I had a crazy idea of making a huge map in BeamNG. So i made a 8192x8192 heightmap and imported it in with scale of 2. It is huuuge. (I did all the necessary things to make the map work) The problem is when i try to paint the terrain with grass or asphalt under the roads the fps goes down to like 1. I opened task manager and saw that nor my CPU or GPU bottlenecks the game. I have 16gb of RAM so thats enough too. I know its a crazy idea but theres nothing on the map expect some mesh roads. The auto paint doesnt work either i have waited for over an hour to finish but when i came back the game was just frozen. The ground would be fine if i only painted the parts that the player can see but the roads are unpaintable if the editor lags this heavily. Edit: The fps counter bottom right is showing 1000+ fps.
My best guess is that it is a case of "its is what it is". Those issues are probably overcomable with good algorithms, but the Torque3d editor can be rather slow at the best of times. The autopaint doesn't work within a reasonable time frame on normal sized maps either. I honestly have no idea what it's doing to take so long, I would just stay away from that feature entirely.
I don't think it is miracle, 32Gb ram might help, but overall editor just probably can't cope with that. Have you ever opened editor in Italy and attempted to do terrain shaping there? Set task manager to fast update speed and select show logical processors, admire how your painting attempts choke out one of your cores. To get even more accurate readings use hwinfo with 250ms polling rate, task manager is bit slow to catch all the load spikes. You need more clock speed, but technically editor just gets overwhelmed and sticks into some do nothing loop when there is more stuff than it was ever designed for, hence new editor is in works as you can see from developer microblogs. You will have then another problem, resolution of your imported heightmap will be very coarse. I don't know if it really is possible to get better resolution any way, like exporting part of the terrain as 3D mesh, you would need to export all different groundmodels as separate meshes I guess and use 3D editor like Blender to make terrain meshes. It would not be possible to paint in world editor, but that is crazy idea what I have had, build whole map from pieces made in blender, that could in theory allow gigantic terrain, but it would be literally hundreds if not thousands of pieces and transition from grass to sand etc. might not be very smooth or easy to make. Making highway from pieces that have own grass pieces etc. would be bit easier to do, but still lot of pieces, however cleverly making turns one might get 200km or so road into small area without too much of shaking issues. Maybe upcoming world editor would also bring possibility to add several terrains to world so that you actually could build long roads bit easier than now.
The problem with using map tiles is that you would need to make them small, otherwise performance may suffer. Potentially due to both LOD's and collision detection. But I could be wrong on that point. I don't fully understand the technical reasons why the editor is so slow, so I have no doubt that all the decisions were made logically. But Torque3D's level editor performs well below what is possible in other software. While multi-threading would help, I don't think its worth throwing more processing power at an algorithm which on the surface appears to be pretty bad. I mean, not only does it perform poorly, but it also doesn't actually work either, since it incorrectly creates artefacts on other sections of the map. I'm not sure whether the new editor is going to be entirely new or not? The interface certainly is, but I don't know if they are re-writing the existing tools or simply calling the existing ones from a more flexible and functional UI?
Tiles might need to be quite small, because one tile can be only one ground model material, so that complicates it a lot, doing highway only map would be lot easier as you could build it like it is done in ETS2 for example or what Bob Blunderton is doing with his Rail kit and Modular road kit, just add outside railing pieces to mix. I'm telling you, editor will do those do nothing loops when it gets bit too job to chew, it works really well under a point, then add slightly bigger job and boom there it is more than 2 hours doing do nothing loop very intensively. As Game Engine did fork from T3D so many years ago, pretty much all is rewritten at least once already. New Tools look similar to what there is currently with scipt AI and ground model debug as well as performance monitor app, if new editor tools perform anything like those, then we would certainly have happy days. Maybe they are not reusing too much as indeed it would be same to rewrite from scratch in many cases, they know there is lot of problems with editor and just new UI is not fixing that, so they probably do lot of rewriting and reading microblog update I get impression it is at least major refactoring they are doing. For example this point, I would think that to make such possible base code needs quite bit changes to have support for such? "added API to extend the create object toolbars by adding custom object groups, could be used by mod tools to add some special objects creation" From https://www.beamng.com/threads/world-editor-2-0.61035/page-3#post-1012060
