menu now plays an example pacenote call while you browse codrivers. It also runs an intercom check when you first arrive.

Levels

West Coast, USA received a large round of fixes. Holes were closed, and sidewalks were adjusted to garage and door heights so terrain and asphalt no longer pop through them. Many buildings and meshes were repositioned with collision fixes. Broken materials and textures were repaired, decals cleaned and power line UVs fixed. The map also has a new backdrop with an infinite plane.

Italy has raised building LOD distances and fixed LODs on roads and traffic signs. It also gets fixes to materials, trees that stood too close to the road, highway line markings, the hospital entrance and a bridge over the highway.

Other maps got updated terrain backdrops, infinite planes and the removal of the old invisible-wall map limit folders. A cleanup pass across maps and `art/common` removed duplicate materials and textures, fixed broken texture links, retired old unused materials and repaired collision meshes on some common props.

Foliage soft collision was optimized on almost every foliage object in the game. Framerates should improve in dense areas such as Jungle Rock Island and Italy.

Gameplay

First Drive Onboarding Tutorial

“First Drive” is the new onboarding tutorial and replaces the Freeroam Tutorial. Many lessons moved over and were improved, and their achievements and trophies moved with them. You can start it from the onboarding popup, the Quick-Start Menu or the Gameplay Selector. On first launch, the popup helps you set language, measurement units and UI scale.

The guided lessons cover vehicle recovery, driving assists, spawning vehicles, customizing vehicles, vehicle interactions, the radial menu, map view, challenges and the environment.

Missions

All Italian trucking missions now use various Percheron configurations. Abseiling Fuel and Trailer Ferry became Freeform Delivery missions with the Percheron as the main vehicle.

TastiCola Driver is a new Freeform Delivery mission. Objectives and star requirements were rebalanced across many Drift, Delivery, Knockaway and Time-Trial missions. Drift mission rewards are easier to earn, and experienced players get bonus goals. Route guidance, hints, descriptions, names, images, weather, lighting and starting positions were all revised, and “Run What You Brung” races now draw from a wider pool of eligible opponents.

Photomode and UI Improvements

The Main Menu was redesigned for easier navigation. Large tiles cover Quick-Start Experiences, Freeroam, Split-Screen and others, and a More… option holds the remaining entries. The Extras page is gone. Credits moved to the Main Menu, Stats to the Pause Menu, and the rest to the Options menu. Blurred menu buttons also perform better.

Photomode’s Environment Settings tab has a new layout. Frequently used controls are easier to reach, and the advanced controls sit in a collapsible section that stays closed when the tab opens. Photomode also gains a temperature profile graph and a wind direction control. The `Level Default` and `Realtime` day length options are new, and Day Length now follows the value set by the level.

Low Performance notifications are also new. In Freeroam and Split Screen, a notification appears if your FPS stays below 25, and the Pause Menu shows the same warning. Spawning another vehicle triggers a performance warning if your system is already struggling.

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