Map development in BeamNG feels left behind?

I’d like to bring up a topic that might not be as exciting as new vehicles or features, but one that I believe is worth discussing – the development of maps in BeamNG.Drive.
With every update, we receive amazing improvements and additions to vehicles: new configurations, remastered/refreshed vehicles, new sounds, or physics enhancements. However, when it comes to maps, we mostly see very minor changes – usually limited to West Coast USA, and even those are mostly small fixes or adjustments (excluding the more recent island update). Most maps are starting to feel outdated in terms of detail, environment quality, and road layout – especially when compared to the ever-increasing fidelity of the vehicles.
In a driving simulator like BeamNG, the environment plays a huge role – and the lack of meaningful map updates is, in my opinion, limiting gameplay variety and long-term replayability.
As an example: together with a few people from the community (many of whom didn’t have much experience), we remastered map – purely as a hobby, in our free time. Despite that, we managed to achieve quality comparable to the official maps – and in some aspects, even surpass them. This shows how much can be done with enough effort and passion – and how much potential lies in BeamNG’s level system.
If similar attention was given to official maps by the dev team, I truly believe the results could be incredible and very well received by the community – especially considering how talented the BeamNG team is when it comes to asset creation.
Of course, this is my personal opinion, but I think it would be great to see more development in this area of the game – especially since maps have such a major impact on how the game feels and plays.

I’d also like to mention the Building Architect tool added in update 0.35. As someone who enjoys making maps, I was excited for it – and while the concept is great, I’ve run into a few issues that limit its practical use.
The biggest problem is with windows, which use pre-made assets from the `/art/` folder that have their own LOD system. When the LOD causes them to disappear at a distance, the building is left with literal holes where the windows were – since the main building mesh doesn’t have any proper LOD of its own.
Another issue is the limited flexibility – it’s difficult to create anything modern-looking, like apartment blocks or residential houses. This may be due to a lack of assets or limitations of the tool itself.
Building Architect is a great step forward, but its current use cases are quite narrow. I really hope it gets some improvements and more development in future updates – because the potential is definitely there.

 

Ffs the devs should connect that other end of the long highway, preferably to some airport or cruise ship port.

 

I have had a hard time using the Road architect too, since it is oddly specific with connections and road styles, another problem which in my opinion makes map development harder is the fact that decal roads can't be put on top of mesh roads, I think that this would be amazing for maps with extremely huge terrain where one terrain tile is 20 meters so painting a terrain material like asphalt will create a 20x20 square of that material.
Another problem with BeamNG is that it's becoming more and more unstable, so bigger, more detailed maps have to lower quality in exchange for optimization, as of recently, they made a change where decal roads won't show up unless you have terrain on a map, this is annoying since my old map doesn't have terrain and it is broken beyond repair, so it has become a mesh quarry for other projects of mine.

 

Yes, I completely agree with you. Another significant issue worth mentioning is the growing number of frustrating bugs in the World Editor lately. For example, there's the decal road problem, the moon mysteriously disappearing after a certain update (and still not returning), and the 'clear terrain' tool, which has been operating with severe delay since the last two/three game updates. In the most recent update, we also received a slight redesign of the top menu bar which, unfortunately, cannot be reverted. I'm not sure why these changes were made, but they’re honestly quite irritating and, instead of helping, they tend to make the work of map creators in BeamNG.Drive more difficult.

 

I kinda hate the new toolbar change I preferred having separate buttons instead of a dropdown, it is also annoying that I have to keep it at 2x height because otherwise the terrain editor UI gets cut off.