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

I'm here, in just a bit of a lull myself - but with the warming weather I wouldn't worry too much. It's been warm enough to have your shirt off (for the males anyways) the last few days UNFORTUNATELY that also brings "TARNADERS"!
Just finished the FIRST tornado warning of the day here!
If y'all are in the south watch this guy. I don't contribute because of being on a fixed income but I DO spread the word, and about half the people I talk to watch this guy.
95,000 people on the stream now. If you're in the SE (current) or south central US tune in (for other times).
Entirely, not fun. However, it is what it is; and while I can control my sails, I can't control the sea. Roane County folks are getting it now.
Got another one about to show up on the door step. Someone in the county said 'they spin up right quick and move 60mph here - and we had 2 tonight!'.
Luckily none showed up for the supposed drive-up service the tornadoes think I have here at the window tonight. I don't need that for a 2nd time in a year.
Of course at this rate, with as my as my sciatic nerve has me nearly paralyzed today (very nearly completely, couldn't even sit up anymore around 1200~1400 hours). I had to draw the line when a tear ran down my cheek and I don't shed tears over much of nothing.
Just know if something DOES happen, that if it does take me from this mortal plain, it will hopefully take me to a better place with much less pain.
If this keeps up it's going to feel like living the Monty Python Spam skit at the diner, because that's the kind of stuff you make when you have but 15~20 minutes in-between crazy storm bursts.
This house is pretty solid though, so I do have a chance if it's an EF1 or EF0.

First time I saw my local forecast software print the crawl message with the BEEP BEEP BEEP that EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED and *then* the red screen popped up full-screen (think early 90's Weather Channel local forecast, that's 100% it). Sheesh. That'll stop you in your tracks. This software pulls from what your weather station and cable stations pull weather alerts and data from. I've seen the full-screen red screen a number of times already though. Made the hair on my body stand up. I think tornadoes are literally about the ONLY thing I have fear for. I am so building myself a house out of concrete if I live long enough to, even if I can only afford to build a bedroom, bathroom, and living room for myself.

OBSERVED TORNADO FOR LOUDON, KNOX, ROANE, ANDERSON & OAK RIDGE/CLINTON AREA *TN* RIGHT NOW. 1900 hours central time USA!

That is all for the moment. Let's hope for some boredom for tomorrow, I'll be thankful for it.
Be safe y'all.
-The Bob
Will try to remember to do the update tomorrow if I have time at the computer. The lay lady at church is with her husband in hospice (he's terminal, and just found out), so I might have to run the show tomorrow with the pastor... will have my hands full. Hope I'm in less pain!
@JoshD @Memersand694 Thank-you for the care, and kind consideration. It always helps.

 

Man, I really love reading these texts you post here. Feels like an news report but it's actually interessing.
Stay safe dude, take care and good luck

 

Great to hear from you buddy! Stay safe down there! I've got extended family who got absolute wrecked in south Alabama, keep your head down!

edit: Everyone is okay! It's just stuff for them

 

Aw man bro, Hope they weren't in the trailer court that got slammed hard-core. It's a running line that Tarnaders always head directly for the nearest mobile home court/park, but it just seems that way. It's mostly due to how the mobile homes and more-so RV trailers affect the wind - in-fact more correctly, it's how they DON'T affect the wind - e.g. they're not very big nor tall so they don't block tornadic winds effectively over a wide enough nor tall enough area. Compare to a tornado hitting a small hill even the size of a pile of mining waste (the size of a small or moderate city building - 3~5 stories tall and one hundred to a few hundred feet wide at most - the tornado's ground-level winds IN THE LEE of that pile of chat/refuse would essentially be a whole lot less - this is partially the same theory that saved me (from best I gather) this past year due to all the very (horizontally) expansive structures here in that the tornado couldn't get the ground level winds up & organized enough to firmly touch down and stay grounded. In trailer courts, there's little to no such things, and the structures by nature are the lightest-weight construction (vs brick or stone stick-built / formally-termed site built homes and other buildings anchored down with solid concrete or lesser-so but still significant: concrete block foundations).
I thought for sure (for a few minutes at-least!) what we had a week or so ago on a Saturday was going to be the end of us again; we had two short-lived hazardous touch-downs in the county and one confirmed significant EF1/EF2 touchdown in or near the edge of the county (IIRC). It roared like crazy and I started getting a little panicky when the house started flexing (and this house is built WAY over what even current code would require, you could park a vehicle in the family room and it wouldn't fall into the crawl space, if this flexes the winds are over 75~100mph, the hurricane-resistant windows themselves are minimum 115mph rated but have held to derecho winds 5~10mph above that mark). I'm not being dramatic, and I'm sure anyone who's been in or very near enough to a tornado to hear the train can attest to this; once you've been in or near a tornado that close, any time conditions get right or you see/hear of anther one in the county, you get this feral state about you which otherwise cannot easily be put into words. Like I've stated in previous, I have less fear of a felon under the influence with a firearm than I do of tornadoes and that is for certain and proven (not by choice, please try to avoid either!).

Index of terms (for you few inquisitive types, I congratulate you - keep it up it'll take you far!) for more info:

Spoiler

site built: Assembled from individual components (e.g. not prefabs) such as lumber/2x4's and 2x6's and plywood or OSB, but also of concrete (or concrete-block/cinder-block) or steel framed (etc).
stick-built: Same as above but typically used by contractors for residential construction and implies it's a platform-framed standard US residential structure made mostly of wood
chat: mining waste, generally carcinogenic and very environmentally damaging, since it contains often things like arsenic, lead, sometimes mercury, other heavy metals (etc) don't let your kids play here and don't be down-wind on windy days. Don't stir it up by riding ATVs across it if you love your lungs. These large piles can be innocent looking dirt mounds, though eyesores to many, can be downright deadly in the case of Pitcher Oklahoma (look it up, there's a lot of info about this town, it is now a ghost town much like more-known Centralia PA).
OSB: Oriented stand-board: This cheaper newer version of plywood is much less strong and lasts much less when exposed to weather, is made of large wood flakes glued together under pressure (larger flakes than it's cousin particle board and much much larger flakes than it's distant relative MDF/HDF which is medium-density and high-density fiber-board respectively). Once this stuff starts burning it's very very hard to put out and burns hot due to the glue. It has much less structural integrity than plywood or solid wood of the same thickness (plywood is stronger than same-thickness real soft-wood, OSB and particle board(s) varieties are weaker than real wood). Most building codes allow for use of OSB on exterior walls underneath cladding (such as siding or brick) with use of a vapor barrier (with the exception of 'zip system' boards and similar can forego vapor barrier in some locales), with some notable exceptions being the exterior corners of walls and usually the roof must use at-least half-inch plywood for structural rigidity and wind/snow/weather load concerns.
Some locales do not require the use of plywood or OSB cladding underneath siding or vapor barrier / some locales do not even have building codes / some locales may not have all building codes (such as having only electrical inspections like they did for us until about two years ago, when they became more strict about codes and zoning). Please do NOT buy a new house with any siding or hardy-board exterior siding on the outside and no OSB/plywood panels underneath it lining the exterior, you really need that wooden-panel clad exterior at a bare minimum. Otherwise, you might as well flee from the tornado and hide inside the kids Barbie-doll playhouse in the back yard (please don't do that, I'm just listing this for parody sake but being real, try to buy an older all-stone or all-brick 50's~70's house with dated finishes you can customize and update to your liking, built of solid wood with a solid exterior to protect you from ever-increasing violent weather. Owning an outdated home isn't pride-swelling at first nor always fun when stuff breaks down or if the roof pees on you when it rains, but in 10~20 years when you've had-at-it a while, you'll be glad you did).

Onto something unrelated:
I was trying to watch the hardware news, as I DO eventually need to replace this nearly-6-year-old desktop computer with something statistically more reliable not to mention quicker, and I realized how many of these folks sound like VALLEY GIRLS from the 80's and are 'LIKE' 'TOTALLY' impossible to stand... UGH: Case in point:

Fine print: 110 of those 112 were in the transcript of the video and only two were in the comment section for a 30-minute video. Ouch. LIKE it's LIKE it's LIKE ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!
The guilty parties such as Linus tech tips and Jayztwocents, much in the same boat Hardware Unboxed has wonderful SCRIPTED content. However, when they get going on with the news, they say the word LIKE so much that it just gets downright annoying. Gamer's Nexus doesn't really do this at all by contrast. However the worst offender would be Buildzoid from actually hardcore overclocking (IIRC). I think I date myself when I say this and it's a pet peeve, but I'm moreso saying this to other folks out there who get offended by hearing this online or especially on the real TV news channels. I'm sure even folks with 50k subscribers can afford to take a public speaking course, just as much as I am grateful I had instruction on that in private school growing up. It's one thing when you're a 13 year old saying it, but it's well-past time to stop when you're into adult-hood lest you sound like previously-mentioned Valley-girls from 1980's television programming. I might as well be listening to the BILLBOARD HITS OF NAILS ON A CHALKBOARD TOP 100 or whatever the equivalent today is; Casey Casem or not.

---

State of the project:
I managed to BREAK the traffic light function while converting the project over to smart traffic lights. Since there is no documentation that I can make heads or tails of, the project got STUCK, this caused me to take a break from the project. I can't necessarily release Los Injurus and call it an update (large or small), with broken traffic signals (not one of the new ones functions at all). So yeah, I'm entirely up the creek on that until someone over at the BeamNG side of things does something to make the instructions human-readable, or make it so that it can be programmed in-game without a programming degree. Even with examples in-game, it's just FAR too complicated, even if I fire up the OLD computer and copy beamng over there and load up another level for a live example (and proceed to simultaneously try to make it 100F in here because the old computer is intel-based 4790k).
In other words, to move forward, there's absolutely positively completely NO way for me to be the one to put smart traffic lights into Los Injurus. There's just no way. For 2.5 months I have tried time and time again to make it work and it's just not happening. I'm sorry - but this is just the way it must be - again due to everything which is NOT in my control. Also, if new content such as buildings and textures are desired, it must be known that not only will an 8GB VRAM GPU not be enough, but a 12GB VRAM GPU may also not be enough in the future to run this level, at-least until the day when the driver and game both have routines to unload content in VRAM not used in the scene (currently only unused textures can be unloaded, meshes cannot, and these require nearly as much space as textures; thus we run out of VRAM when below 12gb and then chugga-chugga goes the FPS).
I know it seems stupid to have great AI support but not support smart traffic lights. However, I cannot afford to hire someone to figure out this mess and I certainly cannot do it myself NOR is it made to be figured out. I asked TWO PEOPLE who do this traffic signal engineering / maintenance duty FOR A LIVING (including one who is a youtuber) and they can't figure head nor tails out of it. The skinny on this is: I TRIED. The reality of it is I would be crazy to try and try any more and expect somehow a different (non-failure of a) result.
In other words, To me the traffic light control portion of the editor might as well not even be written in English, I would understand it no less. It was not made to be modder-friendly nor was it made to be used by anyone who is not a member of the team.
Someone please let me know if there is any documentation outside of the official wiki on the SMART traffic light function. However, this is why maybe 2 or 3 user maps support it, and I think all but one is made by team members.
I haven't moved forward to continue reducing the texture size due to being in a state of limbo with the traffic lights. The update thus got stuck.
This all the while my brain being overloaded with everything caused me to seemingly drop off the face of the earth for some majority period of the last two months. That and seriously injuring my legs in a bad fall has not helped.
Actually, it's been SO LONG since things broke due to impossibly complex traffic signals; that outside of what I posted here, I entirely forget what else I've done on the project due to my poor memory function (PTSD sucks).
Thus, that having been said, the only way for me to move forward, is to completely forget and forego the smart traffic light implementation altogether and just concentrate on implementing and improving things a human being can accomplish. The last backup of the project I have before I broke the traffic lights is just under two months old. I think I will be reverting to that one and publishing this update. I've had two weeks to think about that, and I think I will just post that one up, then shrink down large textures (I've already knocked off about half a gig off texture load anyway which you will likely never notice), and be happy with it. It is where I put in preliminary parked vehicle support - and my brain spent so much time trying to figure out the stupid smart traffic signals, I forget how I even did it.
I haven't wasted all my time however and have been working on some models, this is theripeutic (F this spell checker, which is NOT theraputic) for me. I'll otherwise be sitting here mellowing in the joy that is yet another migraine-for-no-good-reason. What is FML material for some is anything but and just another day for The Bob. However, much to the surprise of most I am still quite happy-go-lucky even if what feels like a fractured leg in much pain to one side and torn knee ligaments to the other is very real to me, I am still quite on the up and up mentally for it is getting to be NICE (though very windy!) and warm outside. So worry not for me.
This project is NOT DEAD. Seriously. I shouldn't have to bold this. I just hit a catch-22 which sticks me in an infinite loop progress-wise: Can't update this until I finish this task which is smart traffic light implementation, can't implement / update smart traffic lights because I can't figure it out, no one updates the documentation into something I can understand even remotely, thus no update to post about. I can't shrink textures without forgoing traffic signal updates, or I'd be giving you a level with mud textures + broken traffic signals. Wha? That's a down-grade in all aspects for every user.
So it's a waiting game.
Or not.
I can just skip this of-course. I won't be happy. You might not be happy. The people waiting for some type of update who are funding this project will likely be a lot MORE happy this way.
The following paragraph is more of a result of my education on Behavioral Science. There is no intended defamatory or otherwise demeaning intention to any of the content, in other words; don't get offended or hate me for it, there's just absolutely positively no other way I can phrase this. I do not look down upon folks mentioned in the following paragraph in any way either, but I do know that some of us are different in some ways and can understand some things to a degree that most cannot (a hallmark of Autism is focus/specialization to a degree many other humans cannot do, which is a lesser-known quality and positive over the wider known negative which is difficulty with social interactions) and thus I might just need YOU and your "special talents" of innate understanding to have even an ice-cube's chance in hell at figuring this gibberish out.
Maybe someone can teach me autism (no offense to anyone with it, not implied nor is it my intent, just being blunt) so I can understand this traffic signal stuff in this game engine, because I obviously do not have it / have enough of it (it being autism) to understand how these traffic signals work in-game or how to make them work here. No, seriously, I mean this exactly how I said it and it's totally not meant to be or come-off-as derogatory nor defamatory (insulting) in any way. Please take this at face value. I just can't put a sign up that says 'now hiring autistic person to decipher smart traffic lights' without the "woke and politically correct" folks coming out for a veritable witch hunt for me regardless of how accurate of need this truly and actually is. I would even be special-case willing to tolerate a lot of LIKES in the instructions, though not without some pain internally. Haven't we come full circle now? (Kudos to see why now I've put that other part above)
--That is all for right now. For those who understand my pain, be it physical or mental, or just a 'you've been there' way, thank-you. This too shall pass.
-The Bob.
An update shall come in the near future when I get my @#$% figured out. If anyone can figure this stuff out or otherwise understands it, please let me know on here on this thread. You'd be really helping this project out. While I can't pay out in cash I certainly might be able to throw you some Steam game code(s) in the process of successfully getting it to work (be it ones I have laying around unused from bundle left-overs or ones that are reasonably priced on said store).
Thank-you ahead of time for support for other folks too who help this project not falter!
If anyone is offended by any of this, seriously, please do NOT be, it was not intentional. If anyone is made even the slightest bit more insecure by anything in this post, please do NOT be. This is not the fear and loathing subreddit (if there is one). If you have autism, please treasure it. Einstein and many great inventors who had things named after them all were and invented / refined many of the things we use today. Wozniak, Volta, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk (for better or worse) they all were (autistic). While some of you may have some difficulty on social cues, it is far outweighed (when managed effectively) by your abilities to understand things which even the smartest humans may face difficulty in. I know quite a few people with it in my past and even in my current circle of folks I associate with it, it is not solely a disability, when harnessed correctly just as any other power, it's an ability if you make it one. An ability correctly put I sure wish I had right now and sure could use! Many of our best computer technology and games/software alike were created at the hands of folks with this very affliction, which makes it feel like much less an affliction and more of a talent. So don't be down about it if this is you, seriously. If you take one thing from this post, let it be that last sentence or two and maybe this next sentence. When you put your mind to something you really truly want to do, anything can be possible (though, good documentation always helps).

 

meanwhile in Oklahoma…

Earth (Dust Bowl 2.0)
Wind (hurricane force winds)
Fire (record breaking forest fires)

the only thing was missing was a single droplet of water (humidity and/or rain)

 

That's like almost 4 "like"s a minute! Like, seriously.

heheheh

 

Just wanted to mention in case it wasn't already, but 0.35 did break Los Injurus a tad near default spawn. The barriers are still there, but they're invisible. Will update if I find any more bugs/brokenness.

 

hey bob any updates or did the tornaders claim you ?

 

Very nice mod can't wait to see more added to this map. This map has lots of potential.

 

Will this map be updated? It looks very yellow but the slopes are perfect.

 

Try clearing your cache (if this isn't actually broken, since I haven't played on it in a while) https://documentation.beamng.com/support/launcher_support_tools/clear_cache/

 

Hey @bob.blunderton, you doing ok? Just wanted to check in on ya because you haven't posted in a while.

 

I hope @bob.blunderton is ok too

 

Hope all is well Bob.