Released Advanced Island Redux 2.3

Well now, that's much nicer now isn't it. Much cleaner looking without those old grainey sidewalk textures from some 1990s game.

 

Looks really good

 

Update most likely dropping tomorrow or Saturday. To repeat, notable changes include a freshly-laid out city area, new roads and trails, sidewalks, and more trees. The update will also include many bug fixes, higher quality water and mirror reflections, and higher quality highway textures. A huge thank you to @bob.blunderton for helping make this update possible. He was an enormous help over the past few weeks and even took the map into his own hands to mess with. I will specify what additions to the map are his in the update notes.

 

Version 2.0 is currently pending for approval. Keep an eye out for the update, it has some massive changes. I hope you guys enjoy it. I will also be releasing a version of the map as it was in 2014, the 1.0 version of this redux.

 

jdbensch updated Advanced Island Redux with a new update entry:

New Highways, better AI mapping, new city area, and much more!

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

When you can manage to tame this beast, it's a hell of a car to drive!

 

I have run into a game breaking bug,when i load the map and it finishes,at the top left it says 'Instability detected" and pauses the game,no amount of unpausing fixes this (as it just pauses again) and changing vehicles does not work

 

I haven't heard about this bug, so here is what I'm going to recommend. This is most likely not specifically related to my map. I would recommend clearing your game cache if you didn't already, and reinstalling the map. "Instability detected" means that something physics-related was happening. Try those things and let me know. Again, I don't think this is an issue with my map specifically, however I will not rule it out entirely.

 

It would have to be vehicle related. Have you tried spawning in other maps? Does the problem still occur on other maps?. If so it is probably your default car that is somehow causing instability the moment it spawns.

 

That's what I was thinking. Physics instability is vehicle related, so it's probably some weird game glitch causing the vehicle to become unstable upon spawning in.

 

So I may try re-working some of the highway to match the smoothness of @bob.blunderton's highways. If I do I will post some progress and let you guys know. Also working on a few other surprises....

 

it is a great map, but some majot roads have drastic changes in lightness and darkness of the road, and some turning corners seem just to be enlarged textures of regular roads, some road changes are very bumpy, as in direct straight angles that need to be smoothed out. a turn off point to one of the dirt roads has a perfect vertical branch off, which needs to be smoothed out. besides these small things, it is a great map, and i hope one day it becomes what the original dev wanted it to be.

 

I'm not too sure which roads you're specifically talking about, can you take some screenshots and share them? PM me if needed.

 

I might take a break from Pobcot Island to give this map a little more love. I may redo the roads using mesh roads to make them smoother.

 

I like bumpiness of roads, it makes them more real like, often you can't do 200kph because of bumps more than anything else.

What I think causes car to get airborn is how your road transits from uphill to downhill and other way around, crest of hill or bottom of valley is perhaps on short side considering rather steep hills there are, I posted about hill steepness to thread that discusses about negative reviews of BeamNG getting on steam, your map might benefit from research on road steepness in real world, or simply by making transition longer / more gradual.

Mesh roads seem to have bit of habit of puncturing tires I have found out, so while you gain smoothness you might get other issues, make sure to test it so that you can return if it is not working as you wanted.

 

I plan on using the mesh roads only to make the roads smooth, then removing them. It's a method of placing down a mesh road and aligning the terrain/decal roads to them. So there won't be any mesh roads in the finished map, you won't have to worry about punctured tires.

 

Cool, that sounds really handy technique!

 

It is indeed a very technique, it's something that's built into the editor. My friend @bob.blunderton taught me how to efficiently use the method, I'm still learning it, but it makes smooth roads a lot easier. I didn't know about the technique when I updated this map, so I smoothed the roads by hand.

 

This message is for everyone. I was just doing road smoothing today...

Road smoothing can be very tough. It's best done one corner at a time, for the sake of your CPU. Unless you're using it to defrost burgers, or something.
Lay out decal roads where you want them, as a guide, along the landscape, viewing birds-eye can help. Try to follow landscape contour realistically.
Lay out a mesh road in the same alignment, Evenly space out your nodes, center them on the decal. Set your default width at the top of the screen in the box!
Make the default width atleast twice what the road is, if it's a 2lane highway, 20 units wide will do, 25~28 is best if you're sloppy or it's a curved road, or high terrain square size (maybe you'll want 32 width atleast, what you had in I saw was good though, plenty wide, too wide = extra cpu time though).
Bank the road evenly. Setting a high break angle (like 9 or 15) can help you keep your banking even (you'll see it buckle if it's not, you DONT want that).
Now make sure it's vertically where you want it. Don't make a highway more than 8~10% grade (10 foot increase for every 100ft on 1/10 grade, 10%, there)***
If you've maticulously and obsessive-compulsively laid out your nodes super-evenly (for example, using a repeating road texture and counting patterns for length, hint hint HEY IT WORKS), you can use the Z-height of your nodes and make some wonderfully consistent grade going up or down mountains. Remember, Z-height is in METERS. 1m = 32 inches (roughly).
Set your break angle lower once you're ALL DONE banking. Low, Low Low is the way to go. I use 0.08~0.32 depending on my curve length (!!!cpu cycles!!!).
Use the raise and lower to mesh tools as needed to align it vertically while looking @ it from the side... the smaller the break angle, the higher cpu use will be and hence the response of the editor may be choppy. If the ground isn't so hilly, a higher break angle like 0.25 *MAY* suffice but require a touch of smoothing in a few spots (Drive it enough times you'll find them, all of them). Higher break angles coming in and out of curve bankings will create one long CREASE, where-as smaller break angles will create washboarding issues. It's easier to smooth out the washboarding, honestly, but your mileage may vary.
You'll know when you're done when you can see a large majority of your decal road poking through the mesh surface (it should be 98% there).
Add in asphalt on the terrain PAINTER tool (F3 key), for your road, and drag the mesh straight down in the F1 object editor temporarily, and give it a whirl.
Maybe you'll love it, maybe you'll just end up upside-down... sometimes it's very frustrating, sometimes it's super-easy... it depends. Just keep trying.
Eventually, you'll get the hang of this and make great maps. I am basically rebuilding my entire Nevada Interstate map's highway. Sure makes it a lot more fun now I will say that and this is why I so encourage you to do the same! No more boring flat spots. No more flying off the corners because they're flat.
Now with MOAR sloped walls so when you mess up you crash UP them, haha. *SMASHEY SMASHEY SMASH!* Now with MOAR upside-down '88 Pessimas!

Don't expect perfection the first time. You won't see all the bumps unless you're viewing it from the car or a similar viewpoint.
Use a sports car with a stiff suspension to test. Don't use the Legranny Bucket. Use something that SHOWS where bumps are, not soaks them up, to test best.

*** IRL I don't believe NEW highway standards allow more than 6%, but grades with 7~8% are grandfathered in from the original 1950s Eisenhower days.
Game coordinates are measured in meters, IIRC. Best to test that theory but I am pretty sure it's right from experience.

I use NOMI Pessimas to test as of late, work well, have all wheel steering, if I can take that corner in my map with a keyboard for controls, it's good enough

EDIT: If you have lots of banked corners and it's got to be smoothed nicely, like a highway, or a race track, set WIDTH DIVISIONS to like 10 or so and make sure you keep break-angle down to like 0.02 or something low like that. The smaller break angles will make it smoother at the cost of more rendering and more FPS drops while smoothing in the CPU-use department, it won't affect the FPS of your final map product, though. Give it a shot and work with what works with your CPU situation... e.g. guys with AMD FX or older Core2 chips would have more issue than someone on a late model i5/i7. The width-division setting will help keep it from buckling, though you should still touch it up with a smoother after previewing with the transparent texture, before removing the MESH road. I have a transparent_AI_Guide texture in ALL my maps in the art/roads subdirectory of my maps, for this purpose (And it's named purpose of making 100% invisible AI paths through complicated intersections as to not confuse it).
Always check for road buckling (heaved slabs, or similar, dips where they shouldn't be), at the beginning and end of banked corners, this is where they form the most. What's barely visible from 50~150ft up (50m) from the ground and a few hundred feet away, can be a car-launching jump in the road on the ground!

 

I put this link here for future searches.
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/slope-degrees-gradient-grade-d_1562.html

That 10 degrees @bob.blunderton mentions comes at less than 6 degrees (5.74), which does not even look like a hill in game, when limited to 2km x 2km area it will be difficult to get some height gain with realistic hill grades, so one has to make decisions, players preferring heavier vehicles will thank from realistic grades of course, but I think when map maker has information, it is his free choice where to proceed from there.

My math is not so great, but I get to use this on many situations:
http://www.1728.org/angsize.htm

I don't know if there is or should be centralized tip location, but I do know many don't know these kinds of things and I'm quite sure such information is something lot of map makers really would like to have.