Beta Three Passes - Swiss Alps (+1000km2) 0.9.3

Three Passes is the classic Swiss Alpine driving loop over the Grimsel, Furka and Susten passes: 122 km of real mountain road through a 1,074 km² slice of the Alps, built from Swiss national survey data rather than by hand.

0.9.3: safer tunnels with lights and sound, Swiss road signs and markings, real car parks. See the changes below.

The route
Innertkirchen - Grimselpass (2164 m) - Gletsch - Furkapass (2429 m) - Realp - Andermatt - Schöllenen gorge - Wassen - Sustenpass (2224 m) - Gadmen - back to Innertkirchen.
Every hairpin, tunnel, avalanche gallery and bridge is where it is in reality: over 40 hairpins, 33 tunnels, 12 avalanche galleries and 89 bridges.

What's in it

• Terrain from swisstopo's swissALTI3D elevation model: the road and its verges at 0.5 m detail, the surrounding 32 x 32 km at 4 m, and a ring of distant mountains to the horizon
• The road follows the real centreline and profile (swissTLM3D): worn alpine asphalt with its markings part of the surface, W-beam guard rails, granite parapets on the Susten
• Signs, markings and marker posts to the Swiss signalling ordinance (SSV): curve warnings, tunnel signs, give-way lines and signs at the side roads, white chevrons round the hairpins, place-name and pass summit signs. Reflectors and road signs catch your headlights at night
• Graded asphalt car parks, with painted bays on the public ones
• Real tunnels with portals, lights and echo, avalanche galleries and bridges
• About 174 km of side roads with gravel or asphalt surfaces and 53 small bridges
• The dams of the Grimsel, Gelmer, Räterichsboden and Oberaar lakes and the other walls along the loop, with the water right up to them
• Buildings from swissBUILDINGS3D, with hand-shaped landmarks: Hotel Belvédère, Hotel Glacier du Rhône in Gletsch and the Grimsel Hospiz
• About 790,000 trees and shrubs placed from the real canopy (spruce, larch, pine, beech, aspen), rocks on the scree, roadside and meadow grass, lakes with their real colours, rivers, streams and waterfalls
• Ambient sound: rivers, streams, waterfalls, wind that rises with altitude, cowbells on the pastures
• AI traffic, with a navgraph through every tunnel and hairpin
• PostBus lines with their real numbers and stops, both directions: 161 Grimsel (Innertkirchen - Gletsch), 681 Furka (Gletsch - Andermatt), 162 Susten (Wassen - Innertkirchen)
• Six rally stages with pacenotes read by the game's co-driver: Grimsel North and South, Furka West and East, Susten East and West
• Four time trials: Furka climb, Grimsel climb, Susten climb and the full loop
• Seven spawn points: Wassen (the default, on the Sustenstrasse heading up to the pass), Furkapass, Grimselpass, Sustenpass, Gletsch, Innertkirchen, Realp

Install
Subscribe here, or download and put the zip, unopened, in your mods folder (in game: Mods > Open Mod folder):

• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\BeamNG\BeamNG.drive\current\mods
• Linux: ~/.local/share/BeamNG/BeamNG.drive/current/mods

Then choose "Three Passes" from the map list. The first load takes a few minutes while the game prepares textures; later loads are much faster.

Size and performance
Download 480 MB, 2.2 GB unpacked. Built for BeamNG.drive 0.40.
To fit the repository's upload limit, the colour of the fine ground areas is at 1 m per pixel and the terrain colour at 8 m per pixel, half the full build. The tiled ground and asphalt textures, geometry, trees and buildings are unchanged.
Measured on the 0.9.2 download at 2536x1390 on an RTX 4080: 80-140 fps at ten viewpoints around the loop, about 5 GB of video memory. It's a big map; a mid-range or better GPU is recommended.

Changes in 0.9.3
Driving

• Tunnels: the walls are solid concrete now; cars that touched them could get stuck to them, as on the old guard rails. They glance off now
• Tunnel entrances: the sharp kinks where the road met a tunnel are gone (the whole loop was smoothed: 1300 small corners in the road line down to 73, mostly real hairpin entries). No more step on the shoulder at the portals, and no gap between road and tunnel floor
• Rock inside 13 tunnels removed, and the slab of hillside across the Wassen portal
• Side roads: far fewer bumps where they leave the loop (within 50 m of it: 1812 measured bumps down to 378)
• Bridges: no more pale strip and step where the road runs onto a bridge, no double barriers, and the ground no longer cuts away sharply at bridge, gallery and tunnel ends

Tunnels

• Lights in every tunnel: warm lamps every 25 m along the roof
• Tunnel sound: the engine echoes inside tunnels, and opens up in the avalanche galleries

Signs, markings, posts - to the Swiss signalling ordinance (SSV)

• Road markings are now part of the road surface: no more lines hovering above the asphalt
• Give-way lines and «Kein Vortritt» signs where public side roads join
• Curve warnings before bends and winding stretches (with the stretch length), tunnel signs with the length plus advance signs, white chevron boards round the outside of hairpins
• Marker posts as the SSV draws them: round, white with a black band, a rectangular reflector facing you on the right, two round ones on the left. They are solid now
• Reflectors and road signs catch your headlights at night

Car parks

• Every car park along the loop is a graded, flat asphalt surface now instead of a blotchy patch of photo, with the ground eased in around it
• Painted bays on the public car parks and the Susten lay-by; private ones (hotels, the Furka summit) are open asphalt

Looks

• The orange / red ground under the forest near Gletsch and Gadmen is neutral now. Thanks Milosh for the report
• About 5,000 parked cars removed from the aerial photo beside the road (they were printed on the ground)
• No grass growing through the asphalt in galleries or inside tunnels
• Place-name signs: the back is a plain plate (it showed the end-of-village board)

New default spawn: Wassen, on the Sustenstrasse heading up to the pass.

Changes in 0.9.2

• Fixed: black / untextured terrain around the road on Windows
• Dams: solid dams with a crest and parapets, and the lakes reach right up to them
• Lakes: no more strip of bare lake bed along the shores; the water is built from far fewer pieces, so it is cheaper to draw
• Guard rails: the real W-beam look, with posts and spacers; cars now glance off instead of stopping dead
• Ground around hairpins, bridges and tunnel portals much improved with fine detail meshes: far fewer trenches inside hairpins and cut banks beside bridges, and the portals are no longer see-through
• No more aerial photo pasted on the ground: the roadside and the detail areas take their colour from the survey and their fine detail from tiled ground textures, with a softer transition to the surrounding terrain
• New asphalt: a worn alpine pass surface with wheel tracks, an oil strip down each lane, repair patches and sealed cracks
• Side roads: about 174 km of roads off the loop smoothed out and given proper gravel or asphalt surfaces, with 53 small bridges, among them the gravel track up to the Steinsee
• Buildings: roof overhangs, chimneys and attic windows; windows no longer skewed
• Avalanche galleries: the white sawtooth ground along the open side is gone
• Lake shores follow the real waterline, with a wet band instead of hard pale edges, and clear shallow water
• Small streams: the sound of running water where they pass the road, spray at culverts, splashes
• New: six rally stages with pacenotes, each with start and finish dressing
• PostBus lines with their real numbers, both directions (161, 681, 162). The game always spawns its stock city bus for bus routes; bring your own yellow paint
• The Susten hairpin lay-by levelled and walled by hand
• Vehicle navigator minimap fixed

Known issues in 0.9.3 (0.9 = public beta)

• Side roads further from the loop still have small bumps in places.
• The inside of some hairpins and the ground around some tunnel portals show rough spots (seams, sharp edges). Cosmetic.
• Steep cut banks (e.g. in the Schöllenen gorge) can show stretched, streaky ground texture. Cosmetic.
• Jagged ground at the ends of some dams (Seeuferegg, Räterichsboden). Cosmetic.
• From high above, the ground graded round a car park can show as lighter and darker tiles, and the roadside grass as a band along the road.
• The time trials load and are listed, but have not been driven start to finish yet.
• No cows yet (the game has no animal model); the cowbells are there.

Bug reports and screenshots welcome in the discussion tab.

Credits

• Terrain, aerial photo, roads, buildings, land cover and tree heights: Source: Federal Office of Topography swisstopo (swissALTI3D, SWISSIMAGE, swissTLM3D, swissBUILDINGS3D, swissSURFACE3D), Open Government Data, © swisstopo.
• Distant mountains: produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved.
• Cowbells: "Vaches cloches 01.wav" by Hicham-chahidi (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 3.0; trimmed and looped (the loop is likewise CC BY-SA 3.0).
• Trees, rocks, grass, guard rails and materials: BeamNG.drive's own assets.
• Inspired by BeamNG.Earth by TecnaGamer.

Full credits are in CREDITS.txt inside the zip.