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

Yes, if you keep shadows off, any map runs wonders on potato computer, but with shadows on, game changes totally. In current form this map runs about same as Roane County, that is when you have CPU limited to 60 which one with 60fps monitor should have, West Coast USA does run much better if you have a GPU to handle it, so I would think it being bit of illusion that this map would run better than WCUSA, it does only if your GPU is weak.

High or low graphics, there is really no difference, turn shadows off and it is solid 60fps, turn shadows on and it is 50fps or bit less on slowest spot, with normal or high graphics, no matter what GPU one has, exactly same as Roane County in that regards.

So I really need to handle your West Coast claim back to you, even you will not like it, sorry :-x

Truth is, WCUSA does run better for most, difference is one needs something like 1070 and fast intel CPU to run WCUSA at solid 60fps, while your map can do fine with 1060 or even 1050Ti, but requires fastest intel CPU on market overclocked to be run solid at 60fps (which still might not quite cut it).

Your map still runs better than for example San Frisco, but then again San Frisco will probably not run 60fps on any machine, unless you turn shadows off.

However, WCUSA is much more balanced in hardware requirements, one very important factor of level design in commercial games is to avoid slow spots, sure WCUSA is heavy on GPU, but it is that because otherwise only that super fast overclocked 8086k could run it (if even that) with today's industry standard target of 60fps.

So I want to encourage you to go beyond comfort zone and find new ways to tackle one of the most challenging issues in BeamNG map making, which even devs struggle to handle, to avoid slow spots caused by heavy CPU usage on their maps

I hope you don't get this wrong way, among maps with cities, your map does pretty good job, in terms of GPU performance really incredible job, but ECA for example has more stuff in it and runs faster, also ECA is much more GPU heavy (bit over 40% GPU usage, vs 35%ish on your map at maximum unless my memory lies to me).
Your map still is less than 4 000 000 polys at spots with slowdowns (WCUSA is 8 000 000 to 10 000 000 polys with lot more draw calls!), removing all old meshroad objects is not changing much at all, so that will not help, I think some new tricks are in order as your city's size will be bigger and this hardware usage will not stay at current level or get lower without new tricks.

It think there are ways to get more balanced hardware load, but it might be bit trickier than just making good LODs. I'm really interested to see how you will manage with this special aspect of BeamNG engine.

Update: This is my test on performance aspect and it kinda looks like if it would be that combining object would be the key to improve performance, but of course that will take some more GPU performance, no free lunches:
https://www.beamng.com/threads/deve...r-contributing-post.1575/page-931#post-912718

 

You always keep amazing us, Bob!

 

@bob.blunderton
I've decided to cancel my Photoshop project due to no motivation unfortunately.

But don't worry about that anyways, and I can't wait to see what you add next!

 

Why? What could motivate you? Need inspiration, ideas or something uplifting?

 

I deleted the file though.

But I could make a different kind of billboard ad.

 

It will be better, I'm sure of it

 

I'm thinking of a deodorant ad.

I'll see what I can do with that.

EDIT: I finally finished it!

 

So, out with the old...

That was an old mesh-road bridge, a total of 27 objects, that didn't reduce in detail as you got further away, with railings that could eat you sometimes.
... and in with the new...BRIDGE!

That's much better

In other news, nearby a new Metro line station was completed. This is just down from the two subway stations, right at one of the subway tunnel ends (yes, you can drive into it, if you must, I made sure that was possible).

For what it's worth, surely, you can drive right up the stairs in a Pessima if you choose to.

Remember, most all of the stairs are RAMPS here, because that makes everything that much more fun.

So just in-case it's been a bit quiet, I've had a few other things to do as of late, but I did get a good solid 8 hours of mapping in over the last two days. Slowly but surely it is getting further along, but the end-goal is still a long, long, long way off.

That's okay though, as I don't mind, I enjoy this.

--Cheers!

 

You even put figure 8 drifting zone there!


I really love this crazy (in a good way) stuff you put in maps.

Now if I would put a ramp on those tracks, park semi with an trailer on top of that bridge and take really really lot of speed with a train, perhaps it actually could go trough the trailer, that certainly is a thing to try

 

Wow now there is going to be more train-centric maps to use with all the new trains.... This is becoming Beamng.engineer

As always, excellent work.

 

Hire this guy already beam!

 

Dear God, man. Will your maps EVER stop being awesome?!? This and Roane County are locked up for 1st now, clearly!

 

This map will feature a complete 'looping circut' of metro-class tracks. So you'll be able to go round and round until you get tired of it, or run out of pianos on the tracks to hit (if you 'accidentally left' them there).
I am working closely with folks who design trains, and train-related stuff, and have actually already released the modular train tracks themselves for use in any map, by any mapper who wishes to do so. Trains CAN be done in BeamNG, and are quite fun to mess around with, and make great crashes too! I used to have H-O scale train stuff as a kid, so naturally I like to include stuff like this.

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This who map actually lends itself really, really well to drifting, to be honest. I do a LOT of that on these roads with the Pessima.

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New fast-food place tonight (Burger World, the map's second location of it), and other things...

...and finished up the retail-store strip mall / shopping center adjacent to the Metro station. 16 stores + fast food places nearby (Burger World is built, and seen here).

^^^Yes that's a jump above the end of the tunnel - I believe you can pass through most of those bushes, too, for what it's worth. It's not much of a jump, barely will hit the bumper of the car, but it's still fun. I couldn't just stick a wall there, those aren't as fun. It's a CAR CRASH SIMULATOR, let's not forget the MO here (main objective).
Nothing substantial is on the rocky area by the tunnel entrance, because obviously there's a tunnel about 4 feet under the surface right there, so that precludes any buildings or large trees.

The store buildings are just plain boxes from almost a block away, but that's fine, because that's what keeps the FPS up (you can't even see all but 1 of the bushes above the mouth of the tunnel, and the Burger World looks very plain here too). So entirely, this won't be nearly as FPS-murdering as some of my past maps (and where it does hit the FPS a bit in some residential areas, adjusting the graphical detail down a little bit, will ease things up considerably, even a 3ghz i7 9xx CPU from almost 10 years ago, with a Radeon 6750 1gb DDR3 graphics card - which can run this at almost 60fps. And it's an HP business-class machine, too, not even custom built).
I am quite proud of THAT (performance on low-end machines). Where Roane County Tennessee USA really hit the CPU hard, even on modern machines, proving to be quite a bottleneck for some folks (unfortunately), I am pushing a little hard in the GFX department while keeping object collisions simple, and not going too bonkers with the sheer amount of objects. This is also a much more arid map, too, so that will help considerably, as TREES and large bushes are the hardest things to render in this game after the vehicle, and water with reflections.

So entirely, I hope you folks have a great weekend. I just fixed a friend's 10-year-old kid's computer and took it back today, so that made my day to see him happy (he can play Fort-Night or whatever it's called).
Doing nice things for nice people and not asking much in return. Story of my life. It makes me happy to make others happy though. So will be doing a lot of that (I hope) with this map.

Have an awesome weekend! I'll be doing some mapping here...as I can't stand spending a whole weekend getting murdered 65535 times an hour in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and my cat goes into heat if I play Postal 2 and 'use' a cat object from inventory...and I've about Simcity'ed (Simcity 4) myself to death. No, really, I have, I can't take anymore. I don't spend much on games, I haven't even bought any in the last 6 months.
But BeamNG.Drive, yeah, I can totally do that. For hours...Whole days until my back calls it quits.
Who knows, maybe I'll break out the SNES or Genesis and find new pits I haven't fallen into before

That is all! Enjoy your weekend folks.

P.S. I will see to uploading the railroad bridge and it's textures as soon as I make a short piece to match it, to the train tracks thread.
If you like what you see, please donate on Patreon, it helps me pay for Maya monthly and maybe buy some textures or model assets in the future too, because I don't need, nor want a new computer - my four year old tower is just dandy! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=12840784

 

Working on a little something-something special. This will be yet another kit for my MRK 'modular road/rail kit'.

What did I love about San Andreas the most when playing it? Driving through the mostly dried drainage canals. That was awesome. Jumps-a-plenty there.
Coming soon to a yet-unnamed city near you!

The picture shows the skeleton of Ghost's Canal (for sizing and perspective, I am using his to source my model sizes, and textures might be used from it, but the model itself will be all original work on my part). Ghost said I could use it, so I will use the textures, but it being a sketchup object, I really can't do a lot with it as they don't import that well into my object modeling program. Sketchup isn't known to make good models (so hence, I threw out my last-year's work on Sketchup stuff, before I even started this map). I use Maya for my modeling needs, and while it costs money every month, some of which the nice people that visit my Patreon cover, I like to model and this program is full-featured enough to make a beautiful model with working LOD's and all-that fancy-schmancy stuff like Collision meshes built-in.

The picture also shows I've just barely started this, but getting the size right is 90% of it. I was super-thankful to have something to source size from in-game. Most of the urban areas in the game will have canals like this every so-many (unknown yet) blocks, as it will help spread things out and keep FPS high enough so that it does not cause any serious issues/slowdown.

Ghost will make the credits for his contributions even from the wayside. His maps were always great, so surely I will slap the big 'GHOST' graffiti sign in there, if not just solely because his maps were awesome and very inspiring to me. They never failed to WOW us no matter how big or small!

MRK, bringing city fun to BeamNG one kit at a time. Soon, anyone can make a city provided they have knowledge of the editor, and any other bits you'll need a long the way.
Copious amounts of time sold separately!

 

Can we name the city West Virginia?

 

Maybe the city name can be:

Del Sol, California?

 

@Def2004 @Fenneko I am still not 100% sure what the name will be. I think I know what the county name will be, though.

In other news, after getting SO angry trying to fix this issue with Maya making all the stuff I am looking at bright blue (some type of selection), that it sent my bloodpressure through the roof, gave me a slamming awful migraine, at which point I completely snapped and punched the tower (hard enough to move all 85 pounds of it several inches up until it hit the wall), and it locked up...
No, it didn't break anything, this is the same PC that the corrupt fired informants*** who snuck in the house threw down a flight of 15 steps, back about 3 years ago - 9 months after I built it ... but this managed to lock it up. So after a restart, a chkdsk and another restart, I fired up Maya again and Voila, it fixed the problem. Punching it fixed it... and I didn't even break bones this time (unlike when I kicked the tower about 10 years ago, broke my big toe)! That'll learn it to give me a migraine. It's been a lot nicer to me after-words. It's very seldom I even back-hand this thing, like maybe a few times in it's life-time, but I've never punched it, needless to say, it's no worse for wear, because you could drop ship this thing & run beamng.drive in the middle of a warzone and it would still run just fine. I build a damn tough computer, because it's got to take my intolerance of poorly coded software for years.

Needless to say, after tenderizing the tower (and not me) a little bit, I managed to get something good out of it.

That's right, all new textures (they don't have normals yet), there's a car for scale, gosh it's so tiny down there, but that's the size of it. I actually used @Ghost187 's canal to size this properly, but it's 100% my model and textures. This is the largest type that will be available. The pillar bases (trapezoid shaped pieces) are individually placed, there's two per pair of pillars, this way if you have a narrower bridge, it's only one model that has to be loaded into RAM (collision) and VRAM (for visible meshes), it is fully LOD'd and collision mesh is done. The entire canal is 36 faces, 72 triangles, while the pillar (each one) is 9 faces. Collision is the same as the visible meshes, with the exception of the Canal, which has some tapered edges so in-case it's not lined up 100% it doesn't eat your car (it gives you a good foot or so of error-room, I'd use less but I would end up with the narrow-face issues with collision meshes in this game, which eat cars or give unpredictable results).

The water level of the map is lower now. This is a good thing. It needed that, it'll dry off some of the roads on the other side of the map, too, that were always flooded a bit. Don't worry, there will still be some flooded low-lying portions that aren't necessary for travel/easily bypassed.

These textures look like absolute rubbish close up. Literally. I will do detail-textures on these so there's a bit more 'texture' to the texture. Have to look up how the game-textures do this!
If anyone has the wiki handy for the detail textures and such, and wants to throw in on here, please do, otherwise I'll just look it up (no hard feelings if not, but if you have the link handy, please share!).


As-per the above:
***Those informants, they never learn, in July 2015 when they threw my machine down the steps to break it, because I took a several-day job at the hospital (they try to make me broke, smear-campaign me, because I have LOTS of dirt on them, and generally make my quality-of-life awful), I ratted them out AGAIN to people I knew they were illegally messing with, like they did to myself in the past. A bunch of informants got arrested & awarded double-digit prison sentences, and some 18 cases in Northampton County PA were dropped instantly. They got their name in the paper for poisoning people in Bethlehem Township with drugs of various types in their food, drink, condiments, and even hair shampoos (so they come up hot on drug tests after accidents at work, or in vehicle collisions!). Yeah this shady bunch (what ones aren't in the SLAMMER) one day will learn, or not. If they don't want to learn that way, my Ruger will gladly show them the error of their ways (to the extent of what law allows). God bless the Castle Doctrine of Tennessee USA, the America I was promised in Pennsylvania but never found until I moved to Tennessee. I love this state. You can buy a 50CAL if you want to They had an issue with organized crime going up in Knoxville TN about 2 years ago, so what did they do, lower the price of the Concealed Carry permit fee, so there's more armed civilians to stop said crime / criminal activity. THAT WORKED! They have brains down here, unlike in PA where they wanted to take away rights all over the place, of the innocent law-abiding folks, just in-case they should become a criminal. Glad I'm out of there (PA). Don't choose to be a victim folks, and don't let others choose it for you.
*The second amendment of the United States Constitution, the right to bare arms, is necessary to the balance of power and the security of A FREE STATE. It's never been more true than now, so don't give up your rights folks, you might just need them at some point, as I did and do. To the men and women who've served this country, those right you've earned for the rest of us, I don't just keel over like a pansy, I stand my ground, and protect my person/possessions/property & my rights. Some (informant) bullies tried to 'bully the bully' (me) and found out what happened, though I will happily play bumper cars with them again in traffic as I've been doing since 1/2004 (That wicked witch brake-checked me infront of a loaded semi @ 45mph, and I had a passenger), if the need arises. Thankfully BeamNG.Drive has made me a much more defensive driver, especially getting a LOT of practice at how to P.I.T. an attacker's vehicle and pin it so they cannot escape. Woohoo!

The always pick on the nice guys (I am super-nice, easy going, happy-go-lucky, & all that jazz; but corner/threaten me and the bully comes out with a vengeance). No one here does that, though.
Nice guys finish last, with a scuffed up front bumper, but they still finish sooner or later

--Be free, safe, and have a good one!
P.S. Don't worry about me, I'm no worse for wear, just thought I'd share a small fraction of the stuff I have been through. I've lived my life as if it's a war zone the last 14.75 years & am retired because of it and have nasty PTSD. Venting = good. I hope no one has to go through the things I had to go through, especially for 'no good reason' as I did. Oh, and if you live in Pennsylvania, DEAR GOD MOVE! That place is a hot-bed of back-scratching and corruption & is why the STATE IS BROKE.

 

Nice work! Keep it up!
Somehow, I had a (really bad) name idea for the city's name tho.

 

Im gonna be completley honest here.. you write WAY to much stuff for me to read. Im basically the defenition of lazy.

 

Hahaha that's okay, I have plenty of bad names I could never print (or host) on a forum, but I will name it something, that is somehow, less bad. Thanks!

Oh that's okay. I have had a very rough life at times, but there's no requirement on reading it all & certainly no test on it on Friday.

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In other news, I tried adding a nice detail texture that I quickly whipped up to the drainage canal (fuzzy textures, low detail), but unfortunately, it made all the upward facing surfaces BRIGHT WHITE, due to a bug, or something. So basically, the texture is going to be ugly up close, but I am 100% okay with this, because I CAN DO NOTHING about it. I can't help it their game is a buggy steaming heap.
Things that cause problems get scrapped, so it was either the detail texture goes or the canal goes. I kept the canal, fuzzy texture and all. Maybe in the future I'll get better textures or figure out a way around this buggy game's problems.

Got some other pieces in the game, and working. 22.5 degree and 45 degree angle. Each one makes the bend across 8 surfaces, so it won't eat the car if you ride the wall around the corners.

Also, a nice T-piece is made where a much smaller (half width, half the height, about 20% the capacity of the larger one) flood control canal meets up with the larger piece. The large piece is as big as they will be.

There will also be small ones for neighborhoods that have straight sides (not angled).
There WILL be spots where you can escape, at-least two per linear mile, where I can help it.
There will also be things like storm-water system drainage into the canal, and various 'variation' pieces.
Considering making one like a half-pipe for the residential neighborhoods. Why not, eh? Those things are fun (yes, I was a late 80s and early 90s kid that had a skateboard, even had Skate or Die on the 8-bit NES).

So yes, this is turning out very good, well except that the textures don't look good up close. Will work on that & see what I can do.