Occam's Bargain Bin

Hello,

As you may have noticed, I've recently gotten a nice work contract lined up, and I am getting ready to try to finish up what remains of Garfield Heights over the next few months. As a result, my remaining free time is soon to be cut short, and I'd like need to brush aside the few fairly advanced projects that I'm confident that I won't be returning to. What follows is stuff I'd rather not throw away, but that just doesn't deserve to go to the repo.

Prometheus AKA Planets:

An experiment with using wind to fake three-dimensional planetary gravity. It's janky as all get out, but it has the kitschy draw of being able to drive from one planet to the next, using either stupidly large ramps, or space guns. Just be sure to play the scenario ("Planets"), not the level itself. Chase camera recommended.

Skjuta AKA Realistic Rail Sim Pack

What was planned to be a silly, albeit polished and well-realized, April Fool's Day joke. Shame I couldn't get the 'polished and well-realized' part working. It comes with a simple figure-8 layout and the BRIO-inspired locomotive itself, but there's a lot that doesn't work here well ATM. Just open the 'RRTest' level.

Sugar Island

This was a little experiment with AI and trying to use AI vehicles to give a sense of light-medium traffic to a place. Even if it's a very small place. It includes a tiny, symmetrical road network with a small town at its center. I lost interest in it too soon to bother creating any custom content for it, and it's not the most striking place visually, but seeing random traffic AI actually populate a place is a nice novelty. Includes the 'Island Life' scenario.

 

Well that's nice of you to release this, it's a shame we have no trains, even though those don't look much like the tracks I made.
Simulated AI on a small map, yes I've done this on Tail of The Dragon, with all of 25~45fps with 11 vehicles in play including my vehicle (10 AI vehicles), it's rather enjoyable. I can only hope for a future where this would be a realistic possibility (even if you must manually spawn them all in). That being said, it's some of the most fun I've had in the game aside of that one time I ran a combine harvester through a line of 20+ pianos in downtown Rockwood (Roane County TN).
If you need help with anything model-wise for Garfield heights, let me know, I might be doing some concept houses soon. I've also added LOD's and 'nulldetail' meshes for your homes (the ones you let me use) in the latest repository version of Roane County. Almost ALL the homes have them, and I don't think any of them glitch out at all (they should be good!). I don't think your map uses enough polygons for it to matter (as it was extremely high fps on my end), but in the end, it might help low-end folks if needed. I don't think I changed any of the names and they are in the /art/shapes/HICE directory of the map structure in Roane County map.
I'd give you my subway models if you really wanted them, they aren't that texture heavy, but you'd need garbage cans, benches, and lights for it. If you want my track models let me know too, I'll even throw in the intersection models for you to blend into your streets with or modify as-needed.
This offer is only for you @Occam's Razer as you lent me use of the homes without much question, bribing or buttering up for the Roane County project.

I wish you the best though! I hope your job is well & hope it's in the game industry. Maybe someone will hire me one day, but honestly, I don't hold much hope. My skeleton especially at the joints is totally shot and I'll be on crutches or in a wheelchair before the end of the year is out. I can barely even walk around right now, limping badly just trying to fix up some dinner (no pity needed though, I get by, I just refuse to take pain pills beyond "IB Hurtin" pills which are OTC, don't need an addiction and still pain).

--Cheers & much best wishes to you in your future endeavors!

 

My question is though, are you working for BeamNG's development team or BeamNG's moderation team?

 

Interesting and nice of you to share these maps with us, I'm really interested in the map with all the cool planets!

i wonder if i could make one bigger and make it a 1:1 scale of mars

 

While there's not *really* a size limit, once you go past the 10km mark, you start to have somewhat noticeable issues with floating point rounding, visible as 'shaking or shimmering of the vehicle'.
This is noticeable in Roane County TN USA map if you drive far east to Kingston or north past Harriman.
By the time you go this as big as Mars, the car's location would be rounded to the point where the approximation has 500 feet (150+ meters, or there about roughly) between frame to frame render.
I've left a vehicle falling for a week that unbeknownst to me fell out of the map while editing (actually fell through the map). It may have gone almost that distance, however far gravity will fall for a box truck or Pessima, for a week to 10 days. It fell and fell, until it was a blur all over the screen like a ghost.
It's not pretty, it's not very functional or useful. You don't want this to happen in your map outside of test concepts.
Rounded numbers are called 'FLOAT' numbers, vs a regular typical INTEGER.
FLOAT math (rounded, fast math) is done on the FLOATING POINT UNIT, the special '8087' section of your CPU. It does AI routines, Physics, and lots of not-medically-precise math calculations all the time in many many games.
Integer math is done on the ALU, Arithmetic Logic Unit of the CPU, this is where all the things that need to be exact get done, this is more precise at the expense of much speed.

So say you're 12345678.9 meters from the center of the map. You'd round 1/10th~½ of a meter there. That's already really ugly to look at and not very playable.
Go 10 times further.
Be 123456789.87 meters or so from the center of the map, and you'd round off up to 5 meters for every computation (for you, you'd see the results every frame, it's actually 400~1000's of computations per vehicle depending on how complex).

So yes, where my Roane County TN map rounds off half a Centimeter north-south or east/west producing visible shimmering or light shaking as if the car idled very badly, or was out of tune, making a whole planet, thousands of miles across in width, would be a no-go. Nope, not even teensy Mercury or Pluto would work well enough. It's not that BEAMNG isn't there yet, the software COULD do it, at the expense of speed, but computational power at this level of detail IS NOT there yet.

That is all! I hope this was informative.

 

Helpful response, I was just hoping that I could create a real scale Mars, so when you are driving the vehicle, the land looks flat due to the horizon, and when you zoom out, it's a circle!!

But I was thinking about how if you travel so far in BeamNG, The vehicles/skybox begin to shake weirdly, so that may be a limitation, but there's no actual "limit" on how big you can make a map like you have said.

I wasn't really worried about performance since it's just a circle with mars ground textures, and maybe some Easter eggs and dunes, maybe a nice little tesla roadster prop somewhere hidden in the map, but I don't think that would be possible sadly, since Tesla had it's copyrights under it's name, only if the other Tesla copyrighted his name lol

Thanks for the information, helped me out!

 

@Occam's Razer Congrats of new job!

Also very nice that you share your projects, they are really interesting experiments, thank you from sharing them

I would say that focusing to only 2km by 2km map and maybe make few maps, might give better results than huge map with almost no detail or then you need some hooking creation there, that makes some challenge, some fun and generally interesting, for example portals and platforms kind ;-)

 

Technically yes, but as a quick separation between the people who moderate the forums and the people who develop the game, there's some who do both.

 

No, there is a team that works, then some of that team volunteer to these forums, that is their free time, not sure if Nadeox and synsol gets paid though from approving mods and moderating the board, but I think that at some Christmas time I did read about staff that reply on boards being just volunteeringly giving their time to cause or something along those lines.

So appreciate these people giving us this possibility as they are not required to do so.

 

I get the impression that the BeamNG team is just one big happy family who all work together to create an excellent game and respond to any questions and concerns/ moderate the forums because they care about the people who play their game

 

Thanks, all!

Yeah, the Skjuta (a pseudo-Scandanavian name, to fit with IKEA-type branding) and its tracks were meant to look more like somebody took one of those children's wooden train sets from the 80's and 90's and blew them up to real-world size. It never really worked very well, though, as the wheels always jumped the track grooves and the train possesses neither the grip nor the power to ascend the ~45% grade. But I agree about the train thing, I never anticipated when I made the handcar that it would soon have a monopoly on rail transport

Thanks, man. I think I'm good on Garfield Heights meshes for the moment, as I'm actually milling through the houses and replacing some textures, as well as creating hyper-low LODs for all of them (no material, no UVs, >50 polygons each). There's also not really much room for mass transit systems in the map at present either, but thanks for the offer, and let me know if you need to borrow anything else for your city map

Best of luck,
Occam.

 

Awesome, well glad you have everything in order then. I just extended the offer as, why reinvent the wheel if something's been done already, right?
Trying not to steal your thunder (assets) any more than I have in the past (though I did ask so it's not stealing). Want to put my own style on things. It was different when I didn't know how to model though, I had little choice but to use what little was available out there.

That being said, also wishing you the best! I will surely check out the Heights when you put out a new one.
--Cheers!