I've been banging my head against a wall of instability and crashes for months now, and have it on good authority from one of Beam's most skilled mod map creators that certain previous versions are much more stable for terrain editing. Is there any way to obtain version 0.20? Or possibly 0.19? It's hard to create content when your terrain disappears every time you save.
As a modder you should have the game by Humble Bundle in my opinion. This gives you the opportunity to keep every version onward after you purchased.
Video? I can articulate exactly what happens: I import a heightmap into editor V1 The new terrain appears, including any terrain masks I've associated with it. (At the moment I'm using a pure white square and assigning one terrain type.) I save my level. (Optional) I exit the editor and drive around my new terrain a bit. I exit to main menu. Next time I open the level, my terrain is gone and I go for a swim. The .ter file for the imported heightmap always appears in the /levels folder, never in the /levels/levelName folder. I've been trying to use the original world editor on bob.blunderton's advice, after getting frustrated with V2. (Mainly the dialogs, which always appear 80% out of the main window and often don't respond to mouse clicks). But he told me recently that he doesn't use it with the current version of the game for the reason I've described above. @NOCARGO, I wish I had thought of that, but I bought BeamNG way back in 2014 on Steam before going dormant when I switched my old laptop to Linux.
The old World Editor (V1) is deprecated and unsupported: It has several problems, and it is generally painfully slow to work on due the way it entangles itself with the rest of the engine. That's why we have been working on World Editor V2 since a few years: Being mostly rewritten in LUA, it allows for extremely quick iteration and fixes, as well new features. There has been a ton of work being poured to it in these years, in particular the last one as we have nearly completely migrated to the new one for all our level work. And we are looking for feedback on how to improve this editor as well new feature in the dedicated thread You can expect several fixes to World Editor V2 in the next major update. Note: The Terrain Importing process is still requiring some more work, as we want to fix several problems related to it still (for example the ambiguity between terrain layers and groundmodels). While the basic should be working by the next update, the experience may still be a bit unusual with it at the moment. Step by step it is going to be improved further, feedback is again welcome on it. And a recap/reminder: World Editor V1 is BROKEN and going to be REMOVED from the game in the near future. It is not maintained anymore. You are warmly encouraged to stop using the old editor, and start using World Editor V2 and get used to it and its changes. It does not take much to get used to it, and the jump from one to the other is actually much less scary than it seems. Keep trying to use the old editor is just beating on a dead horse for us and you. We are also actively working on updating the Documentation, which should help further on this. Meanwhile you can find the old (but still 90% relevant) documentation here: World Editor — BeamNG.drive documentation We are working on an updated version of the documentation to reflect the changes that we are doing and will be doing to it.
That's good news. I'm going to head over to the feedback thread and see how I can contribute there. It's not about "scary"; it's about constant crashing that doesn't let me save anything. I've only recently started modding, so I started with V2, but switched to V1 after realizing that bob.blunderton still uses it as his main tool for his incredible Los Injurus map. Nevertheless, I'm going to switch with the next update, and see what useful feedback I can provide.
Having only scratched the surface of the structure in this game, this is just a stab in the dark, but I'm guessing it has do to with the fact that level modifications have to be saved not only in the level folder, but in a number of other paths that are imperfectly managed.
