Jungle Rock Island Peninsula Road

Any reason why the peninsula road was so drastically changed?
It was a great road, especially for rallying, but now there's not much left of it.

 

Was extremely disappointed about this in the update, it actually ruined my day. The length and challenge of the old map was such a rarity across pretty much any racing game. In fact I cant think of any map from any game that is half as good as the peninsula routes. I've probably spent around 280 of my 315 hours in this game trying to perfect this route and tuning cars specifically to get every possible bit of speed out of this map. I would start at the port spawn and make a right onto the peninsula road, then take it all the way to the ring road and do a lap of that. Flying across the narrow winding road in a stripped down 480hp 200bx on slicks was exhilarating, when the slightest mistake would send you off a cliff or into a tree at 130mph, and you had to keep it up for 15 minutes straight. If you were ever curious what it feels like driving a real car on an actual track, this was about the closest you could get. The excitement and level of concentration needed to have an all out perfect run was unmatched, no other game has come close.

Really hoping someone can put up a mod for the classic map soon, I'd do it myself if I had any idea how.

 

**UPDATE**

I've kind of got the old map back. I'm still messing around with it, and I still don't really know what I'm doing. I've made some progress and I thought I'd share. It also seems uploading the old map as a mod is not okay, as the uploader does not own any of the files (they are IP belonging to BeamNG). I didn't do much looking into the details of this as I still don't have much interest in creating content for this game.

If you are on steam, you can do a rollback to game version 0.14 for directx10 compatibility. Rollback is available in the steam "beta branch". From here you can do an update and load up Beam 0.14, which will include old Jungle Rock Island (you can play the map here, but there were a lot of other improvements made between 0.14 and 0.21, first thing you'll notice are the shitty sounds). Also I think there were some minor changes to the map between 0.14 and the version right before the revamp, the road is the same though.
Once the game has been rolled back, search the game files for the levels folder and copy the folder for jungle rock island ("jungle_rock_island"). Place this in a temporary folder for you to work in separate from the Beam folder. Now you can opt out of the beta and update Beam back to 0.21.
Read this guide on how to create a new map: https://wiki.beamng.com/Starting_a_new_map_project
We won't follow every step, also don't delete anything, the tutorial is for getting to a completely blank slate, which we don't want. Keeping the folders and "prefab" files intact will keep all of the scenarios and quick events, many of which seem to have been changed or removed in the new map.

You will want to rename the entire folder to something like jungle_rock_island_classic and the jungle_rock_island.ter.json and jungle_rock_island.ter files (one .json and one .ter file, I used jungle_rock_island_classic for the folder, jungle_rock_island_classic.terrain.json and jungle_rock_island_classic.ter).
Next, search the entire jungle_rock_island_classic folder for any .cs files (use the search bar and search .cs to get all of them together in one window). Now select every result and edit the files in notepad++, you want every file you need to change open in notepad++ for this to work. Do a ctrl+F to search for all "jungle_rock_island" and replace with the new name (jungle_rock_island_classic). Notepad++ has the ability to replace all in all open files. Doing this got me about 640 replacements across all files. What this is doing is renaming all the filepaths so the game pulls assets from the "_classic" folder and not the default "jungle_rock_island" folder (which is the new map). Save all changes to the .cs files. (This might have renamed some things in certain files that shouldn't have been, but I'm not sure, i did this instead of manually going thru folders and opening each individual materials.cs file and doing the replace. I also saw some filepaths in other .cs files that were not materials.cs files that looked like they should be replaced, so I did a search for all .cs files and replaced everything. I think it's okay)

Now open the info.json file. Find the line that says Title: "............" and replace the text inside the quotations with Jungle Rock Island Classic. This file determines what level info is displayed inside the menus, the Title field is the name of the level. Don't forget to save.

Now place this folder into the same area where you put mod level folders when doing a manual install (for me: This PC\Documents\BeamNG.drive\levels).

Boot up the game and enter freeroam, you should see the new Jungle Rock Island and Jungle Rock Island Classic next to each other. Spawn in to the classic map, I recommend the port spawn because you will spawn in on the ground. The map will look familiar, but you are not done. The terrain will be the new map, but the world textures will be the old map.

Make sure the game is in windowed mode and hit F11 to enter the world editor. Select the terrain editor tool from the toolbar (icon is some mountains and a wrench) to open the terrain toolbar. From here, select import terrain to open the import window and do the following:

The terrain name is theTerrain, don't change it.
Meters per Pixel should be 1, don't change it.
Change Max Height from 50 to 200. (this number is from the main.level.json file, ctrl+F terrain in that file to find it)
Height Map Image is theTerrain_heightmap.png
Hole Map Image is jungle_rock_island.ter.depth.png (I think, it seems fine if you skip this and imports with and without this selected seem the same)
Add a texture map with the "+" button and select the map layers, there's 9 of them.
-theTerrain_layerMap_0_groundmodel_asphalt
-theTerrain_layerMap_1_Forest
-theTerrian_layerMap_2_RockyDirt
.....
-theTerrain_layerMap_8_Concrete
There will be two dropdowns next to each texture map. One has some materials in it but I don't know what it does (more on this later). The other is R,G,B for the color of the "apply texture" parts of the texture map, these should be red.
In the Additional Data section, select the box for "Apply Transform". Don't change the transform values (-512, -512).
Also select the box for "Flip Y Axis?"
It should look something like this:


Hit import and hopefully the ground won't disappear. If it looks good, save the map before exiting the editor.

This is as far as I got, and the steps needed to get to this point weren't too bad but I don't really know where to go from here. The terrain is correct, and the road layouts are correct. The roads however were all dirt/sand/mud, despite having the correct asphalt texture. Several textures are missing, like concrete (all bridges/tunnels and concrete in the port), some building textures also don't show up, and some buildings/objects are missing altogether. Grass and small foliage also seems to be missing, though trees are all there. The nav minimap background image is also for the new map, but the white roads match the old map, the minimap seems to be using the new background image instead of the old one.

I threw together a monster rally car and went at it. It is honestly a lot of fun with all dirt roads, I'm going to try and keep a version like this and get the correct textures to show up. Unfortunately you cant see where the roads change from dirt to sand or mud, so it is somewhat unpredictable. Most cars I've tried also have a tendency to overheat when you get into the sand, so you need to keep an eye on the engine temps.

Next to each texture map is a dropdown with some materials inside. The first time I tried this the other day the only options in that dropdown list were dirt (repeated like 12 times), so I didn't change anything. I tried again to import today so I could show what the import window should look like and this time there were several options for materials, each texture map layer had a corresponding material in the dropdown.

Whole map:

Port area (the car is a D15 Super Pig from the newest update)


This map appears to have been saved as jungle_rock_island in my levels folder after using the world editor. I don't like this so I'm going to have to change it somehow. (I deleted the folder thinking it was a duplicate and the changes I did in the world editor were all gone.) I've messed around with a few other things trying to get other problems fixed. Now that I've kind of figured out what to do, I'm going to try it again from step one when I have a chance.