I'll be very happy to give you detailed instructions on my porting process. The base is DragonFF which made this possible. The first step will be to make it support Vice City, which won't be that difficult - I'll be able to do that, I wrote the map importer so I'm familiar with what to do and where. Then it's about importing every section of the map, and doing very specific procedures to it in Blender. I haven't had any issues with the collisions. I'm just using the visual model minus foliage and decals (dirt, shadows, road markings..). If you really want, I can make a video tutorial to make it clear what you should do in Blender. It's not hard, but time consuming, which is why I probably won't port any other map. Liberty City took me ~2 months (working only on weekends). Also, the more map segments you make, the better the map will run, but the more time it'll consume. I settled on 36 static models each with it's own LODs.
This is awesome, imo its pretty much perfect. performance is amazing, even the grass and sand works like it should ! BIG THANK YOU for creating this !
Damn thanks. it would be extremely helpful with that addon. Very nice to know theres an addon like this. it wouldve been very helpful back then too lol. but hey, its better late then never. Im not 100% sure about this but i know there was a lot of location related stuff with the map. Cutting up the map into different parts sounds like a good idea for performance. makes me think of a few different games that does that. Ive been reading a bit through the thread with the draw calls issues and all that. Its a lot of reading ill have to do when im back home. Its a lot of things to revisit and work on at once. but seeing that you were able to do this in 2~months on the weekends. im pretty sure i can do this lol. My blender skills are prob not out there but i know how to use the thing It would be greatly appreciated tho. idk how far this will get but if i like how it works i might try s-a in the future if someone doesnt do it before me. Or i could just jump to sa directly Make a thread about it and keep it documented to maybe get help if i get stuck in some places. but with bigger maps brings the issue of the draw calls which ive seen talked about here a few times. Lots of blah blah for now but v-c has been on my mind since i started it. and honestly im still a bit interested in porting it. i gave up on it cuz it wasnt going anywhere by myself.
The raw import is already segmented. Every island was in 4 pieces. Maybe I was too cautious by splitting the islands, tunnels and bridges even further. The main issues I encountered were: Every texture in Renderware GTA games has it's own material, which is bad. All it means for optimization is that you'll need to keep the triangles down as much as possible. Underwater tunnels aren't possible in BeamNG, which was a problem for me, but VC nor SA don't have any of those right? That's about it. There were other issues I encountered which I haven't talked about here. I'll be sure to mention them in any tutorial I end up making. Well... There's a few "next level" Blender concepts that might make it hell for you if you don't know them. Hopefully not though. I think VC would be great. SA seems to me like it would require a team of people and exponentially more time to make. I'll get to work on extending the importer. Then I'll try to make a video tutorial. Once that's done I'll let you know. --- Post updated --- Yep.. I want this to be a straight port. The curbs in gta 3 are like this, and BeamNG behaves like this. Even if I wanted to "fix" the curbs, it would take a really long time, and imo bring very little benefit. I'm personally not interested in doing this, nor do I have time to do this. I invite anyone to make a "better curbs" version of this map and publish it. People can then decide which version is better.
ok, the map is great, looking down from the "love media building" with 3 car i get 50-60 fps with my dangerously overclocked mobile gtx 950, and we all know how renderware game are optimised... But, since i'm a perfectionist a**hole i fuong bugs. 1. near the subway tunnel in shoreside vale, at the bottom of the stairs, my truck sank in the floor (notice the paintjob and the rollbar: i made it 2 hours ago and i'm still giggling from the excellence of my craftsmanship) 2. in the Cochrane dam, in cedar grove the dam is off. i'm sorry but i can't describe why i feel like this, mabye the mateials or the scaling of the pipes. i know that the final cutscene is wierd, when, in one scene maria (if that was a spoiler for you then don't waste any more time and go play this 17 year old game) and claude are on one side of the dam and the next are in the other side and that throws off many people while discussing the Cochrane dam but i've checked in PS2, Xbox and iOS versions of the game and there is still something missing. BOOOONUS (mainly just my rants) 1. no ghost town, not even throught the clunky yet charming verion of the nearly vertical bridge mod. 2. no bathroom interior in Belleville park. other than that MARVELLOUS and BRILLIANT mod
Wow thanks for feedback! Bugs 1. A wild triangle appeared! Fixed in next update! 2. Not sure what you mean. Is there a missing model or something? The models should be 1:1. Textures are slightly different, but only slightly. Rants 1. & 2. Unfortunately intentional optimization. If enough people want ghost town, I might add it. But hopefully you can forgive the interiors. They would have no gameplay purpose and only hinder the performance. Also missing are Donald Love's garden, Joey's garage, Kenji's rooftop and the floor in the construction building where Asuka tortures Miguel.
Thanks a lot man. this is really appreciated. I dont think ill complete the map in 2 months but i sure as hell will pick it up and start working on it again, until i hit another wall... I dont know if this is a good idea but what if i added textures together to make multiple sectors of the map into 1 big texture? it would be a lot of work i know, but its how i made the supra engine textures. i mashed up a ton of textures and uv maps in 1 big texture because i didnt feel like working my way through 50 different textures just for the engine. Honestly, i know enough about blender that im not really scared of much. im open to learning pretty much anything. im slowly starting my life working with blender for multiple different things. this software is such a powerful thing, the more i can learn about it the better it is. so bring it Ive got VC started, SA is just too big to begin with, i dont think id be able to do it by myself anyways... ill have to go dig up old files to find it again. If i remember well the map was split up in multiple parts but i managed to get help from @thomatoes50 and i got the entire map exported together without any problems. next was just adding the materials, collisions and splitting up the map. If there would be a way to automate materials it would be nice because that was another thing that kept giving me issues. im a bit lazy and i dont feel like adding up 20000 materials manually. As for under water tunnels. eh. theres workarounds for that. i think. but as far as i can remember, vc has none. Thanks a lot for the effort you put into this. the map is freaking amazing btw. been loving every bits of it as of right now.
Materials are mostly automated. I'll address everything in my video once I make it. There's a lot of specific little things that I'll have to go through in detail.
ok, i fired up the glorified dvd player (PS2) , the firehazzardbox (OG xbox), the eyepad (ipad), and the iwannaexplodeon3/4box (xbox 360) to check but i can't find what's the thing that's off. it's probably the textures and, consequently, the materials. i found the most resemblances with the og xbox version. what version of the game is this a port from?
Looks pretty good do you think it would be possible to port gta4 map or atleast some part of it? like 1 island? i played gta4 my whole childhood and i would love to see it in beam!
the plyflow and general optimization of the RAGE gtas (IV and V) mekes them much more difficoult to port than the renderware gtas (III, VC, SA, VCS and LCS)
DragonFF imports dff, ipl and ide files. If Rage is using these in theory it's possible. But the formats will be completely different and it would take lots of work.
Well i would have fired up even the gamecube but realized that nintendo decided to use squished kirbys as their media in that generation so sadly no gta. To be sure i cecked even the 2 PC version i have but there is still something that bugs me and i'm going to dive even deeper in this investigation (i'm ounding a bit like ham face cole phelps). something that i'm sure is wonky 1. at the port the roof of this building (the one were you drive the stolen securicar in from joey's mission) is missing is seen from the floor, althought it's fine from the top. mabye this is intended in the original game as the camera is quite limited 2. the "Les Cargo" in the port is missing a part of the cab thingy at the rear of it (i can't do boats, my head is filled with classic cars and obscure nintnedo games) 3. in portland harbor this building has no glass (probably an accidentaly removed material) I spent around 5 hours in this map already (in my timezone it was released yesterday night) and i'm still astonished at how well it runs, great job lowest fps (looking at the closed off chinese market, standing near punk noodles) 47. looking down from LMB: 53 FPS looking at portland's LOD from the construction site in statunton: 55 FPS (All of this with 2 mod vehicles spawned: the olds 98 regency and the satsuma 210)
Taken by @XManic1995. This looks really awesome. Now I really want to add traffic support. Also if the BeamNG minimap supports custom images, we could make the minimap work.
Im not 100% sure about this but i do know that some custom maps has a minimap. Actually, im quite sure about this, This is the automation minimap. Every map has a png for their minimap. so its doable. Also, when you will be implementing the ai roads, do you think you could show the way you made it work? Ive got indianapolis thats also a mesh map and i wanna add ai to it but never managed to get it working properly.
Cool, so minimap should be doable... As for AI roads, I have no clue how to do it, never done it before. So I guess I'll do my best and report my findings. Again thanks a lot for the feedback. I'll fix all of those when I get home. Btw I thought about the interiors and ghost town and I'll add them back just with a really low draw distance, so they don't impact the performance normally.
