Italy = 16km^2 WCUSA = 4km^2 16/4=4 Italy started just before WCUSA, 4 times the size, and all open terrain that needs to be detailed compared to just putting some buildings down and going onto the next one
But italy does not need as much detail, and like you said, it started before. So i dont think it needs much more to finish.
We knew about Italy only about a month before, and there was more progress on WCUSA when we learned about it compared to Italy. Ontop of this, Italy is all natural terrain. I assume it takes longer to get natural terrain to a good point since it involves terrain, vegetation, rocks, natural looking paths, etc... but WCUSA was mostly man made buildings and highways, which is probably just place in a robotic industrial way and forget. I would like to see an overall update on Italy's progress; its been awhile since we've heard anything from Hutch and unfortunately the devs really don't like showing true WIP content anymore. It's definitely possible it will come out sooner (especially since we've seen progress on it from multiple devs compared to only Mitch for WCUSA) but we shouldn't expect that. People started expecting WCUSA for the April update, and a lot of people expected it for the August update.
Considering all of the WCU buildings were brand new and handmade and most of them unique, no i dont think that italy will be taking much longer.
when I spawn on WCUSA, I generally pick the freeway point, haul butt to the end, turn right from the offramp and go to the drag strip. make a few runs, mess with the "LOL" bottle, and Alt + F4. If I want to mess with suburbs, I'll drive around Garfield Heights. If I want to race, there's a ton of community maps for that. The city is basically a crash section being laid out like Nob HIll. I like the map a lot, there previously wasn't a map that featured a realistic concrete freeway, and the drag strip tree is sweet...but after the hype dies down, I'll probably go back to playing the tried and true Utah.
I love to troll my friends with ALT+F4 When they are super far in a game. OT: After messing around with my settings, i can get up to 30 FPS in west coast!
Dang, I'm still stuck at 15 FPS on my computer, and that's even while using a Pigeon. I can get 20 FPS with a Pigeon and a Covet on ECA (except in Firwood), but I can't do that on WCA.
Took some time to read the whole thread, and I find myself agreeing with three major points. 1. The map looks great. It's really a beautiful thing to drive through and has lots of nice little details like the burger shop, the moving oil pumps and it looks like a lot of time and effort has been going into it. 2. Unfortunately it's very small and cramped. Basically only the city has a good feel to it. All the little parts outside the city like the small strip of coastal road or the tiny little piece through the woods or the short drives up the tiny hills are rather disappointing IMHO and feel like an afterthought "oh shit we forgot to put that in, lets make a few hundred meters of forest and coastal road, to make it look good." 3. What really made to whole map cramped is the racetrack. Don't get me wrong there. I actually like the racetrack very much. It's beautifully designed with great curves and chicanes, but it takes up some quarter (?) of the map. I would have preferred to have the raceway as a separate map called something like "West Coast Raceway" If it were possible to connect two maps that would be great. Like leaving the highway at a the "Raceway" exit at the edge of the map, and the raceway map is automatically loaded with the car you were driving. Having said all that I'm glad to have it and thank you all for the hard work and for providing it free of charge.
0.11.0 my game wouldn't load WCUSA. Something fixed it (steam or Nvidia update, not sure which) but the hot fix made it so that nothing at all will load. Time to go through the process of finding out what's wrong yet again...
In 0.11.0 loading WCUSA from the free roam tab would crash with a GPU error, but I could load every other map. WCUSA could be loaded through scenarios. Updated my drivers then steam randomly decided that it had to run through the first time installation for BeamNG. After that it worked fine. In the hot fix, loading any map will crash with the same GPU error. Loading a scenario crashed with that error and another error, something like "the system ran out of memory to perform this operation". Safe mode, files verified, all software up to date.
I can get 20 FPS on WCUSA with lowest settings + AA, but only 16 - 18 in ECUSA. Crank up the settings, ECUSA's frame rate will be still the same but I can only get 8 FPS in WCUSA.