WIP Beta released A new *CITY* map - LOS INJURUS 2023-12-20

I understand that mindset. In my case, it often prevents me from finishing projects, but work projects have taught me when to say good enough and put it out there. At work, anyway.

Thank you for those tips on using the MRK! I'm sure I'll have questions, but you've just given a pretty detailed tutorial. To this point I've been using a combination of flatten-smooth, flatten smooth, (repeat a hundred times) and raise/lower to mesh roads. Using the MRK should streamline that process quite a bit.

Hey, forum admins: We need another Like button that's more of a "Wow I love this!" button.

As someone who has worn glasses for 40 years, I feel that pain. Especially these days, with my close vision going. I can think of so many securement options better than tiny screws: Twist-locks, sockets, C-clamps, duct tape...

Coincidentally, I was just talking to my son about this last night. He's got a solid grounding in code, but he's just getting started on serious modeling. He was describing to me last night how he was figuring out how to attach textures to each face of a model, so I told him why efficient UV mapping was important to learn. Didn't take much convincing. He started his programming hobby by creating complex programs (including games) for his graphing calculator, so code efficiency has always been a priority. I'll get him into BeanmNG modeling soon enough!

 

How many miles of road does this map have?

 

According to the loading screen, it's over 600, but that may not account for dual highways or certain mesh objects.

Short answer: lots. Real answer: Bob only knows...

 

Over 450 miles

 

Something else lol
The toxic cesspool that wont be named

 

A project such as those time-sensitive ones we do for work, just needs to be 'good enough' to pass all critical requirements and keep your boss-man (and you) from catching hell about it.
Projects we do for ourselves, it is entirely up to the person doing it, what is good enough or not. You're the boss and it's your vision, do with it what you want. No one but you is required to love/hate it.

First, figure out where you want to put your road - this should almost always be decided by the terrain. Look at the terrain and see if it's conducive to taking a decal road over a mesh-based assortment of MRK units / objects, this is based on time-constraints and where it is in the map in relation to your urban areas. Sidewalks are common in urban centers BY MANDATE but not out in the middle of no-where. Road grade is determined by the type of road, who's paying for it (to get federal 9-on-10 money for interstates, it must conform cohesively to the national DOT standards which you can find on the internet with ease), and what and who's going to be using it.
Lay out a mesh road. Get it banked immediately after setting break angle and width subdivisions - keep in mind banking a road can and will change the gradient of slopes at the beginning and end of a turn. Raise and lower your terrain to closely conform to the edges (cliffs are an exception), then go ahead and raise/lower/carve TO MESH your terrain. SMOOTH your terrain nicely as-needed, and then dress up the edges, lowering the force amount of the brush as you get closer to your road. At what point you wish to lay down a decal road to mark where the road will go is entirely up to you. It can sometimes be handy to see where the road will be, after-all.
You can set the top of your mesh road graphic to be invisible (I have one of these textures in all of my maps, WC-USA has one too), to better see underneath it. You can then using the f1 object editor set the coordinates of the mesh road to be 100 units lower on the z-height so that you can check your work. Don't forget to delete the mesh road when you're all done working in that area and don't believe that you're going to be having a chance to mess up the road grade accidentally / easily (for this reason some still exist in my map). While the MRK is designed logically and for ease-of-use, there are points at which it can take comically long to lay a lot of road out - though this is the price for detail and versatility found in this kit. Feel free to suggest pieces not yet found in the kit, but be sure to include intended uses, so I can see it will be useful or find ways to improve upon the design without ruining use.
If making a large, long road many lanes wide, that doesn't curve a whole lot, feel free to include a cross-slope in your road by either using two adjoining mesh roads each sloped a bit towards the curb width-wise, or use one to cut the initial curb-to-curb grade and then raise terrain using a square brush (almost the width of the road) of appropriate width to bring up the center of the road as-needed, using a smaller and smaller brush as you get towards the last bit in the center. How much you wish to cross-slope a road is mostly on you, however larger roads on flatter land will require more cross-slope than those on a hill which require very little.

My night vision is *GONE*. I can see in a dark bedroom, or basement have you provided I'm in the dark for several minutes - but I can't see for jack driving at night without using high-beams. I swerve like a drunk when using normal beams at night even on a straight road if it's anything but my Corolla I'm driving. If it's raining AND night, forget it, I should stay home. I can't drive over 30~35 mph on a clear night, or over 50~55 on a highway clear night.
Want to know the sad part about that? I have 20/10 and 20/15 vision otherwise, my pupils just contract quickly but expand very very lethargically so I don't end up seeing well at night.

Provided he's taught how to connect all the UV faces one could ever think was possible for best performance, he should be OK. Remember, most game engines have a feature (even this one!) that will render duplicate faces without incurring additional draw calls. For this game, I'd like to say that the scene at any point should have no more than 4000 draw calls when running on DX 11 mode. Also, keep in mind, that additional components of the texture may or may not incur additional draw calls (normal maps/bump-mapping, specular and reflective mapping, glow-maps/emittance and so-forth). It depends on the renderer that you are using to render the scene if these additional layers require more draw calls or not (DX generally does, but Vulkan might not or in our case only requires 2 draw calls for almost any regular texture). The GPU can compute and render THOUSANDS of surfaces for every single draw call the CPU can send it in the same amount of time. However, the CPU takes so long to throw a draw call out by comparison, that having a few thousand of these can make reaching 60~100fps on any scene almost impossible. This is why often in some games (Fallout 4, MS Flight Sim 2020 in DX11) neither the CPU or GPU is at 100%, but one core certainly is always pegged at 100% while the rest of the CPU cores loaf around by comparison. That is a draw call bottleneck and something any modeler or 3d artist (what I do with this project would be considered a 3d artist) should know before-hand well before any geometry or meshes are placed in a level.
Now, with the new VULKAN renderer (and DX 12) you can use multiple rendering cores on the CPU (not just one!) to feed the GPU. This is important as more and more games use open worlds with increasing detail and immersion. For any 3D artist, these multicore-rendering pipelines are a GOD SEND. They free us from one of the few limiting factors that govern the worlds we can dream up (does he have 'the mind's eye'?) and produce.
The only other real enemies of the 3d artist are limits to VRAM in any scene (in this game engine it happens to be map-wide, which is why my map slows down sometimes by the airport when VRAM is exceeded), and much less-so but still pertinent is space-on-disk and download-size. Oh, and on youtube, Joe Scott did a good piece on THE MIND'S EYE, you'll have to look that up. This is something that's almost a prerequisite to designing thoroughly believable game environments (if you're going sci-fi, obviously this is slightly less important). I can walk virtually through most all of my memories, and they're vivid down to the pattern and size of floor tiles, or the labeling of a can of food. Just don't ask me to write out stuff and not end up with really long run-on sentences or mangling grammar in general.
He should look up DRAW CALLS and what are they, on youtube. Then look up the importance of sewing geometry to reduce these. Then read up on different texture formats and their pro's and con's, such as DX1 dds format causing the pink-ish hue on the townhouses when viewed from a half-mile or more away, or DX1 having 1-bit alpha and a black outline around transparent sections (Nevada Interstate has this issue, I never sought to fix it).

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 miles (give or take a few, but I can almost promise it's over 50!) of limited-access interstate highway, this does not count each side separately on highways.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 miles of surface streets and country thoroughfares. It could be more than this, but I'm essentially adding 30 miles for the additional city roads. It could only be 90 miles of surface roads, and you can't always get easily to all of them (there's some very old routes on one edge of the map which are only accessible via a very obscure dirt trail, but I've left them there for now for explorers to discover). I haven't checked lately what the true mileage is, but I will one day be able to give a more accurate ball-park of how many miles of road there are. Just now is not the time.
The reading of road mileage length may include markings (which I believe are 1m or less width roads which can include sidewalks in-front of homes too and does include edging for some roads), may include edging depending on width, may include wear-layers such as cracking, tar, and general skidding/filth, definitely include AI routes which are separate from most roads in that I may wish to have the AI route different than what the asphalt would normally dictate, and of-course the asphalt itself. So 1km of VISIBLE road may be 3 to 6km of actual road total on the load screen. The only roads with a general 1:1 or 1:2 total are the old ones, or the new mesh-built (MRK objects) city sections which just use invisible AI routes to get traffic where it needs to be. Grade-separated roads or those with a median or center turn lane (stroads), also use invididual AI for opposing directions and also some sections of roads have more than one AI route PER SIDE due to either lane configuration or other issues/features nearby.
The only way to really figure out total road length is to drive them all and keep an odometer out. There's one in the apps, I think it may be called TRIP METER, if I recall correctly.
Before the city was built, I believe it was 44 or 45 miles of freeway and 70~72 miles of surface road. Considering the city has eaten a few and the highway has been expanded (as has the terrain), this number is no-where even remotely close to accurate these days. I would say it's close to 150 miles or so, total. That doesn't include runway/taxi-way areas or parking lots/private driveways.

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I have procured CC-0 models for a junkyard, so maybe one of those will appear in the near future.
I have finally almost finished (95%) that stupid building I've been working on for 10 days now. Thankfully, when it's done, I will be able to re-use sections of it (not just re-skin it with different textures) to speed-make other buildings.
I have a backlog of NO LESS THAN 50 mid-rise to high-rise buildings, so it's going to be a while. This doesn't include another 50 buildings of other styles, but does include a few contributor buildings.
Not all buildings require this much work. However, if anyone is quite good at modeling especially UV/texturing, and wants to take a stab at improving UV's on a model, I can send the model over without issue if you wish to work on it. I don't have enough budget to pay anyone; but you would have my extreme gratitude, save a little of my sanity, help this project along and become a life-time contributor too.
Models can be sent over generally in FBX format, OBJ format, or DAE format. Textures won't be included unless absolutely necessary or I may just include CC-0 textures to aid with texturing where needed.
I will be expanding cliff-rock variety in the map with a 15$ purchase on more quality cliff-rocks in a week or two. I am getting it for 50¢ on the dollar so it's a good deal and quality-made.
I DO NOT know when the next beta will come out, though I will try to push the next beta out within the next two weeks. I haven't gotten as much done on the map itself due to 'texture fahldeerahl' with the new version of the rendering engine for 0.23 and working on models combined with my absolute hot mess of a schedule lately, trying to get things done before winter so that my house doesn't fall in on itself.
I have been trying to learn substance designer (which I've owned for almost two years now!!!), also exploring in other software about better methods of UV / texturing to hopefully find 'a better way' to do it, as it SUCKS but MUST be done if we want to measure frames per second VS frames per hour.
I listen to the community, so always feel free to give your thoughts, advice, recommendation or just plain moan about something.

Life's better when we can all moan (about something) in unison together, and maybe get something done about it, too.​

I have download a literal dumpster full of CC0 and CC-SA license (creative commons, creative commons share-alike with credit, respectively) models, textures, and more, and must begin going through them which I have been doing in my time here. I can spend hours just going through models to find a few that might come in handy. I then have to manage a list of credits which is not fun. However, I only worry about credits when they're going to be a part of the final finished version of the map.
Did I mention juggling licenses absolutely sucks as to what you can and can not do with things, not just who made it, and what you can or cannot allow to be re-used individually??? Thankfully I'm fairly versed in USA legal stuff, as I've always paid attention to it and have a bunch of law books, too. If I wasn't my own legal department, I'd have had to hire someone already for it. Know your licenses, folks, it will save you a lot of pain later. Plus, I know for a fact that the BeamNG team wouldn't appreciate me earning them DMCA violations or getting them sued, so yeah. I can and do dump hours into this sector every week, but it is anything but time wasted.

So entirely, DO keep me posted if anyone has comments, complaints, suggestions, or anything such.

So three things here to take away:
*Want to help with UV'ing or texturing (mostly just reducing draw calls through sewing UV's and removing duplicate vertices, fixing author screw-ups etc)? Let me know, I need all the help I can get and is the main thing holding me back right now from releasing more betas at a faster rate. I can't pay cash BUT I will throw you on the contributor beta list for the remainder of the project, where you get betas monthly (or as common as they come out).
*Know of a way to import MAX files and convert them over to FBX or .blend so that I can work with them? That'd give me access to more CC-0 buildings as I don't have 3DS MAX here.
*Know of a great script to help with UV'ing (mostly buildings), in any program such as Houdini Indie, Blender, or Maya LT ? Let me know! I use Maya the most but Houdini is installed and I'm currently picking up a little about blender. I haven't much gotten into Houdini but for indie devs or home users, I believe it is free.

That is all, if you can help great great great, if not, thank-you for coming along for the ride and reading this, and keep the great ideas coming.
I will for the forsee-able future have my nose buried in the modeler more than the editor; but I'll be here, when I'm not helping my rather-needy immediate family out (which I am 1000% not supposed to physically be doing, ouch ouch ouch, sometimes being the local wise person or so it seems or the mr. fixit, can really absolutely suck; that said you shall never ever be bored nor want for things to do).

 

I am going to be at-least two weeks on the beta yet, I don't have enough ready to go into the map yet (several large things coming soon though!) to even make it worth releasing anything. However, there's a hard cut-off at just past mid-month (two weeks from today!) just in-case things get jammed up / held up, so it'll be out by the 21st.
Found a boat-load of CC-0, CC-SA, and CC-SA3 stuff I can include in the map (I tend to be careful, so that I could release commercially if needed in the future - though it'd only go commercial IF all the Patreon supporters and contributors could have free copies, just for the record as that'd required to be fair). This includes eroded cliffs/shoreline such as those in California where it sometimes takes down houses with it.
Just in the last two days I've removed WELL OVER 12,000 draw calls from *ONE* building (it was 15,000+, 3x the max scene budget w/a vehicle), it's ALMOST done.
Then when I'm done with this stupid building-from-hell, I have to tend to OVER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY notifications...
What caused the backups? I lost FOUR days last week (well 3.5) due to having to help a family member clean out not one not two but THREE storage units and put a serious hurting on my back and almost got (temporarily!) paralyzed again, and these models I recently bought are awesome but REALLY took 50x longer (not overstating that either) to do the UV's (textures, draw call reduction) than had planned. Since there's only ONE of me, yeah it stacks right up!
Once I am done with this model, I might bump other models in-front of the other ones in this set due to the time required. Hopefully I can make up for some lost time - besides, I think I started working on this model on the 20th of last month and am getting SICK OF IT.
This building is known as the KVNT-TV building. This is what it's name will be (KVNT_TV.DAE) when it's in the map. See all those BLUE lines VS the decreasing amounts of white lines? Blue ones = good, white ones are bad (unless around the edges of where textures change or the edge of geometry itself), so this only comes into play where geometry is divided up (sometimes needlessly, in which case the geometry gets optimized some). Only folks with absolute entry-level video hardware have a triangle limitation (GPU's such as Ryzen igpu older than 4th gen Ryzen chips, Radeons back as far as the 440, 240 or less, and nvidia GPU as old as GT 730 / GT 740 and older - not including GT 745/750/750Ti as those cores are newer, intel iGPU models on anything though IRIS is usually a little better off, etc). The triangle limit that was so prevalent back in the GTA San Andreas days has came and went, it's now a draw-call limitation as I religiously banter on about in seemingly EVERY post (aren't we sick of this yet?), and a video memory limit; but this is life and most always be fore-front on your mind when modeling and mapping. Otherwise you end up like Roane County's more populated / developed & detailed areas and things SLOW DOWN sometimes as low as 20fps on some systems (on Roane County - not here). We don't need a repeat, nor will we get one!
To that end I've removed some geometry, and also will be continuing to do UV's for today and tomorrow on this building - after that I will move on to the next building(s) in line that are smaller / easier, and also possibly make some dirivitives of this building in the very near future (once I am satisfied with performance and looks and have worked out all the bugs like missing sections, poorly aligned joints when obvious, or performance issues I couldn't notice in the modeler). I've already had to break the city buildings model up into TWENTY FOUR parts just so auto-saves didn't fill an entire 2tb drive in 4 whole days and so the machine here could run it (reality check for Bob: current tech computing does have it's limits), so yeah, it's taking it's sweet time. A computer can only computer so much stuff in X amount of time, there's no getting around that. Hopefully by this time next year though I will find a way to butter up the developers and no longer have to worry about VRAM limitations in-game. Ever notice your modeling software will absolutely chug with half-a-million triangles (if you model any who), but a game can have TEN million said triangles and run fine? It's usually our arch enemy, the draw call demons, making hay of your performance by choking the CPU core that feeds the rendering engine.
I've reserved myself to realizing that absolutely positively NO ONE will take the time to work with UV's like I do - maybe Rockstar's crew did with GTA series, but not in the world of commercial modeling. To that end I will eventually be selling models (I have to consult my lawyer who's currently out of town, first and foremost!), and this should add a little money to the project fun (as most will directly go back into it). The closest things I have seen to awesome UV's are some of the modelers here who work on THIS game engine's maps.
I just keep telling myself the end result will be worth it - even if the project seems like it's not even treading water - but I can almost promise it will be awesome. I don't have a choice; failure is NOT an option. I don't quit - not a quitter - just know it's mostly behind the scenes stuffs here, but I've include a snapshot or two of the building's current state in the modeler (the wire frame of the building + texturing is shown in most shots, know it will look MUCH better in game).

Let me know if anyone has some good ideas, suggestions, etc, or just plain gets too IMPATIENT (I get it, I totally do!).
--The Bob

*Try not to jump ship from the Patreon fund, as I've gotten a reaming from over 300$ in the last 30 days from doctor bills, plus my prescriptions cost another 100~150$ a month, so this project is living solely by financial means of the folks who love it. That said those doctors are the only thing between me working on this project, and being alternatively bed-ridden for the most part. Now that it's colder outside (the high today was 45F, though next week it should get to mid-sixties for a high, yay), things that I need to do before having time to work on the project are much, much less. I still will always have a revolving pile of tasks I must accomplish, but thankfully this means I have LOTS more time to work on this as of the last week / two weeks or so. However, most things must be done right and cannot be skimped upon, so it does take time. I will speed a number of buildings through the UV and optimization phase though for the next few months to catch up where I got behind in August, this shouldn't impact performance in an obvious way and will be only temporary until I go back and make a second pass.
For the record, this building lot has over 40,000 individual textured triangles. 1st shot showing the mess of UV's that remains. That's roughly 5% of them at most. I got rid of about half of them (many dual-layered textures I can do in-game such as dirt-layer-over-concrete stuffs or shine-on-glass or common emittance), and I have literally joined up most surfaces already where possible. The detailing (horizontal lines on the building with different texture) and the stuff that surrounds the windows/doors/openings remains.
Lastly, added a picture to show some detailing. The awning over the entrance was a real PAIN to do UV's on!

 

So, finally finishing up the building, the building from hell. It's no less than 98~99% complete and just needs a double-checking and a few window borders fixed up. Collision will be fairly accurate but decidedly basic by design to keep things fast on the physics side, as are most things. I will try not to make the UV's too ugly / avoid pop-in.
Seriously, should be done tonight or just after church tomorrow. Then I'll get a bunch more models going that I can blast through the pipeline (by comparison, they're not 40,000~50,000 UV's / textured triangles), and hopefully most of those I can let the machine do most of the UV's in-stead of making this focus piece (gets used in missions, spawn point nearby eventually) all of which I pretty much had to do by hand. It'll be about two weeks from now that I'll be uploading, have to have new stuff IN the actual map to have something to show. Otherwise it's just a mental picture of (pick any area!) what looks like post-World-War-3 scenery.
It DID go from around 15,000~20,000 draw calls to a few hundred. I will be getting that down to <50 and that should be good to go (that's plenty for a building that takes up to ¼ or ½ of a city block. This saves your FPS. Not all buildings can be so complicated however, as that'll quickly eat up VRAM budgets for the map (that's ALREADY why some 8gb cards can't run this map in every place at 100% smoothness sometimes, needs some optimization passes yet to say the least).
That said it's high time I get to learn Blender (open-source and free) and Houdini (free for indie users), as they're seemingly more stable for what I do (Blender is not perfect, and there isn't much support except from other users and sometimes admins on a forum, unlike Maya software AND support which I pay for monthly). I've been sticking with Maya up until now as there are a lot of tools out there for it, and there's really quick / good support from the moderators. They also can tolerate me when this thing makes steam come out my ears as a paying customer, so there's that too.

The last couple of days, Maya has been acting like this:
Complete crash-out, sometimes without an exit save / crash save. Auto-saves are every 5 minutes. 100mb+ models will VERY quickly fill a drive up and saving to an HDD is completely out of the question as the app freezes up for a few seconds on auto-save if there's more than one building to the model.
Draw some faces or split some faces and other faces not connected to the work-area disappear.
Connecting / merging vertices can cause strange things to happen (often models do not come with neighboring or overlapping vertices merged, this is very bad and can make texture sewing (UV's) impossible, raising draw calls and absolutely bludgeoning performance), such as faces turning black (normals issue), disappearing, or crashes out-right.
Odd things in the UV selection screen where clicking on a model UV face puts the 'handle' in the wrong spot, or somewhere that the selection is NOT.
Sometimes things do not want to select, though this is less of a crash or a glitch and more of poorly implemented design.

It will take more than the above issues, to stop this man or this project - A LOT more than that. Thankfully I don't give up easy.
So, soon time to dig up some more BRICK BOXES to put in the map, since we seem to love those here. They're neck and neck with bridges. /s ...
Those boring old Brick Boxes definitely save on the VRAM though, and that's why they are what they are. As above, the mission hubs will be more detailed as-needed.
The project resources (source material, paid for and the free stuff) directory is around 200gb. There may be a few GB of dupes, up to 20% of it due to extracting things and not deleting the zip sometimes, but this does NOT include stuff that comes with the base-game. Only a small percentage of this stuff will actually make the cut - more models than provided textures will make it, due to redundancies etc, but there's so much to do.

Guess it's just Maya's time of the month. Ugh. Is this what marriage is like?
Feel free to keep sending in pictures of roads or buildings or anything else you would like to see represented in the city! It's always nice to have some inspiration.

So yes, looking like around (or just shy of!) two weeks from now, I'd like to put out a release. The following release will be out a week or so prior to Christmas.
There will be a public update/release prior to Christmas, I do not know right now which one it will be (November or December), it depends how crazy my schedule gets, or if I get hung up on something (game updates, software support required, or hardware failure and so-forth). I try to stick to a schedule, but not at the cost of my sanity.

 

BEHOLDER and KEO are both free-to-keep right now on Steam.
Beholder is a simulation of renting to tenants who you spy on constantly like perverted private investigators, and KEO is a multiplayer vehicular combat game.
Do check them out (you'll have to search for them).

Was putting the last finishing touches on that building - the complicated one I've been working on FOR EVER - Maya kept crashing. Despite this, I've manage to reduce 8000 triangles to EIGHT triangles. This is good for draw calls, as that translated previously to some 3000~3500 draw calls JUST in those pieces (that's pretty much the entire scene budget less the vehicle), now down to about 4 draw calls. Values given per-pass (e.g. full-scene-reflective mapping, normal-mapping, emittance, those are extra no matter what scene you're doing)
Hooray. I can't wait to be done with this and actually do something else!
Regardless, I've got it looking fairly good, and 'decently' within render budget now.

 

So yeah, this. I won't say too much on it. But it's featured here in this video and it will be featured in Los Injurus in around two weeks...



I have over 450 tabs open in Firefox at the moment. It's going to take an hour just to go through everything. My data allowance was toasted 5 days after the monthly refresh, so yeah, been acquiring lots and lots of data / resources / purchasing stuff for the map. Lots of behind the scenes stuff besides that stupid building that doesn't seem to want to be finished (and likes to make faces disappear randomly, that's always lovely, if that stupid building has a missing trim piece or small section around a window missing, that's why).
So entirely, it's coming to Beamng and ONLY IN LOS INJURUS. The map that's made possible by YOU!
Much love and God Bless, many thanks for the support too. It will take a week to simplify this model for use in-game (or a bit less).
Oh, and I finished painting at the church today, just beating the rain coming in at noon tomorrow. Our pastor and Lay-lady will be so pleased as the building is 171 years old (from 1850, it's a small village church) and our building needs a little love - and I don't mind one bit leaving the house to do it provided I'm not in a purgatory of pain.

This menacing bridge will be my Christmas present to the BeamNG community, and it looks like it'll be out in the wild in public form within the next month. Supporters should get this just past mid-month (11 days or so, one week from the end of this weekend), the public version I'd like to put out around the beginning of December (though this can change by a few days or a week if the game updates, and it's been a while since it has updated, the delay is only for quality control so it's not broken on release).

 

I've used the 11foot8 site in safety meetings with the challenge of having people think about what else the city could possibly do to reduce collisions.They have signs, lights that turn red if a vehicle is too tall and display an instruction to turn... but they probably still have people asking "Why doesn't the city do something about that bridge?!"

I suppose they could bubble wrap the thing. Or have severe tire damage spikes pop up before the intersection. Or hire "harbour pilots" to sit beside every truck driver (or at least everyone who rents a truck) in the city.

It will be interesting to see this implemented in Los Injurus. I predict modders creating props to creatively deflect trucks from the bridge. Not to reduce vehicle damage, of course...

 

The bridge cannot be raised anymore due to grade requirements for trains in the city, which go slow and have a few freight stops nearby. For commuter trains / subways alike, the requirements are much less stringent when it comes to track grade.
The road cannot be lowered, due to there being a large sewer main under the road, which is around 100 or so years old, the grade of which cannot go any lower or it'll cease working / lack the 2% minimum pipe grade. When water slows, it drops the silt and debris that are in it, causing clogs & backups of whatever is flowing within it.
2% grade minimum (two feet drop per 100 feet distance, basically) is not only just for your home sanitary sewer / drain pipes, it's for storm-water & city sewerage too (these are two different things for those that don't know - storm water is what you think it is and connects the inlets on the road-side to streams or drainage areas/water-shed, sanitary sewer is what the toilets, sinks, and most basement drains are connected to e.g. poop!).
So entirely, that bridge is what it is, and cannot really be changes unless the trains or the road are removed. There's a number of low bridges around that area, and a number of them where I was from originally in the North-East USA area.
I thought I had posted this before, but it's not coming up on my end, so I sent it again. I may have closed the browser out before I posted it, as I currently have 589 tabs open (yeap) and sometimes after a few days to a week it can get slow and use over 20gb of memory. So sorry if it fixes later and this looks like a double-post. The rest is not, however.

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The KVNT building is done. I mean it, actually done. I have to script the textures in (ones for the windows mostly, the rest is already in-game data). I am so happy to be done with that miserably thing. It just didn't want to be done, and when I thought it was done, the modeling software would change my texture assignment for random surfaces or eat them altogether. I don't want to go through that again, and I possibly could have made this building better from the get-go without using a purchased model, but hindsight is always 20-20. It's a very large building, consisting of a hotel, offices, and banquet/conference (not convention) space. Some retail shops and a bank are also featured.
This building may gain a subway or other rapid transit area in the future, it depends where it ends up going in the city. There may be similar re-skinned buildings like it in the future, but I'm going to have to see how good the draw call performance is first as I'd rather not wreck things.
Roof objects were not added as stated earlier; I have a pre-made commercial kit that has all that stuff ready to go, it just has to be added into the game data.
The windows have been changed to something more American, and the signs are updated with local ones. It now has front doors, too! I will have to add a back door at a later date, when I know where this will be and what will be around it. It does not have collision or LOD models yet, but it'll get that quite soon as that'll take less than 2 hours.
This building was not accelerated through the UV/texturing/optimization process. Due to the way it is put together it required 10,000's of clicks and over 40 hours of UV work (or there-about close to that). Miserably [censored] building [BLEEP] texturing [word omitted]... *grovels with Muttley-muttering*

The Bob really despises UV'ing / texturing things, especially things made by others. However, due to The Bob enjoying Los Injurus City as much as most of you do, he keeps going even if it means going half bonkers in the process and even talking about himself in the 3rd person in such a strange way. I should almost never EVER have to re-texture commercially purchased models if they are done PROPERLY, but no one seems to do UV's like I do, nor are they able to get the performance out of them that I can due to it.
Eventually you may see Los Injurus models made by The Bob in other games, as they'll sooner or later make it onto modeling sites for a small fee (some will be free, of-course). That will help fund the project a little better and keep me afloat doing what I'm doing. Also, you may sometimes see a similar or identical model in this city that may also be in another game. To that end it is likely a free model or a model that was purchased for a reasonable price, that just happened to be good enough to be picked by other commercial game developers and used. I see a lot of models during the course of any week that I browse modeling repositories on the net, which have been used in one or more other games, so this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. I just wish people would put a lot more time & love into getting the textures correctly optimized.
Do YOU love to create things? Learn how to 3D model, it's awesome! You can then make almost anything your heart desires, without restrictions!

I will have a lot of time over the next 10~11 days before release to work on the map, so expect more updates coming up before that date.

 

I figured there must be a uility line under that bridge preventing further grade separation. Modifying that would require miles of large-bore directional drilling... which would be more expensive than hiring someone to ride shotgun on every truck in the area.

They could close off the underpass entirely, but I imagine that would cause huge backups throughout the city. I remember a dozen years ago in New Westminster/Surrey BC, a section of the Pattullo Bridge burned (an original 1937 section that still had wood structure!). Traffic throughout the Metro Vancouver region was a nightmare for a couple of weeks (I mean, even more than usual).

Luckily, the 6-10 weeks required to construct a new bridge segment was cut short because there was a commuter train project in progress at the time, and someone determined that one of the prefab guideway sections would fit the gap almost perfectly. The train project was delayed while they replaced that segment (which didn't impact traffic because it wasn't active yet), and a quarter of a million people experienced 30-45 minute delays for weeks instead of months.

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I think a great solution for 11foot8 Los Injurus would be a ramp that pops up when a truck approaches. Catch big air over the railroad! Or a big roller right in front of the bridge that would reduce the height of the truck box so it can safely pass under.

 

Great work by BC infrastructure crews!!! Losing a bridge is no fun for anyone. Just knowing they got it done early really helped out a lot & shows ability in how they did it that they can handle their obstacle quite masterfully. Color me amazed!
IF someone makes a pop up ramp (or there already is one, don't ask me I haven't downloaded a mod since summer nor even looked at them as I've been crazy busy since August and it just died down this month), you can just use the MAKE HOLE button with a brush size of 1, and make a hole before the bridge where-desired IF NEEDED and then put the ramp there - if it even needs a hole. You can always stick a concrete chunk underneath the hole in the terrain by finding one from the forest brush or object editor, to hold it up if needed.

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Collision on the bridge will be fairly accurate and as good as I can make it within the limits of this game (narrow surfaces don't play well, the faster you go the more likely you will be to screw up collision and the less narrow a surface has to be to screw up).

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LOD and Collision mesh are done for the stupid KVNTV building
The LOD is furthest, then the main model (as there's only one LOD besides the main one), then the collision mesh closest with wire-frame highlighted. I did my best to keep draw calls down on the LOD, it should be less than 10.

Now I can forget about this stupid thing after cleaning up the texture names/stuff.

 

WORDS...

 

Beamng drive in real life!!! (Clickbait thumbnail incoming heh)
Pretty crazy how far we have come. Did you scan this youself?

 

THOUGHTS...

Is there a way to make something like this into a prop in such a way that it's not indestructible? I was just thinkint what would happen if you drove the BELAZ mining truck into an underheight bridge--not that it would fit horizontally in to that space, but having one or two destructible prop pieces of infrastucture might be interesting.

 

These buildings look really cool. Are the window reflections part of the texture or using a custom city block cubemap?
And by scripted textures. I assume you're adding an emission map to them during the night time? That would be amazing since it would transfer into the dynamic reflection map of the vehicles and create a nice city night vibe. Great job so far.

 

Uh oh, I would not like to have to clean up and uv that tris bomb. I assume you are taking single structures and tracing them over instead?
Isn't that bride in the North-East? So you would need to make it fitting to the West Coast anyway

Is this the bridge before or after it got raised?

 

i think the Ben Tower asset from SimCity 4 would look amazing on this map