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

Every time I drive this map I get lost somewhere new, which makes these updates showing new places to get lost that much more exciting.

 

You can end up with a 10 gig map when all the road repairs have a backstory as to when they have been fixed and have differing shades of grey according to their age

 

Hahahaha, yes there's dozens of different shades and flavors of asphalt and concrete in this map. Not every road looks the same. Consistency can be good, yes, especially when it comes to road striping. However, they should all be a bit unique, too. It not only helps ME know where to go and where I am, but it helps others figure out what road is what since they all kind of look a bit different, a bit like people in society (exception: highways are pretty consistent - there's newer ones and older ones).
I mean, in a regular FPS game I'd be hung in town square for this many GB's of asphalt textures (hey I paid good money for those!), but in this game - well - it's a driving simulation / crashing simulation. So the road detail and that which is immediate to the road is of utmost importance.
But yes, I'm glad you noticed, as I put A LOT of work into a lot of these thoroughfares in making them both look real and to be true to an engineering standpoint. All of the infrastructure is to be legit from an engineering standpoint as much as possible, but to be there with purpose also and above all BE FUN to be around. Endless winding mountain roads, loads of city streets, over 50 unique miles of highway, tunnels, big bridges (more coming!), double decker highway sections as it winds up the mountains, huge flood control viaducts, and just about every interchange or intersection you could dream of. And then you find the subway system I've installed in sections of the map, with no fanfare, just a kind-of hidden bonus for explorative (or hopelessly lost) players.

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@EUDM fanboy I will keep your suggestion in mind, the tar repairs are touch dark at the moment. Thankfully I can make a fresher version and an older version just with the texture indices, so no extra VRAM weight. This *IS* an AI up-scaled version of an actual picture of real-world road repairs though, but since the layer only includes the tar repairs and not the asphalt underneath, it can be adjusted.

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I promise that each new update, barring those that are solely bug-fix updates (these happen), will always bring you a new place or two to get completely and utterly lost in. I get lost a bit too, hence what I mentioned above where each road is to look just a little bit different. Just look for the biggest road with the most lanes, and you should eventually find a highway one way or another. Except for rather raw unfinished areas; most roads DO go through to SOMEWHERE. So if you drive around long enough, you can usually get up to someplace with a nice vista (view) of the surroundings, and get your bearings in order just enough to get outta there. Don't ever feel bad, I get lost now and then too, but I'm admittedly having this happen less and less as the map gets more character / complete in more places. Eventually most of us will learn this map just like we learned to drive around the city we live in. Hopefully somewhere along the way I get some more road signs up, especially the oh-so-handy green directions ones.
I don't know how many road miles there are, and I'm not sure I could ever count (you can't really go off the loading screen estimates, not even close). There's close to 55 miles of interstate highway, over 100~150 miles of surface roads both rural and urban and it could be over 200 miles by now.

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Map work today just added around a half-mile or so (close to it) of sound barrier along the highway near to where the new development is going in. I also added a dozen or more speed limit signs to the nearby highway in both directions, including the tunnel area not far from there. I need a REDUCED SPEED AHEAD and a TRUCKS SPEED sign made, which I'll do later on this week.
Highway speed limits range from 50mph in winding, twisting hairpin turns or tunnels, to 70mph on the open areas. Not sure if it'll get up to 80mph. Speed limits as far as I'm concerned are set by road conditions, terrain conditions (cliffs, drop-offs nearby etc), how tight turns are, road turn bank angle, entering or exiting traffic (or cross traffic though not on interstates), etc. It should be set to a speed to where most any vehicle can zip along at the speed limit (or +/- 5~7mph) and have no issue hanging onto the road without sliding off or losing control.
Highway signs are 2x the size of surface street signs. Seriously. Next time you hit a USA highway, look how BIG those signs are. They need to be big, they're hard enough to see/read at 55~70mph already even at 2x size of surface road signs. Usually important signs like speed limits on highways are posted on BOTH sides of the travel lanes.

Just an example here. These should be extremely close to or spot-on to regulation size signs. There will be some 'funny' signs added later on in development as I have unused sign slots.
I added an under-construction lot in the development that I'm working on building. It'll just have a footing and some stone in a hole in the ground.
What I do on the map is without a hard schedule; it's somewhat random. Sometimes I'm just nit-picking as we say here, fussing over this and that for reasons which will never be known for all of time.
--That is all.

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Glad you enjoy the backstory! I try to be pretty transparent about everything in life. I still keep enough private for sanity reasons, but I of-course have nothing to be ashamed of. I don't mind sharing some things especially if they're helpful to others. I am human in the end of it all, just like the rest of us. No better, but no worse either. Not much out there upsets me, and words almost never do/can upset me. So I don't mind being such a chatterbox, on here as much as in real life. I generally try to bring a smile to the crowd, and hopefully my game-world creation continues to share that trait also.
Turns out, though I didn't know this when I started, that there's TONS of us (hundreds of thousands) who play driving games with no specific goal other than to drive around and cause various levels of mayhem, as much as just exploring and meditating in our own way. Whether it's on here, in Forza, Just Cause series, or even GTA V or San Andreas (I have a personal soft-spot for San Andreas), it's fun to just cruise around for a while and see what you can get up to. Hopefully I can continue to entertain folks to the high standard I try to set here with this map, far into the future.
Seeing as physically I'm pretty busted up as far as things I CAN actually do, THIS is what I can do. So might as well do it well if I'm going to, am I right? I dreamed of and hence wanted to make something like this for THIRTY years. It just took this long for gaming and world-building / model-building tools to become this accessible. So darn right I'm going to do it, and make every attempt to do it well. As much as I can do, anyways.
I first got my own (used) 486-processor-based PC 30 years ago. If. I. Only. Knew.
Only PC hardware and this game-engine are the limits for this project.
--Cheers!

 

hint blue circle

 

My last post was with my 13100 System with an RTX 3090.

I managed to find a RTX 4090 at my local best buy and picked it up. I figured why not replace the 3090 with the 4090 and see what happens. Of course as to be expected not much performance difference because of being CPU limited.

Settings the same as i've always used

1080P Ultra



4K Ultra



4K Ultra 7 + player car



As you can see vs my other videos with an RTX 3090, zero performance improvement, which was expected.

But now, is there a difference if you get a better CPU? Say an 14900K?

That's exactly what I did, I swapped out the 13100 for a 14900K and I saw a large performance increase.

1080P Ultra



4K Ultra




4K Ultra 10 cars



Then the ultimate killer

4K Ultra 20 cars



Not really playable but its possible.

Now compare the 4K Ultra 20 cars to my i7 12700K (5.2ghz) with an RTX 3090



losing about 10-15fps on average overall.

With today's best hardware this map looks awesome and is a blast to play but not quite with the amount of traffic I would like, but I don't like to turn down settings!

Keep up the great work, and if anyone wants me to do any specific videos showing performance please let me know.

 

Let me know if you get laggy over near the airport and the nearby complex tunnel, as some folks reported issues there. I'd like to know if your super-duper-high-end hardware alleviates any of that (doesn't really lag for me there).
You're lucky to have that much disposable income, coming from a guy who's had to sink much of his disposable income into the house/truck/car etc in the last 6~12 months. Life is this way for all of us sometimes, though. I just have to suck it up for the time being, and I'll get my day one day again. Not broke, but definitely keeping an eye on my expenses lately (as I think most of us have, to be fair). Just make sure you have fun buying PC parts and upgrading your PC.
I'll have to sit and watch the video reels in the morning / around noon when I wake up, for sure. Always interesting to see what people do with Los Injurus, and it really helps me as a game developer (or game environment maker / 3D artist) see what is good/bad or needs improvement to a level that just pictures or words can't always do.
CPU and memory speed are your two biggest hurdles here in BeamNG Drive, once you have a GPU fast enough to keep up. The CPU does not only physics 2000 times a second, but the draw calls handing the GPU work orders are also done on the CPU (as with any game), so the CPU and memory interface pull double duty.
Thanks for noticing all the detail work that goes into the map and it's too-many-textures. It's truly a work of love, something I enjoy doing quite a bit, but it does come at the cost of some serious VRAM requirements. However, we already have plenty of games out there with mud textures and what-not, and I can always cut these down some later-on for a lower-detail version of the map (the fabled legendary potato-spec PC version) once I'm much further along.
Thankfully, 12~16gb cards are coming down to the 250~400$ range now, and they're not junk at this point either.
Single-core speeds will beat-back the mighty beast that is draw calls. Many games are limited to lower FPS because of this, especially DX11 and older renderer titles. It's not that simple though. If you have great single-core boost clocks but require the use of more cores while doing so - such as for physics - it may cause this turbo boost speed not to hold and to drop down due to power/heat reasons or just motherboard BIOS parameters causing it.
So concentrate not just on your single-core boost speed but also multi-core boost speed. Try undervolting the CPU just a bit and see if it helps things. Since CPU silicon is 'binned', your chip is programmed so that even silicon that just barely makes the cut will run at the specified speeds on the box. So you may have one that is 'just good enough' or silicon that's a bit better than that and will run on slightly less voltage, running cooler, leaking less power, and boosting higher for longer. So it's worth toying around a bit sometimes if you want to squeeze that last little bit of performance out of the machine.
*Just for comparison, this several-years-old-machine with it's paltry 3000mhz CL-15 memory and it's dated but still well performing stock-settings Ryzen 3950x and a well-used RTX 3090 in it, can run 40 vehicles or so playable. Playable means 30~40fps or so. Might dip to 28fps at very short intervals, but also goes above 40fps regularly. Didn't try for more. Will see what it does tomorrow with more/less vehicles.
*I mean the 'just for comparison' bit, my PC is old by PC years, in-fact it's four to five years old. I do plan on keeping it for years yet, though. It does all it is asked to do after-all.
I will run the tests again and see how I do, as my own memory could be off, but I had no issue creating huge traffic jams (which, admittedly, is exactly why I bought this CPU, to test for things that only show up in heavy traffic).
"Congradulations! : You've just spent a ton of money to create what in real-life we both dread and avoid - a traffic jam!"
I wouldn't go replacing your computer though, in-fact I think you have some pretty respectable performance there.
The tough thing is right now, you don't have a lot of options to go higher on performance without going into the workstation, or picking up a 7800x3D/7950x3D chip/board to experiment with.
As always is the case (because you just picked up a CPU) there is a new one - a *14900KS, that is just going to be out in the next few weeks, it might be a hair faster (6.2ghz turbo), but otherwise not otherwise note-worthy.
I wouldn't bother with it, as 200mhz of an increase at 6ghz isn't even 5% anymore, I'm not even sure it's 4% at this point, and it's only for a short bit until those heat/power limits come into play - same as before.
14900KS reportedly launching in mid-March - SFW Videocardz news site link
Don't feel too bad, in-fact, be happy your computer is happily plodding along fast as can be. I don't think there's really much to complain about there. Unless you plan on plunking down serious cash for a Threadripper platform, I wouldn't worry about performance too much more.
There is a bit of a 4090 shortage too, so you lucked out.
Please keep in mind that my performance levels were at 1080p, I don't have any higher resolution screens (would be nice, but meh, I'll get to that one day).

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THANK-YOU, totally forgot about that one! I really got to do a better job of putting the kabosh on those carving guides.
They don't call me Blunderton for nothin! Looks like I'm earning my keep as far as names go.
Never too late for a bug report, and it is highly appreciated.

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I partly say never too late for a bug report due to the fact that I wasn't even working in the map editor tonight, I was in-stead perfecting a building model and toying with this LOD generator tool. It's a mesh optimizer, LOD generator, etc - The whole works. It's that new software I was looking into two weeks ago and am finally getting to figure out, which I'd mentioned last week or so.
Some buildings are FAR, FAR too complicated to do a manual LOD on to any decent visual presentation, so this software will come in super-duper handy if it works well enough. It's really hard to find good affordable software that works. Trying to use the mesh-detail reducer built into Maya is just a big fat NOPE, so hopefully this one works well enough (and it includes a plugin for Maya so this should be a big help if that works also).
So I'll be continuing the work in the morning/around noon tomorrow, when my head isn't causing me so much misery. My health has been a total write-off the last few months, but hopefully with the warm weather just around the corner, that I can put those dark days behind me - without costing me a ton of my time that is best used on this project.
Click the SAFE-FOR-WORK picture below for a larger variant.

 

I did manage to get something usable out of that software, we'll see how much the game likes it in the near future (I have to sort out some draw call monitoring software here 1st, I have it I just have to figure it out).
On another note, I also created manually a super-low-detail version and a collision mesh for this, so it's otherwise game-ready now once the textures are added to the texture indices. Otherwise it'll be the unabashed orange we all know.
Please click the picture at the bottom for full-detail shot of it. I made sure to label the four models in the shot so you can see what's going on, even when you don't usually get to see it. Italicized stuff below explains more on this.
Full detail - self explanatory - this is what you see when you're right in-front of it or have crashed into it
Optimized - this is medium detail and will handle ranges of distance of where it's in-view close enough to matter but you're more than a half-block from it. Distance such as within two miles. This is 11 draw calls. You won't be able to tell this from the full detail version unless you're within a half-block or so from it unless you have 4k, then the distance would be about double that far to be able to tell.
Low detail version - this is what you'll see from sky-cam map, in-stead of a poorly faked billboard that's badly tweaked at that angle anyways. This only requires 6 draw calls in total, and could be even less if I use a mosaic texture here.
Colmesh - this is what interacts with the player and their vehicle; also an acronym short for 'collision mesh'. Most games use dedicated collision meshes these days to speed up and otherwise save a lot of CPU time determining what the player can pass through (such as foliage or a busted window) and what the player can collide with (walls floors stairs railings etc).
For those in question, the total draw call budget for any scene, in any direction, with one vehicle, should NEVER exceed 5000 draw calls in this game. Otherwise, the FPS on most good desktop machines will drop below 60, and portables will drop below 30~40fps at this point. A vehicle is usually 800 draw calls or around there, with traffic-only vehicles being a bit less than that (which is exactly why there are traffic-optimized vehicles, a feature I requested some time ago). There is a spot near the default spawn to be fixed that gets to over 5300 draw calls, and yes I am aware of it.
If I were to use the full model as the collision mesh, the game's FPS would suffer whenever your vehicle interacted with (touched or crashed into) this building. Not so much an issue for a tiny little single-family one-story home with 200 triangles or so, but a big issue with a building this size with around 52,000 triangles versus the dedicated collision mesh's 3300 triangles. Still, using said dedicated collision mesh helps you weed out those narrow faces (narrower than a few CM generally speaking) and oddly-shaped long triangles that otherwise would not interact properly with your vehicle/player (eating cars and car tires/tyres, cars passing through some faces/triangles when they shouldn't, generally getting stuck).
The game picks out which detail level to display by how close you are to the object, and culls the object entirely if it is out of the view plane (field of view) or if you've turned away from it. Too many levels of detail on a commonly re-used object (trees, rock faces, bridge pillars) can actually make things worse for the renderer, because like-levels of detail will batch-render - but different levels of detail displayed at the same time won't batch render (which means, render ALL at once basically for free). Also, each additional level of detail adds to the object size - not so bad on one object, but across the whole city and you'll have another GB or two of data (or more) sitting in VRAM that otherwise wouldn't have had to be there. Too few levels of detail and you get model pop-in, as some of the original houses in this map suffer from (those will get their day once again when I go over and polish/optimize some more of them, hence I'm learning new software to hopefully expedite this process).
Vulkan rendering, when properly programmed, will help distribute draw calls among the many cores present in today's processors. Even quad-core processors from 10~15 years ago can benefit from this. This is in contrast to DirectX11's mostly single-threaded draw call engine, which is stuck (in almost all cases and implementations) to a single core of your processor. This is why some games - including this one - get hung up with a single core at 100% use, while the GPU and the rest of the CPU cores aren't full utilized. Yes folks, this is why Fallout 4 loses so much FPS in busy areas and downtown, and gets worse yet if you use mods and turn off 'use precombines' in the ini to use a 'scrap mod' for settlement building (the game has pre-combined chunks of the scene when done in the editor, this reduces draw calls on similar but not identical objects by combining them - think building pieces like I use with identical trim or windows shared across multiple objects). However, the game still dragged when you got to the top of the Corvega factory or slugged through downtown Boston.
Even the early versions of the most recent edition of Flight Simulator - published by Microsoft (though not developed by them) used DirectX11 and fell victim to the same fate - choked with draw calls - until a DirectX 12 or Vulkan renderer version came out a while after launch.
I'd like to not make a repeat of this with my own city here, in BeamNG Drive.
Do know that work continues, whenever I'm not in absolute agony / falling asleep on myself without trying... ugh!
If anything is unclear to you when I speak of modeling objects/buildings etc, making the game environment itself within the game, or talking about rendering, draw calls, and all the other fun stuff, please let me know and point it out so that I may correct this. Those of you following along with this resource thread will already know much of this stuff, though I do understand that not everyone has all the time to read these seemingly endless posts.
--That is all (audience coughs) for right now.

 

Half-mile or so of the highway has been upgraded.
Two new bridges, one over a (new) wider arterial road (5 lane total, plus bike lanes on each side), another bridge is over watershed area (think: drainage, low spots, tidal pools, etc).
There will be an interchange here, but notably I don't have the ramps in yet. There will also be a new coastal / sand-bar(s) style residential area here too with a few small bridges.
Please ignore spare pillars, random road chunks or road striping laying about, unfinished / unleveled terrain etc. This is what I am rather busy working on here, as such it is heavily W.I.P.

Jersey barriers under the bridge are actually about 30% bigger than standard ones, to prevent vehicles entering the "sidewalk" area with the pillars (to protect said pillars).
Thankfully, I was able to spawn the Knight Industries Mobile Command Center trailer to help with the clearance checks on this highway overpass, that's why it's just sitting there.
This road will replace some of the road nearby that goes up the mountain, eventually winding down to two lanes as it goes up the hillside (will keep a truck climbing lane for some of it).
Just to note, the super-duper unrealistically-hilly road nearby here will become a circuit track (race track!) that is part asphalt and part dirt surface. A road nearby will be partly detoured for this case. I have too much fun on that small pile of hills to get rid of it (that's why it's there in the first place, all the way back from 2016~2017 or whenever it was).
Again, keep in mind, this is heavily a work in progress. So please excuse the half-done work in the shots.
Also, to the bug reporters, thank-you for your services. I have removed the hanging / floating carving guides (orange things) over the ocean around the map. I think I got them all - but we shall see, won't we? I will double check to be sure. I have plenty more things to fix though, to be sure.
Whenever the next beta releases (not that far off), I will try to make the joinery of the new and older sections of highway fairly straight-forward, so as to not upset the vehicle at speed too greatly.
The newly upgraded sections of the highway only have around ~3 miles (4 or 5 km?) to go to meet up, but that won't be finished in time completely for the next beta. Otherwise the beta would be pushed back another week to two weeks or so. Keep in mind that spring time is just about here, as it's beautiful outside today (but I'm just-about cripple at the moment for today), as such this means progress on the map is just slightly slower (since real-life tends to interfere). Just trying to be transparent about everything with those who are interested in and those kind folks who support this project.
Got some texture tips from the staff a few days ago (thanks!), and do plan to implement these on my PBR texturing in the future (this road textures in the last shot are PBR, one of the first).
PBR texturing will be slowly implemented over the course of the calendar year, however this might mean removing just a select few of the building texture variations to keep things related to VRAM use in check. It shouldn't affect the map negatively over-all, as the improved render quality will FAR outweigh any loss in variation. The road texture variations will of-course stay, and in contrast the road textures will have some resolution enhancements where I deem necessary (such as the set of asphalt and concrete "old highway" textures, which are a bit low-res, especially bad on medium/low GFX detail settings, where the striping all but disappears beyond 100 meters from the camera). On the old concrete highway textures, if a resolution doubling does not improve the striping fade-out at distance sufficiently, I will experiment on using custom mip-maps to help preserve the sight-distance on the striping.
Now where'd I put all those orange construction barrels? I know I had them around here somewhere...
--That is all for right now.

 

GET LOST! ... on a whole NEW road ... or at-least an extended and improved one (well some of it leading up to and under/beyond the highway is new). Parts of the old road are still there, in-fact, and will be a part of a side-road now. A pair of highway entrance/exit ramps will be where the orphaned pillars are, on each side. I'm really liking how this turned out though, I must say.
While I didn't mean to be rude though it sure sounds that way; I've put the intro to the post the way I did because of comments how others, like myself, tend to get LOST in this gargantuan game environment.
Shots are listed in primarily left to right order then moving down and repeating left-to-right (et all).
1st shot - the main road under the camera is the new one (it is the largest SURFACE ROAD), while the road on the right with the hills/curves is the one that will become a mostly asphalt race circuit.
The road previously occupying the more curving areas of this track will be detoured a bit and re-carved elsewhere to service the same general area. More roads will be added as there will be developed areas (where the grey sections of sandbar are) with condos and small stores in a mixed-use (almost Florida-like) setup. This isn't solely to mimic California, after-all. Think: Vice City, complete with some liberal heaping of mid-century art-deco buildings and all that fine goodness.
2nd/3rd shot - new 5-lane route carved into the terrain, winding gently through the sloped terrain with gentle banking. Plenty of drift room here. The upper-half of this wide route mostly follows the previous alignment of the old road. The terrain has been changed up a bit to help make things a little more natural in regards to the new road elevation.
4th ~ 8th shot - new intersection with closed-off incomplete road walled off, creating a hard 90-degree turn in the road. 25mph corner signs are posted ahead of it's location in both directions, with plenty of chevrons and a few arrow boards to make this very visible to approaching traffic. Will this road ever be finished, or will a closed-off incomplete road add some immersion to the map?
Previous to the improvements done today, there was a very hard 90 degree angle in the (much narrower) road for seemingly little reason. Now you know why, as I'd just never gotten this far with the road carving in this area.
The wide main surface road here was heavily gone over with the smoothing tool. Thus, as the case for most wide roads in this map, it is friendly to some drifting at nominal speeds. Hoons rejoice!

I hope you enjoy a look into a small bit of what's coming in the next beta. Please input your thoughts as appropriate including what you might vision being out this way in close proximity to the island air-force base in the far distance of the last shot. Yes, I spent over an hour and a half just doing up the 90-degree intersection in the last shots. Time spent yes, but also yes to the well-worth-it variety, too.
Also, some things (like the ramps on the cloverleaf in the distance) fade-out too early at distance and don't have proper terrain coloring either, so details may seem missing that otherwise would/should be present. I'll get that straightened out if possible (some roads don't respect fade-in settings, it's a game-bug) prior to the next beta update, if I remember and/or have time. Terrain coloring is used to help road networks and different types of terrain be visible from both up-close and far away (Well, up close if there wasn't a road image covering it up) even after the game fades-out the road graphic to help keep spare CPU (not just GPU) resources for the rest of the scene. FACT: Some roads are semi-transparent like stained glass or wood stain is - this enables yet another layer to road appearance and kills off repetition readily - features which some roads already use. The reason for so many entries in the road texture index is partly due to varying transparency settings. I wouldn't need as many, if it wasn't for the poor result of when they overlap at intersections or where the road changes width (adding or removing lanes), so matching fully opaque versions are infinitely handy in this regard. I do not make use of - nor intend to use - pre-made intersection *graphics* for roads, but conversely physical meshes of pre-made intersections do exist for the city roads kit where much less variations are needed - at-least on grid-friendly-streets.
Again do keep in mind this stuff is half-done, and as-such, is much subject to change and more than copious amounts of nit-picking/obsessing.
--That is all.

 

More highway got done (another half-mile or so). It is graded, banked, and has it's chevrons (all of them).
Jump has been added to the new concrete barrier blocking at the hard corner in the race course, for those NOT racing and just clowning about.
That's about all I've got done at the moment, as I won't be on the editor the whole night tonight.

Cliff face by the ocean is only just barely created (it's the height difference between the highway level of the terrain and the sandy shore-line / beach area), so it doesn't have any detailing yet.
On/off ramps on this side of the shot (last shot in distance by lone / orphaned pillar) have been carved in but no road detailing on it yet.
The race track will be widened before the next beta release... not by a terrible amount on the hills, but wider definitely in the corners and in the sloping banked turns. "Vertical Overtaking" is it's name.
The race track will be 'orphaned' on it's own 'AI island' so to speak. Not a geographic island, but it won't be connected to the rest of the AI in the map, so that vehicles stay on the track.
The jump at the end of the track, you can see there's plenty of room if you've come the other direction (toward the last shot's camera), so that'll eventually get it's own non-intrusive jump too. You can bet on that. If it adds to the fun, it goes into the game environment! Why wouldn't you add something fun??? Don't know if it'll make the beta or not though.
--That is all right now.
EDIT: That jump makes a perfect hatchback every time.

 

Whenever I open the BeamNG website again after a week or two there is a rich documentation of all the progress being made on this incredible map! I wish I had more than a potato to play on it xD

 

Added 2.7 more miles of road (not highway, just surface roads mostly on the sand bars), along with leveling out buildable area that will have various buildings on it. You can't see the roads for the most part aside of the grey terrain color, but they're there. Wish they didn't fade out so soon (I know there's a setting for it, it sometimes works, meh).
Consistency notice for users of my game environment resources in the level editor, specifically the MRK (modular road kit) below, if you don't use the level editor please skip this bolded part:
The concrete + brick curb set will be changed in the next revision of the map (next beta). It will become solid concrete in-stead of concrete sidewalk + brick inlay where the planting strip would be. This is so that there's not excess versions more than I need and solid concrete will do just fine. If you made use of the brick and concrete sidewalk set in your own map or project, back up the texture it uses, as otherwise it will convert to solid concrete. These SWO_brick_xxxxxx pieces won't be featured in future versions, so keep your old models. New SWC_xxxxxx pieces will replace these functionally. Again, If you aren't aren't making your own game level, please ignore this bolded text. Only difference in the model is the texture it references.

Not even half done here, but one pair of on/off ramps are in / graded / paved / needs signs striping and curbing etc.
Still have to put the other pair of on/off ramps in which will be a jug-handle style, making this a hybrid interchange.
That's all for right now.

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Aw shucks, you'll get a better one some day bro. It's a potato but it's YOUR potato and you own it.
Ask friends for old computers. Hobble upgrades together out of parts. Use youtube videos to figure out how, it's fun!
Get a MSI b450 MAX motherboard used, a cheap 35~40$ ddr4 3000~3200mhz DDR4 memory kit, and a used Ryzen 3500 or 3600 processor. Even a 3200g / 3400g will do in a pinch, but make sure that works with the motherboard before you get it. Make sure the processor comes with the default cooler. The MAX includes out-of-box 3000-series support. Even a B350/A320 with a Ryzen 1300 processor on it and a cooler for under 100$ would be good enough.
Keep in mind this means you'd need a video card, otherwise get a G-series processor as only G-series processors have on-board video. Usually you can use a video card out of your old computer, or get a known-working used one decently cheap with 4gb of VRAM on it (that's enough for low or medium).
If your existing computer is an ATX / EPS standard machine (e.g. isn't one of the big-name computers like Dell or HP with proprietary parts) you can put these in as an upgrade and your machine should continue working. You might have to reinstall the OS, but you can pick up a key if having done that invalidates Windows, usually for under 20 bucks on one of those CD-key sites or even on FleaBay (Ebay).
If you don't know how to do all that, get one of those USED recertified/refurbished workstation machines from HP, Lenovo, etc, that comes with an SSD and some type of half-decent video card with 4gb of VRAM on it for under 200$ and you'll have your self a nice machine, especially if it comes with at-least 16gb of RAM. A good bit of food for thought is to look for 'Microsoft certified Refurbisher' or 'HP certified refurbished' etc, and good user reviews. You can get one that's a few years old and have a really kick-butt computer on the cheap. It won't be as upgradeable as a hand-built one, but it's hard to pass up the value in components a few generations old when you don't have the budget of The Royal Palace of England.
You aren't in much different of a situation than most people, even me. I'd still be using the machine from 2014 if it didn't start acting up when the substation down the road went critical and threw 40,000 volts through the 880v distribution / service lines around here back in 2019. I'm disabled and on a fixed income, though the donations from supporters of the project here helps fund computer replacement parts (for when the PC takes beamng crashing to heart and lets out the magic smoke), unplanned doctor visits, emergency car repairs, or for coaxing the house's furnace back to the living. Said donations don't go to 'I wants' they ONLY go to 'I needs' and 'project needs' like models such as buildings and also to textures / software / scripts / sounds / music for this project. HOWEVER, I'm a stickler for only getting things I can pay for in cold hard cash and not taking out loans ON ANYTHING, as there's always a cost for that.
This gets into the next part of things, barring being a (lucky!) minor, you get so exposed to so many places wanting to give you things on payments, loans, both short term and long. The costs/difficulty of being trapped in debt are akin to something almost inescapable. So, if it comes down to it, pick up something used if possible, and that includes a computer if you can pay it out-right in cash. If you're under-age, see if there's some things you can do to raise money, or some old clothes or shoes or even video games you can sell to make some cash - of-course with parents permission - as I don't want your mum (as positive-minded as she may be) swatting me to death with a fly-swatter very slowly and painfully.
Maybe there's things you can do for your family or friends that could make you some extra cash, even if you're an adult.
That said, I don't have as much as some people, but for a guy who's stuck at the computer a lot due to disability, I honestly can't complain and also have no buyer's remorse for what I (have to) spend on PC stuff. Do know that while material possessions are nice to have, they're not everything, and that I myself would give everything I own twice over to have a working skeleton again, to be able to do the things most people do on a daily and usually don't think twice about it.
I don't have much, but I still had money saved away to spend about 200$ to put together a like-new system for my mother (new PSU, SSD, Case, motherboard, Zalman CPU cooler I got for a pittance, other stuff was known-good used stuff I got out of PC's destined for the trash), to replace her FIFTEEN YEAR OLD computer that was so old that the bottom was nearly rusted through on the PC case and it sounded like a drill when it was on. Still works though.
You will get through this. It could be worse. You have a PC even if it's old, you live in a house etc etc - I say this not as a parent - I say this as someone who did not have a home all the time in his adult years.
Even if you're not religious, or if you're a devoted athiest, I'll still say a prayer for ya that maybe better days will shine for you. I been there... but do know there's still 30+ years of games you can run. I know for a fact TANK WARS* would run on that PC in DosBox even if you have a lowly much-reviled Pentium 4 - and I STILL play that semi-regularly.
If you wish to let me know the computer make/model, and as much about the PC hardware that you can figure out (like stuff listed on the BeamNG status screen that says your cpu, RAM, and video card), I might be able to assist you in either modifying the map locally or finding cheap upgrades that can help you enjoy this mod / this game more. Also, it helps to let me know if you're knowledgeable in working inside a computer case, or if you have a friend or family member who can do these things without sending the computer to the big desk in the sky.
I firmly wish you the best bro and glad you took time to provide some input on the project... and glad you like my overly transparent straight-up nature of presenting progress - and even things that don't always have to do with it.
*TANK WARS is a 100% free scorched-earth clone for DOS that requires a 286mhz PC-compatible (or DosBox and a Pentium 4 from 2003 or newer) computer to run. It's a lot of fun if you know enough of DOS to make it go.
P.S. edit: There will be a low-detail potato-certified version of this map sometime in the not-super-distant future, but I must complete much more of the map first before I commit to do this, as otherwise I'm essentially doing TWO projects.

 

The other two on/off ramps are in, so the interchange is now driveable from any direction and is functionally complete.
The highway now has it's chevrons on that 1st turn also (the 2nd long turn has them also).
Small set of barriers added on the shoulder where the road has slumped away before one of the exits.
40MPH speed limit signs added to the surface road, and to where the one pair of ramps becomes a surface road (including two sets of warning signs for the two different T-intersections on it).
Ramps on either end won't be signaled intersections at this point in time (and may or may not be signaled at a later date, not sure, depends what ends up here). They do have stop signs however.

For editing purposes the water has been disabled from the render queue, so that I can work with the terrain a little easier. Don't worry; it's still there, you just can't see it for this moment.
--That's all for right now. Bunch of little changes too, not worth mentioning at the moment.

 

Excellent work as always.

 

Question, will there ever be working fuel stations in the next update? I feel like that would add more immersion to the map. This map is pretty dope already, keep it up!

 

Eventually there will be some type of refuel function at fuel stations. Sometime between when I figure it out, and when the map is done. Sorry I can't be specific... doing a lot of stuff IRL and in the map lately and haven't even given it much thought in the last few months. It'll get functional traffic lights (as far as AI can see it terms) and random spawned-in parked vehicles, too.

Thank-you, glad you like it!

 

I have an upcoming post with a bunch of pictures showing performance among the computers I've used recently, but I thought I would post a little teaser, and maybe its already know, but I tested out the Vulkan Render on this map..........
100% performance increase! Its amazing.

4K Ultra settings, dynamic reflections ect ect.......over 150fps.

Here is a short video showing the performance in the same style i've done before



And the non Vulkan render



And A screenshot showing the massive difference.

 

Well in between all the crashes, I managed to get 40 cars spawned and was able to drive around.........60fps in Vulkan, I wish it was more stables as the performance is so much better.

Might be a few minutes but here is the video link

 

A little bit more time to play around in Vulkan

Here is 60 (yes 60 cars spawned) I had to do them in 2 30 car increments for the game to not crash, obviously its not overly playable but it is 30fps.



Then here is 60 cars using the regular renderer........absolutely unplayable.




Coming up later this week, I ordered a 7800X3D and i'll be putting together a system and putting in my RTX 4090 to see if the 3D cache does anything in Beam, and specifically this map i'm pretty sure it won't but I need to put together another system for gaming in the house so I figured i'd give it a try.

 

There's the 7950x3D also, do not forget, just in-case you enjoy your 7800x3D a little too much.
You get likely bursts of higher FPS on the intel (VS AMD) but only sustained higher FPS with an overclocked, super-well-water-cooled chip with good RAM. AMD chips tend to be more consistent especially with A LOT of vehicles, where the MESH interconnect tends to win-out over the single/dual RING-BUS style system common on intel chips (that's not the same for intel servers, which also use MESH, along with high-core-count workstation chips). Now I don't know what's changed since the introduction of those pesty E-cores, but the single/dual ring-bus systems are less latency for single to a few tasks, but once you get to about quad-core utilization, the single ring bus saturates, and dual-ring-bus is about equal to mesh interconnects at 6~7 cores. These mesh / ring-bus designs affect how the cores access both cache memory and pass data to one-another.
If you have a whole lot of tasks, mesh is the way to go, but increasing cache memory on the CPU design or adding on-chip 3D V-cache on Ryzen helps this significantly, by not only removing the need to go to system memory but not having to deal with mesh or ring-bus in the first place (you still access 3D v-cache at the speed of memory but with a LOT less latency).
x3D chips differ from regular Ryzen series in that they are therefor significantly less RAM speed dependent, so you don't need the absolute best stuff available. Most reviewers are using DDR5-6400 low-latency kits to get the best out of Ryzen chips regardless and it's pretty reliable to hit those numbers with a half decent board or better. So I wouldn't go with generic base-spec memory at any rate, not for a second... but you don't have to pay for the best gold-plated diamond-encrusted stuff out there either (unless of-course you really want it to blind you better while gaming, as if gamer-stuff in general doesn't try to stuff your eyes with enough rainbows so as it is).
Now of-course you don't get to choose what kind of connection your CPU uses beyond which CPU series you choose.
All Ryzens use mesh. 5000-GT, any G-series and any mobile chips use an all-in-one design without an SOC, while desktop chips have an SOC to help connect to all the chipset features and have more PCI-express lanes and such. SOC is like a chipset but it's another little chip on the same silicon as your CPU dies sit. Whenever stuff leaves the CPU, it does so through the SOC if it has one. B-series and X-series AMD motherboards also have an additional SOC functioning as the chipset on the motherboard, through which Sata, USB 2.0 / additional USB 3.x, and some other stuff is connected. A-series AMD motherboards lack this additional motherboard SOC chip and therefor have less connectivity (though fine for office/HTPC use). Increasing the mesh speed on Ryzen chips can be done, but tread carefully as instability can come quickly. Try to keep mesh speed locked to memory speed, or a ratio there-of. Otherwise, RAM has to be boosted an additional 300mhz or so to overcome this not being in sync. Ryzen performance can be boosted with turning PBR on, but also, keep in mind that additional marginal gains can be gotten with performance optimizer in Ryzen Master with how it tunes the boost curves to your specific chip.
All Intel desktop chips generally-speaking are currently (to my best knowledge) using dual-ring-bus with single-ring-bus being relegated to lower-end chips like i3 and pentium-branded chips (they're changing to ULTRA branding this year btw). Intel i7/i5 chips didn't move to dual ring-bus until around Coffee-lake (8000) or the following generation, but it did help multi-core performance stack better by keeping the scheduler (and hence the cores) waiting less (just like Hyperthreading / SMT does on Intel/AMD chips, as it's merely a scheduler enhancement to keep cores busy more without so much waiting on fetching the next task as soon as part of a processing pipeline inside the CPU is freed up). Moving from single to dual ring-bus essentially halved the maximum wait-time that the scheduler would have to wait for completion of a fetch/store command (among much else). Moving to MESH means that while it might take a tiny bit longer for a single core to get data fetch/store commands complete when only a single core is doing the work VS a ring-bus design, as soon as you get a few cores going strong it's almost always faster. That's why servers and high-end workstation (and Ryzen) parts always use mesh topology. Intel HEDT parts (with the exception of some quad-core 7000-series) almost always use MESH and have for some time, for the same reason they are given more maximum memory channels - more maximum bandwidth.
TLDR - Mesh is better with it's consistency, you won't get the micro-stutters of ring-bus when maxing out the poor CPU, but a dual-core / single-core game might never be the wiser to said performance advantages. Beamng = best with mesh topology processor layout, fast low latency ram, and still a good core boost speed to crank out draw/render calls when many AI vehicles are on-screen (which is why your 60-car test makes DirectX-11 cry as anything 40-and-over generally does). Friends don't let friends DirectX-11 render Los Injurus, unless of-course IF using Vulkan crashes your GPU a lot.
You may elect to test with E-cores on and off if you haven't done so already. You can enter BIOS and on select motherboards use a hot-key like scroll lock to dock (disable) the e-cores for the remainder of the session to test performance differences.
30fps with 60 vehicles is pretty good, actually. I will have to try and give Vulkan another shot, since I recently updated the video driver after testing Cyberpunk 2077 ended up completely locking the game up in short order.
MAKE SURE - ABSOLUTELY SURE - YOU ENABLE REBAR / SAM OPTION IN BIOS, VIDEO DRIVERS CONTROL PANEL OR WHEREVER ELSE AND LEAVE IT ENABLED. This is almost essential for all 3000/4000 or newer Nvidia cards and Radeon VII/5000/6000/7000 series graphics cards. This enables the system to use spare empty VRAM as it needs for other things, this does NOT detract from usable video memory nor need any OTHER input from you.
As always, I appreciate all the time you take to make performance feedback videos (and also something I'll throw on the resource page the next time I update it). This is why I also don't mind helping throw some pointers out for you and a lot of tech knowledge. Having all that cash for PC parts is great, but not if the buyer is uninformed Do enjoy, regardless.
May the computer that's best at computering win!
Youtube videos from the likes of Gamer's Nexus and Hardware Unboxed can be nice to watch for hardware tips, and Hardware Unboxed just did a nice one about VRAM and it's effect on gaming FPS for example. For server tech, Level1Techs is done very well as are some others, good stuff to know for the tech that eventually trickles-down to desktops.
I don't honestly recommend the other tech youtubers due to the hyper disorder being very grating on myself and other adults (no offense to those that have it, it's my personal preference), not to mention sometimes affecting their resultant works' quality. Evidence of this was front-and-center with the Linus Tech Tips scandal of throwing out too much too fast, and making a whole lot of errors - both big and small. I don't hate people with ADHD, certainly don't paint me into a corner on it, However, in terms of being a good presenter, you shouldn't have the word LIKE in almost every sentence due to the hyper-stammering and not pacing themselves. Good public speaking courses would go a long way with him.
Seriously, I dare someone to pull up a Youtube Linus Tech Tips WAN SHOW video - any of them - and pull up the transcript, and use SEARCH feature in there to count the word LIKE in there. It's got to be in the three or four digit range. Drives. Me. NUTS. I'd sooner listen to someone drag a giant centipede with it's 46 legs across the world's longest chalkboard.
...as long as I don't have to marry that unfortunate centipede and thus forced to buy shoes for it, it's all good.

---

Did a lot of work on the sand-bar islands area. A LOT. Hours and hours of work. Lots of buildings will go here, but no giant centipedes. Probably not chalk boards either. So I think we're safe, for now.

The highway has gotten further, around yet another corner, complete with chevrons, and applicable grading for the sides.
At-least another mile or so of surface road has been carved and laid-out. It's a little rough in spots, but it's not designed for high-speed, so drivers must use a little more caution here.
Lots and lots of seawall has been installed, likely around a mile of it. Lots of little terrain adjustments for it to fit nicely.
Some access points (read: stairs in the sea wall for beach / fishing access) and a boat ramp* were added. Don't drown.
The main surface road that accesses the highway (the big 5-lane) has been detailed/striped all the way to the main 5-lane on the sand-bar that runs perpendicular to it. The main route will continue past here, over some arching bridges across another sand bar and finally to a check-point to the base-adjacent government-owned residential area on the island.
You should already know by now that the arching bridges will happily oblige to lob hapless speeders upward for copious (and hazardous) amounts of air-time. Not like car jumping over the check-point would be a security risk or anything.
This map IS known for vertical passing for a reason.
While the arching bridges might not make the next beta, the amount of highway I needed to complete before releasing the next beta has been completed tonight... after 8~10 hours of working on this almost non-stop, sans one heck of a sugar crash earlier that made my legs feel like ice cubes and the rest of me very very weak / short of breath / famished. I survived, somehow, after eating several fast-acting glucose pills. That's why I keep those at the desk...
*Boat ramp is likely 2x as steep as it needs to be. I know this, and it'll be tamed a bit in future screen caps, it's just preliminary. Do we even HAVE a boat or anything that floats to test this with??? I can't really test THIS with a piano...
...or a giant centipede on an unrealistically long chalkboard. That might get me nibbled, painfully nibbled (stung!) at that.
--Before any more misfortune comes to me or any other (and likely more innocent) person, that is all!