I finished up Nach2 this morning. The interior is fairly bare, but it's not really too noticeable while driving through. Overall Layout Overview from the entrance Overview from the other corner Overview from the start --- Post updated --- The first of the custom courses have been named. It will be called Karting Decora going forward. I created a logo and sign for this course and plan on doing so for each of the custom courses as well as seeing if I can track down signage for the IRL courses Nach 3 will be called Omathingo in honor of Omathingo for their contribution to the map with the time trials. It will also be the only course set in a different environment than the rest of the courses to reference the map mods they tend to make. I will be using amusement parks as a reference to help hide the area while keeping the open feel of the rest of the map. Nach2 will be called Gochoo Karting as suggested to me on Discord. They even provided a poem in Korean script which I integrated into the sign. If you have a name suggestion for nach4, please shoot it my way and I will add them as long as it isn't offensive and fits the course. The signs for the named courses are below: Decora: Omathingo: Gochoo: Goparc: Osona: Echirolles: Lentola: After looking for signage, I realized that there a quite a few details missing from Osona that were not in the AC map. I will be adding those details soon.
I finished Omathingo and am now moving on to Nach4. It is the last one that needs a name, so if anybody has any suggestions, I will slap it on. It reminds me of Bemidji from Viper Racing, so I might give it a name to do with that. Here are a few shots from Omathingo: The back of the course: Starting Line: 1st and 2nd corners 3rd corner and entrance View of the waterfall Sign and area:
I have most of the finishing touches in place, so I am uploading one last pre-repo version for some final feedback on performance, layout, and aesthetics before I go for the final push. The course I am calling Bemidji still has a WIP name, which I am taking suggestions for. To round off the night, I redid the uv unwrapping of the darker roads as well as made normals and ao maps for the dark roads and the white and blue rumble strips. I also added rumble strips to some of the corners of Omathingo that are semi-blind and that I want to cut every lap. I mostly removed the huge bump by the starting line of Lentola so now it is small enough to not unsettle the kart. That bump has been hard to pinpoint due to how small it is. This time i just relaxed the mesh for that whole section and the difference is notable. Over the weekend I plan on polishing the entranceways to each of the courses as well as making further changes to Bemidji and Omathingo as I continue to test the backyard changes on them.
I just noticed this but you have trees in the map? On my side no, even after having a new download and after having clear clache
Thank you for letting me know. I will get that fixed before the next upload! Looks like I never changed the file paths from my Crandon map for the forest meshes. If you want to see the trees, for now, you will have to have that map downloaded, but it will be fixed to be standalone. This problem actually highlighted for me why the forest tool is so good. Initial placements are (based on my experience) less precise, but you do not need to have the items in question in your map files. All that is needed is the materials.json file placed in a similar file path as the original mesh. So long as the source meshes do not change location in the map you took them from, they will update along with the vanilla maps. The only thing you would need to change is the materials file in case they add new materials. For this example, I used the pine trees from West Coast USA. The file path to the meshes is "/levels/west_coast_usa/art/shapes/trees/trees_conifer/". To make it work I just need to copy the main.materials.json file from that file and paste it into "/levels/indoorkart/art/shapes/trees/trees_conifer/" and I get the benefit of having vanilla meshes without bloating my map with copies of these meshes.
I had a pretty busy weekend, so I did not get much done. However, what I was able to was improve the immersion of the map a bit. I added US national park themed signs to point to the courses when driving around as well as added a little offroad area in Omathingoo. I changed the grass texture to match the road edge texture I was using, so the edge is a lot better hidden I also made small changes to the collision meshes for some of the courses to hopefully make the rumble strips a bit less jarring and updated the shading on the courses. The last thing I did was work on fixing the terrain painting in some areas and fix the reflections in the pond by Goparc. Before I release the first repo version, there are a lot of minor issues here and there that I need to fix up such as floating objects and inaccurate terrain painting. These fixes are mostly busy work, which is why I have left them for so long, and I also wanted to finalize the layout before going to precise with painting and whatnot. Here's the theme of the new signs. I have three right now starting from Lentola since that kind of acts like a central hub: Here is the offroading area in Omathingoo. I wanted to make it more of a slow crawl-like area, so it has a couple of steep-ish hills on the trails. The base 350cc config can get through these trails with moderate difficulty: Here is the new road to grass transition, it looks much better now in my opinion. The colors do not match, but they do have the same texture now.
I finished up the minor things I wanted to, so I cleaned up the files and uploaded the map to the repo. Expect it to be there soon!
With version 1.0 out, I was thinking about making a map that is made up of courses designed for faster karts since the ones in Kartland are all geared toward karts that stay under 75mph. I started working on making my own ports of irl tracks and got the Utah Motorsports Campus main kart track loop in the game. It is almost wider than the entire Kartland map! Due to this massive difference in size, I decided not to try to add new courses and will be making a new map to house these courses geared toward faster karts with the first of the new courses being the UMC kart track. Here is the layout of the course. The 350cc race config is at top speed for almost the entire straight. So yeah, expect a new thread once I get a few courses together, a bit of progress on the new map, and a name for it.
As a beam drifter I can't thank you enough for putting this together. I spent a good hour last night going through all the courses trying to link all the corners together in a 200BX. I know this wasn't your goal for the project but I anticipate many hours of fun will be had!
Thank you for the kind words! I noticed there was a lot of overlap between the drift courses and kart courses and I am glad to hear the courses worked out in that way!
I love this map, its fucking awesome, but can you please look into optimizing it a bit? It appears to be very performance heavy. For example (bear with me, as I have a higher end PC), a solid map would run 180+ fps on ultra settings for me. This map gets, on average, 100fps on ultra settings. This makes me feel bad for those with a lower-mid grade PC, as they'd have frame issues from the get-go. Furthermore, when this map starts getting used in BeamMP (namely me, as I plan on doing this), the concerns for an unstable session with multiple players is going to be high. This map would be great for MP sessions for kart racing fans, and I want it to succeed. If it helps, I have jotted down my own scuffed performance benchmarks (keep in mind, ultra settings, 1080p resolution + backyard kart mod). - With just one kart spawned, I get an average of 100fps. - with a single kart and all other tracks/trees deleted via world editor, the frames jump to 120-130fps on average. -With a full grid of karts spawned (8 of em), I get down to 50-70fps. - with the full grid and all other tracks/trees deleted via world editor, the frames return to 80-90fps on average. Again, great map, keep up the solid work my guy!
Thanks for the review! I have to learn how to make LOD meshes as right now, the IRL courses have none and they are fairly poly-heavy since they were designed to be standalone. The rest of the meshes are borrowed from vanilla materials, so they have them built-in. The terrain size change did not have enough of a benefit to warrant an overhaul of the terrain. The biggest impacts I am seeing are the custom meshes.
While working on these LODs I managed to find several places where I can reduce the face counts. For instance, I managed to reduce the file size for Goparc from 131MB to 35MB without losing any noticeable detail while also fixing the UV mapping so it looks significantly better I no longer notice any significant frame drops when looking in that direction from anywhere on the map. Along with this change, I also am making a few changes to Omathingo. The name will be changed to Mathing as that is the preferred username of @omathingo, I added a bridge to the portion that crosses the stream, and I added additional rumble strips to corners that I instinctively try to cut. I will be working on completing the LODs and size savings, then uploading those changes asap.
With this update in place, please feel free to let me know if you still get inconsistent or unstable framerates. There are still a few things I can do to improve them, but they are going to take significant effort which amounts to (on my end) very little gain. Hence why I did not do them for this update.
I'm not seeing any noticeable improvements in frame rates, sadly. Maybe 5-ish fps maximum in improvement overall, while I've seen frames as low as 82 and as high as 123 (so I guess staying bout the same as my initial "test" at 100ish avg fps). I feel like the file size being 450mb for such a small map is a bit worrying, as Kirbyguy's PBR Nürburgring map is a hair larger in file size and performs better, as I'm seeing anywhere from 110-170fps (not trying to shoot any shade towards you, its just the best comparison I can give rn, as I'm using maps with similar file sizes for this comparison). Again, I'm more worried about the multiplayer aspect of things, and I have no complaints about solo hotlapping (beefy PC moment). I'm looking forward to any further improvements you plan on making, and I (and some fellow BeamMP users) will wait patiently!
Thank you for the feedback! I do not take any offense at all. I am fairly new to trying to make maps perform well, so I will be looking at what else I can do to lower the system load. I will also be looking into reducing the filesize by not keeping copies of vanilla textures and instead just linking to the vanilla maps as well as reducing image sizes of several of the custom textures. Quick question, have you checked that the cache for kartland was cleared upon update? I have a slightly higher-end pc as well and got around the same framerate range before I changed the meshes around. Also, is the lower framerate range in Green Karting? I will still for sure look into ways I can make it better, but I want to be sure I do not have to make the LODs more aggressive.
I am still looking into ways that I can improve the framerate. One way I found was to actually use the fog. I was under the impression that rendering the fog would be more intensive, but even a minor amount netted 20 fps: from 140 to 160 at the map center and from 90 to 110 on courses. My previous max for the number of Backyard Kart AI on this map prior to any optimization before dipping below 30 FPS was 13, but now I can get 16 while maintaining 60fps and up to 20 AI at 30fps. It was hard to get them to drive without them crashing constantly With 20 AI and one player vehicle When they are not crashing nonstop I will be looking for more ways to optimize the map over the weekend, so expect this update sometime in the near future. My pc specs so you can compare potentials: CPU: Ryzen 5700G GPU: MSI 3060ti RAM: 64GB Drive Type: SSD
The improvements made to the map seem to be stable across the map now, but I need to fix the sky color as it is almost always a twilight color except at night. Since this is most likely a simple fix, I hope to have the new improvements uploaded for review by tomorrow night.
