WARNING VERY LONG POST AHEAD (I've tried to separate it into paragraphs to help with readability) Not sure if this is the right place, but I was flying around the map edges of Johnson Valley in free cam and noticed some interesting stuff past the southern highway road end. First off, I found there is A LOT of modeled empty terrain past there, and it seems like this space is just being wasted when there could be more stuff on those areas of the map. I'd like to know from anyone with map making experience, or just knowledge of how loading of the maps in this game work, would it be possible to build more stuff closer to a map's real terrain edges without lagging badly? I don't mean a huge megacity or anything, just stuff like a few more roads and an Interstate style highway, truck stop serving as a fueling point, and a few more spread out houses in an otherwise empty map. I wouldn't expect extensions like this to a map like West coast or East coast, but could it be possible to wide open ones like Johnson Valley or industrial site? I have some pitures below ^This is at the southern end of the road on johnson, as you can tell there is TONS of open space beyond it, just look at how tiny the TRACTOR TRAILER I was driving looks compared to the open space. After flying out past the end of the road in a roughly straight line for about 15 minutes(!), I found these interesting markings on the, to my surprise, still modeled ground. They looks to me like the same ground texture used for the off road trails. I didn't expect to still be finding actual ground this far out, I thought the distant mountains were just part of the skybox. You can probably see that the ground still keeps going to, maybe the distant edge or maybe just ground not loaded for who knows how long. To give a sense of just how far away I got, here is what looking back towards the end of the road from that point where the markings start looks like: (yeah, what's in that tiny circle is all I could make out of it, and this picture's zoomed in a good bit) So yeah, now that you have a sense of how much free space lies beyond the current map boundaries, i hope you can see my point. It's not just here on Johnson Valley either, below are some pictures of what's outside the boundaries of industrial site map. These screenshots are over a year old (Aug 2021). Looks like an outline for farm fields or a street grid doesn't it? With this much space existing outside of the current map "edges", I really want to know whether an expansions of these maps, or much more massive new maps would be possible without sacrificing performance, and if it's possible, whether anyone (devs or map modders) would consider it. Thanks for reading. -Blue Bird Gaming --- Post updated --- Edit- just realized this is probably the most I've written since high school lol
The problem is that the main in-bounds heightmap, and out-of-bounds ground are two completely different things, they're usually generated in one program to start with, and they're blended together well, but they're functionally completely different. The ground under the main part of the map is a proper heightmap, capable of having: -modifiable terrain editing (carving hills/valleys, flattening roads, carving ruts & potholes, etc.) -painting terrain textures on it, which both smoothly blends the textures automatically and adds things like grass particles, -placing decalroads and decals, to make both paved and dirt roads look a lot more detailed and realistic, -and probably most importantly, groundmodels, which gives you the grip and "sinking" characteristics of different terrain types (think how it's like to drive on mud or sand). Whereas, the out-of-bounds ground is a solid mesh, like a rock, building, tree, etc. so detail can't be put into it. if you actually drive on the out of bounds ground, you'll notice that the textures are really low-resolution, and the ground is low-poly, meaning peaks and troughs in the ground have occasional sharp edges. Currently, the highest resolution a heightmap can be is 4096x4096, which makes Italy 4x4km of map with 1x1m ground resolution, or gives WCUSA 2x2km of map with 0.5x0.5m resolution. The other thing is that the base terrain size isn't the problem, rather the total number of all the rocks, plants, buildings, etc. spread across the map. even if they made the terrain bigger, they would end up adding too many objects, and it would be super heavy to run. That being said, the highway on Johnson Valley does already extend outside the map, by having a small section of mesh around the road that's specifically made in higher detail. so it's possible other maps in future might have a small amount of extra roads outside the main bounds of the map, but nothing like what you're suggesting.
Thanks for the info. I did notice when flying outside the boundaries that the ground looks less detailed, although I was not aware of the limits on size or objects or anything. By any chance, does anyone know the exact limit on objects before it gets unplayable laggy, like is there a specific hard limit set in the game or is it just dependent entirely on your computers ability? Also, would higher height maps resolution than 4096x4096 for a larger sized map require just developer settings being tweaked, or a rework of the whole game engine? I remember I saw something on the update speculation thread about SSRB not being able to be updated until some feature to make large maps run smoother came out. I have SSRB myself and I notice that the farther I drive, the vehicle starts to vibrate more. Correct me if I’m wrong but is this what the new “feature” that was talked about is supposed to fix? And Does this have anything to do with the size and resolution limit?
the number of objects is mostly arbitrary, (there is an absolute hard limit, but it's at something like twice the number you'd normally put). I don't know what your PC specs are, if they're good enough you might not notice, but if you load up WCUSA, ECUSA, JRI, and Utah, you'll notice that despite all being 2x2km, their FPS levels are all different, with probably WCUSA or JRI being the hardest to run, on the basis of all the buildings/trees. larger heightmaps would require game engine work to make happen, back before Italy was in the game, the largest you could make was 2048x2048, but they added support for 4096x4096, so it's possible they might be able to so some back-end work to make them larger. the problem seen on SSRB is a separate issue, about "floating point accuracy" and it's a fundamental problem in the graphics engine. from what I understand, there are currently 3 positions defined in space to determine an object's position, but there's a small amount of error there, and that gets magnified the further you go from 0,0. what most games with really big maps do is add a 4th or 5th reference point further out, so that the "scale" is better locked in place, but I think if BeamNG were to do that, they'd also have to recalibrate how jbeams are attached to meshes, etc.
Interesting, I wonder how much bigger it could get. Also my pc is barely better than a potato, 2019 dell laptop with an i7 at least, but integrated intel graphics and 16gb RAM, so for this reason I feel like the devs should consider “lite” versions of official maps, just with less trees and vegetation, and maybe for the West Coast lower poly building models.
Zoll has already done an exemplary job of explaining the complexity of this issue in a simple way. However, I do want to clear up one minor misconception: Floating point errors are responsible for the jitter/vibration seen when far from any given level's center, but they're a problem of the graphics engine, not the physics engine. The physics continue to work remarkably well even several thousand kilometers from the level center.
The official BeamNavigator needs to be updated as well, as in some places of the Johnson Valley, the map fails to load the roads
The visible boundry of the map is extended using a filler mesh The actual drivable portion uses a terrain object which in turn uses a heightmap The largest vanilla heightmap is 4096x4096 pixels which ends up at 4096x4096 meters if you use 1 meter per pixel. Some maps have increased this to 1.5 meters to get more map area at the cost of terrain detail. In which case you can get it up to 6144x6144 meters and it's a feasible way to get a bit more space into the map without a cost in performance. You could bump the meters per pixel as high as you're comfortable with. a 2 meter per pixel landing at 8192x8192 meters. But it depends on how detailed features you want in the map. Going beyond 4096x4096 pixels though would be experimental as it has not been done in a vanilla map. Should you want to go larger the most logical route is to make a mesh based map but it comes with the drawbacks of not having tessellation. And also the ground cover system is not supported on meshes.
