WIP Beta released The Tennessee USA Roane County 0.71 Beta Discussion/Suggestion/feedback Thread 19.3.1

That will make a beautiful carnage, hitting that rock wall next to roads will certainly be rather satisfactory

Incredibly beautiful and detailed scenery there.

Do you get lot of sinkholes? I guess there is less water running under the sandstone there. It is bit different in Florida, sea almost runs under that, so they get a lots of sink holes.

 

Sinkholes most commonly happen due to underground water infrastructure breaking, anywhere in the developed world. A water main or sewer line cracks or breaks allowing water to erode the ground around it, and take the path of least resistance etc, then you have collapse of above infrastructure and buildings and such later-on (possibly shortly after, or a few days / weeks after).
Sinkholes naturally happen commonly in limestone and similar sedimentary rocks (mostly just limestone though), due to the fact that lime is water-soluble. Water finds it's way through cracks or caverns in the limestone, gradually eating away at it until there is enough of a void that it cannot any longer be the foundation for what is built or existing above. You then have collapse, which over a road or near an existing building can break water mains / sanitary sewer lines and cause further exacerbation of the problem.
Both of these are generally covered under loss due to subsidence of structure clauses in home-owner's insurance policies, and can often not be included by default unless you have a good agent.
There's also two other ways, that subsidence can happen, though that's not entirely the only reasons left for it to happen.
1.) Old mine subsidence, in which the old mines flood with water, which can erode dead-man pillars left during the mining process to support the ground above, leaving the ground above unsupported and causing a serious health and safety issue (from the toxic water flowing out, and safety obviously due to subsidence/cave-ins etc when the ground moves).
Old mines such as salt mines can sometimes be breached by oil/gas drillers who miss target only to pop a mineshaft, releasing pressure of the mine and allowing water into the salt mine, dissolving with salt almost instantly, and creating a vortex almost immediately in the lake, which in the past has completely depleted lakes (there was on in Louisiana or such years ago where this happened!). Salt domes collapsing can cause very wide-spread subsidence sometimes ~1 mile wide. This also happened recently due to gas drilling in a Lousiana Bayou area Parish.
2.) Permafrost areas thawing out with global warming, where methane has been trapped underground and can now suddenly escape due to thawed unsealed-by-ice-removal ground above, the methane from natural decomposition (natural gas) suddenly will spontaneously combust, blowing a huge crater in the ground (common in Siberia, Northern Alaska, Northern Far-East Russia, etc), or it will just escape, leaving a void, which collapses as-per typical subsidence of ground, leaving a small lake of water in it's wake. This gives far-north topography it's pock-marked appearance looking a lot like Swiss cheese.

Florida, and parts of the North-East, not limited to Pennsylvania, NY, Northern half of NJ (southern is all alluvium), Ohio, and the Virginias (and also New-England areas), all have limestone basement rock (bedrock) in part or in full (Florida has almost fully limestone basement rock), and hence are prone to sink-holes in the classic form of "suddenly your yard or house disappears" - or the whole block!

So, while sink-holes can commonly happen in any rock, not just limited to limestone, it's exponentially more likely to occur in limestone for said above-reasons. It doesn't generally happen here, but when water & wind erosion take place, anything can happen. So best to be covered if you have a home, or it will literally put you in a financial, and physical hole!

Terminology pertinent to the field is used here, for those who don't know...
Alluvium = silt, soft sediment, common to river valleys, etc.

 

I think I did read also from farming that used so much water that it caused sinkholes to happen where it normally was rare. Terrible things, I just hope I don't end up to such in your map!

I like thick solid granite bedrock here, not even nukes can crack that

 

Granite is pretty strong. I think that might be "felsic intrusive igneous rock" if I am not mistaken here - as per wiki.
Igneous rock comes from vulcanism, volcanoes barf it out and it lands everywhere and makes a big mess, like when you overfeed the cat, sort of. But it's a lot more useful than the stuff the cat 'gucks up'.
Igneous rocks are generally some of the strongest ones, where sedimentary rocks are the more brittle ones depending on the density of the material (how deep it was compressed into rock at, the density of the structure can vary a tad).
Of course some igneous rocks from lava have lots of gasses trapped in them when they crystallize so they will be inherently sponge-like and not very tough, some downright fragile as glass, shattering on impact. So essentially, it varies rock by rock, the conditions when that rock layer was formed, the water table around the rock as it sat over it's lifetime, and tectonic forces at work during the duration of it's lifetime. Sometimes when highways cut through mountain-tops as they crest the summit (or get close), and there's a 100 foot deep chasm where the highway was cut through, you can take a good look at rock layers up both sides of the highway. Sometimes you can even see where the rock is faulted, etc, like in New Jersey - of all places! Yes, fault lines do exist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania - mostly dormant, but they act up once in a while.

So lots goes into your rocks - more than you think - something worth forethought before buying or building on a parcel of land - even buying an existing house. It might seem peachy at first and a beautiful picket-fence American dream-home, but will it still be there when you come home? Is it good on it's foundation? A home is no good without a good foundation, and that surely is key (I used to work in concrete construction, pouring residential foundations; and damp & water-proofing them too for many many years). Many cities and certainly to some extent (if you can find the data) USGS will have the data in the US/North America. Worth thought, definitely. No one wants to end up in a hole.

So I guess I could totally stand-in for a few days for "Captain Bunsen Burner" (generic science guy name), if I had to. Whatever works!

 

No pictures at this very second (not sure there will be any tonight, it's just boring blank terrain with lots of lines scribbled with only hopeful accuracy)...

Westel Rd was in the wrong spot (the interchange with US 40 was just fine though!, good because I'm not moving THAT unless it's way-off as I just fixed it up!). Re-plotted Westel Road all the way out to Airport road (yes, it meets Airport Rd!).
US70 through Westel town (westel road south-end ends here) was off for 1.2 miles of it's alignment, and some stuff going up the hill was off. Will fix. Plotted!
This should add another 2 miles of road in.
Plotted Pig Path Rd (yes!). 1.5~2 miles.
Plotted Mount Vernal Rd, about 2 miles or so.
Plotted Smith Mountain Road. ~2 miles.
Plotted Howard Ingram Road (dirt). *wonders why dirt texture named 'DURT' * 1~1.4 mile
Plotted Ridge Gap Rd. ~1 mile
Plotted Rankin Chapel Rd - 2 miles (this was a 100ft stub half-way down Airport Rd).
Plotted Sexton Loop Rd, 1.5 miles.
Plotted Cliffy Creek Rd, which turns in to Riggs Chapel goes under the 2 south Harriman exit bridges (train and 4-lane road) which lets out at the end of the 2lane bridge on the SE side of Harriman... It's a good 4~5 miles or such!
Plotted Golliher road from Airport Rd (near entrance to Airport), all the way past Piney creek (2~3 miles - not sure!)
Plotted many many miles of PINEY CREEK (4+ miles easy).
Not that you are going to drive a creek bed (not until Beamng.Boat your not), but it's instrument in giving me landmarks I can see from the bird's brains eye view.
Some of Airport Road will have to be re-aligned a bit, it's not perfect but it's CLOSE. Will move as needed. Airport will be lowered by about 50~60 feet and moved South-East by about 100 feet or so (about the width of the runway).

So this likely adds 8~10 miles more road here when it's done.
I have to work on the highway tonight some yet and finish decorating some spots of it.

Did some forest tests - frame-rate tanked from 90~100fps down to about 60~65fps. I'd like to keep it a 20~25% hit to FPS max... so full-density forests are a no-go. Will substitute with more rock walls than I originally planned. This is okay they look pretty anyways, right? I hope they do as I worked pretty hard on them.
Forest test was merely about three-quarters of a mile, on *ONE* side of the dual-sided highway, with grass median in the middle or the far side of the route un-touched. Too much of a hit to FPS. Will use 2d tree-walls behind several rows of trees, just won't look as pretty when flying over, that's all. Shouldn't look bad on car-wreck videos then. Will see how game-developer's maps do it for pointers (ECA). It's just not possible to run a full-density 100% real forest, on a developed map of this size and scale, on current hardware. IF CPU's / GPU's were twice as fast, surely it could be done. Not quite yet though my friends. I tried! Considered adding bill-board only trees but it's hitting the processor which is deciding which models to render, which ones to knock out of the render pipeline, etc, and no easy ways to tell it YOU CAN'T SEE THAT STUPID COMPUTER DON'T DISPLAY THAT.

Sorry for the rant, but do know the next update, when it comes (weeks away yet), will be packed with miles of roads.

Aiming for 200 miles of roads total. Current private beta and also last public release has about 175 miles of roads or so.

I will try to bring you the most realistic American highway experience to drive in Beamng.drive aside of the mile or two in West Coast (hey, I am humble/honest here).

@fufsgfen and @NewoFox you guys will get betas as I put them out, private betas, since you always offered nice videos up without me even asking. For the rest, I am sure if you pester enough, you can get the beta, but I won't have one out until close to the end of the month for anyone.

I am aware my diamond signs are still broken in the most recent private beta. I tried to fix it. STUPID TECHNOLOGY!

--Doing my best - this is taking every ounce of brain/talent I have to figure where these roads go - don't have an overlay on this map.
~18 miles plotted. Have no clue until I drive them!
Well on way to having additional 25 miles of roads in the next update.
--Cheers!

 

If I would even try to open this map, my computer would literally blow up. I was wondering if you could make the separate towns a map of their own. I hope you do, and I am looking forward to it!

 

@bob.blunderton looking forward of testing your map, if you need performance data from any area, just ask, also let me know what you where you want me to pay attention so I can give you some useful feedback!

 

@ehart07 - What is the specs for your computer (cpu/ram/graphics) ? I can't really cut this down, It'd be a 2gb pack of data for a few square miles - that would be nuts. I may however release a version completely devoid of all trees outside of towns, when the map is *done*. No promises, but it only requires some 2~3 GB of RAM without the tree infestation. I feel for you - really I do - I am on a 3+ year old i7 here, but when I build them, I build them fast & to last... but so long as it works... why fix what isn't broken? You'll be with us someday soon surely - for now there's here! Thanks for writing in.

@fufsgfen - Well I can always use performance feedback - that's a given - however, I am keeping an eye on the FPS meter big-time. I won't have any private betas for another 6~12 days though easily. If I promised to release a public version by the end of this month, or beginning of February, I'd likely be a fool. Earliest public release is about a month away, on the soon side - earliest private beta for those on my list, is a good 10 days out. <--- provided the editor doesn't keep kicking me back to the 'Desk-trap'.

---

MAP PROGRESS!
4 miles of roads re-aligned (not new added - just made Westel Rd and 70-through Westel the correct route).
6 old style bridges and one mini-3-piece bridge removed - and replaced with all-in-one bridges that don't murder my (or your) FPS as hard & also look better. Has custom textures that match. Improved the concrete bridge texture too - and screen-shott-ed my damn normal-mapping (bump-mapping) settings this time in my graphics program - ugh. Seeing as the 6 bridges I took out were all 7~9 pieces a pop, plus the other 3-piece bridge, That's almost 45 units spared, including the 5 or so (guess) I added back in the form of single-piece bridge models ! It's not much - but it's SOMETHING. Something that says I can add all the things I want to and not get a bit closer to the item limit Map smarter, not harder. It means more content for you folks!
It's looking like I will be able to hit that "200 miles of road" 'mile-stone' with the next update without having too much issue. There's SO MUCH of this place that's just... missing. Lots of fun snake-like back roads - LOTS - only about 20~25% of these roads I am adding are straight, there's always a banked corner ahead in 75% of it if it's not ALL CORNERS to begin with.

Some of the stuff I was working on today:

Hideous, but the intersection at the bottom center/right of the screenshot, is where WESTEL is, from there to the WESTEL sign scribbled on the map.
The lighter routes are the OLD erroneous alignments. All the routes here were 100% re-arranged and completely re-sculpted. That's the four miles of road (yes that's it!). The map-edge/sky-box on the left side is the WEST edge of the map (a small portion of the west-most part of US40 highway is up top-left). You can still jump the rail crossing on Westel Road, you have more landing room now though. The brown-rock colored snake-like thing is PINEY CREEK ... that's about 1/3rd or 1/4th of the entirety of it, IF that.
Added in the materials for my new terrain layers I am adding:
Brown leafy-colored forest floor (not green, but brown-ish like the stuff in Tail of The Dragon).
Long/Tall brown grass layer, which will be long and will look like WHEAT in the many farm fields here.
Another stone layer variation I intend to use near streams.

The bridges I've been putting in are ECA models re-skinned with road asphalt to match the stuff in the map, so it won't look 100% the same as ECA (East Coast America map).

None of these roads have been properly forested or de-squared.
Want to make a normal-map that works very very well?
Downloading & Installing the .dds file plugin and normal-map plugin for GNU IMAGE MANIPULATION TOOL and using the same settings will make a beautiful normal map (see attachment for settings).
I hope it helps someone besides ME, screenshots above of bridge in evening, uses these settings.

--Cheers!

P.S. I made my PC look like Windows 98/NT deliberately, and yes, it's Windows 7. I can work faster this way and it never tells me 'your computer seems to be running slowly - would you like to turn off desktop effects or whatever' anymore. Simple, spartan, and super-efficient and easy to work with.

 

Good, I have less than 2 hours of practice with this thing and I need all practice I can get:

 

@bob.blunderton I have a i5 4gb ram GeForce gtx

 

The latest test version is working great, as seen in the below 44:45 video -

I'm starting to know Roane County better than the city I live in lol.

 

You will have fun rip-roaring through the new version then. Lots of beautiful work done on US 40 highway (the shot in the preview there, is near where I was working).
Will check the video as soon as I am all 'edited out' or it gets too crash happy and I have to take a break for an hour or the rest of the day, to not want to choke the computer. Stupid technology.

You folks wouldn't want to know how many HOURS it took me over the last two days to get the ground cover working right.

Forest floor sample above, like the ECA stuff. I actually stole this out of my Tail of The Dragon map after trying to re-create it unsuccessfully. It's not GREEN on the forest floor like ECA, but BROWN like fallen leaves in the real world (maybe a little TOO dark/saturated brown).
There's also a shot of field-grass test here below - don't mind the hideous test-shot.

Yes, it's a hideous square chunk of testing, this will be present all over, but only about half as dense as it is here.
You can't see much of anything when driving through it though, as intended.

Below is where the ramp used to be on the west-most US40 Interchange.

Below a one-lane bridge over Piney Creek which corresponds to the same thing IRL. This is about how narrow it is. I will see if a truck fits later. This area gets lots of trees and such and forest-scene, here on the northern flank of Westel Road that never used to exist past the wooden jump by the interchange (US 40 highway is behind me about 300~500 feet).

Also did a bit on the highway below

I think after two+ years of mapping I've finally made what feels like a real forest, without bird poo falling on you.


More to come later, I think... I hope... stupid crash-fest editor. This game sure simulates CRASHES well.

 

Rofl on that Snake oil

I don't think that there is anything to improve of your forests, that looks exactly how forests are in reality, small stuff down below, indeed brown forest floor, that is exactly right!

It is incredible how such small details make a lot in re-creating feeling of the real stuff, like that little bush at snake oil shot, that breaks clinical and static nature of computer graphics, creating kind of noise that is all around us in real world. When creating virtual world, I have seen best results coming when there are right amount of inaccuracy, so it is not too perfect and those small details that break otherwise too perfect setting.

 

Ah thanks a bunch, I am trying to do it both well and FPS-friendly* so that the map is 'immersive enough' while still being as much good fun as you can overload onto low-detail terrain. I am able to hide the low-terrain detail really well where it's done up enough though. It's almost on-par with the terrain in Fallout 4 though, seriously, so I don't feel too terribly bad. When you get to the shore in Fallout 4 it really shows the 4 meter resolution of the terrain in quite a few spots.
However, in this game, I had to make a trade-off. I could make a shoe-box map, or this - obviously, we have enough shoe-box panoramas around here. I want to drive, and drive for *MILES* without being walled into traversing the same road over and over - that would get boring fast. I also don't want all the roads to look same-y if you know what I mean. Each one should be a *little* different, but still bare the look of roads in Tennessee (no shoulders, just two 9 or 9.5 foot lanes, many faded to a very light color, and surely not near enough guide-rails). It's a fine line to walk.
Thanks for noticing - and yes, there's some overgrown weeds around the sign IRL also, so I felt adding a stray weed was accurate. More to come when I get back in the editor... it needs that realism. Those imperfections translate into immersion for us as drivers milling about. I use google street view (when available) to help put those little details in, so that it looks genuine. Sure lots of the grass is brown often, but hey, I wanted green grass. We'll have brown grass too eventually. When I figure out how to add in random brown grasses into the regular grass layer without bungling the rest of the layers - or getting grass in the road again (yeap, I did, OOPS, had to fix that quick, then it went to ALL GRASS everywhere 3 feet high, bugging out, and then it promptly CRASHED the editor).

*from above - yes - forests and FPS FRIENDLY don't go into the same sentence, however, when it drops below 60fps I start feeling the need to remove things. This is on max settings with no reflections, mind you. So I am doing my best not to kill the FPS, but thankfully, the chief FPS-murdering components which make up my towns, shouldn't be too close to the forests at any point.

--Cheers!

 

This editor is crashing so bad I can barely get any work done. As I have a migraine, no work will be done tonight. This next update will go on hiatus and be released to private beta as-is (it's fairly bug free except the diamond signs), if no work is done for a few days.
This is definitely on of the top most horrid, crash-tastic disaster I've ever had my hands on. I literally open the editor and the 1st thing I did (remove a stop bar decal road) crashed it. Lovely. I can't take the stress of not getting anywhere with my PTSD.

When they update the game, updates will continue (because I will be able to). I am losing too much work/progress to crashing. Once I can't get past a certain point because I've tried so many times and it's crashed, I will FAIL to continue. The terrible state of the game editor needs to be addressed sooner than later. For what it's worth, I know a few folks working on larger projects and they pretty much stated the editor is 'complete garbage, half of it doesn't even work, the half the does work, works for a while and randomly crashes out'.
Whatever the folks did to the editor, they need to undo it. The new state of the files is more difficult to work with, too. I have had trouble even helping folks get their maps working.
This is what had delayed updates this long. If there is no new update in the game for several months, then it will be several months until there's an update to this map. Heck, not even the one way roads work correctly (not me, not my map).

I mean if stuff's going to be half-finished and broken to all heck and back, then I am going to ask why we don't get weekly updates, what do we wait 6 months for?

 

Okay, I will go ahead and upload my existing map, and take a shot of the decal road, where if you delete it, CTD.
Give me a day or two on this (or three, my net is very slow) & I will upload a workable .zip of my map. I will then show you how to reproduce this error just by deleting a node in a decal road. I mean, I've spent *thousands* of hours (you know), and doing stuff like this all the time. I want this editor working just as much as you do, so you can have some time off (and so you can like us and be our friend again).
You don't sound like a broken record, you could be as mean as you want (and sometimes I deserve it), and I wouldn't get mad or smack-talk you, just... it's very frustrating. Especially where there isn't enough detailed info on just WHAT is crashing in the log. It doesn't even come up with an error like 0x???????? or anything, just disappears and crash reporter pops up. BOOM. The log used to tell me a lot, now it just has repeating functions over and over and no REAL error (that I can see).

The developers should not be rushed by 'me' it's just... TAKE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED TO FIX IT, just, you know, fix it, that's all. No sense adding MORE features on top of broken half-working other features. That just makes a MESS.

--Cheers!

 

First 3 are completed areas, last one's just a 4 miles visible section of (5.8 miles of) roads that went in two nights ago.
Last night I was able to put in 8.2 miles of road. These are in addition to 1.2 miles like 3 days ago I added.
That's 15.2 miles of winding back roads, not always 100% smooth by design, lots of little corners, not always banked.
New field grass is in. But wait, progress, I have mentioned I wasn't going to attempt any.
Well I left the crashy part behind and left it sit for now. I'll do something else in another part of the map (it doesn't crash when you drive around, just when you edit it at times). I had retracted my notice at throwing in the towel and pulling mods as the developers/moderators contacted me and let me know they actually hired someone to maintain and improve the editor. Well that's a breath of fresh air, and as such, the map now has 190.2 + miles of road (not including parking lots, etc, and also, not counting sides of separated roadways separately, technically it has much more at that rate).

A few more miles of highway (total, since anyone played it besides me) are finished off now. Looks nice, FPS isn't 100% where I wanted it to be, but it looks beautiful. I will take feedback on it as needed... shouldn't be too bad though. It's not as slow as the towns, though, for what it's worth.
You can now drive from the two lane bridge on the south-east side of downtown Harriman out to Airport road (the road with the airport on it, duh, that goes to the waterfall, from the highway, it's about 8+ miles long). It's all back-roads. Very windy here, so can't go fast or you'll eat trees, or go off a cliff, or end up in a water feature.
Re-aligned the whole entirety of Westel if I hadn't mentioned. Where it says Westel on the map, it where. New bridges too through there (may have covered some of this).
Re-aligned about a mile or so of Airport road where Rankin Chapel Rd comes out, as it was 'off' by a few-hundred feet. Eliminated a bridge as it wasn't needed. It's only a culvert, that's it, not a full-on bridge.
Forest floor and brown field grass with props are both working now as they should (well, good enough).

So basically, I have been working on this, despite the poor state of the editor. No promises right now. I might get fed up and not bother for a few days if it makes me too nuts. Ugh. Definitely simulates CRASHES well.
My sanity comes first, though.
--Cheers!

 

That tall grass is beautiful.

 

Bob, when tools don't agree, it is always good to see that outside world is still there

Say, is this this?


More alive looking: