https://www.beamng.com/resources/douglas-rally-2019.9931/ The Map Is Released At The Link Above. This is my first map, Rally Stage...well, first decent attempt at a map. I really like playing on Rally Forest and DiRT4, so I was wondering what it would be like to play a lengthy, linear rally stage. I still don't have any ideas for names. I would love some suggestions. I also had the idea of making deep ruts on some sides of the track, to hopefully get a vehicle really flipping like in multiple Rally videos. I made the mud texture seen below function like sand, but I can't find out how to add depth to the texture/material/whatever (You can tell this is my first real attempt...) 1/24/2019 Just tell me if there's anything you want to tell me... Most recent updates are my recent posts, I doubt I'm gonna update the OP often. REMEMBER, THIS IS THE BETA Hopefully I don't ruin anyone's day with this post, but I'm starting to lose motivation in playing BeamNG, mostly because of the lack of performance in my laptop and because like @fufsgfen said it, my brain can't stay on one topic/item for very long or else I start to get bored. Probably why I get sleepy after racing on Nascar. Also because I worked myself to a pulp on this mod early on, I dried myself out. This hopefully doesn't mean that's it for this map, and I bet I'll pick BeamNG back up either after the update or later on, but I...really do hope this map gets finished. Because I've been on the forums long enough to feel you guys's pain to abandoned mods, I'll release a much earlier version of the map. This is before I had to redo the trees, as that feels like it took alot of the motivation from me. Warning: This map is very laggy, hence the reason I was redoing the trees after this. You'd need a gtx1080 or something along those lines to run this map well. I don't know about specifics, ask @fufsgfen about it for further detail. Here's how to play at night the intended way. I'm going to either make the day map only day and make the night map only night on the sliders, or I will leave it how it is, and you'd have to play the night version to get the real experience, with the night skymap and everything. Open up World Editor and head over to the scene tree. Search in the seachbar for "DaSkyBox" Open it up and look at the dropdown "Sky Box". There should be the material changer. For night, choose "NightSkyMat" For day, choose "BlueSkyMat" You could also Enable the lights at the start and finish gates. Just search for "Light" in the shape tree and enable them. Change the time and it'll be almost pitch black. What I think is the hardest thing a rally stage could be. Just ask if I should change it to be slightly brighter, I'm not sure how, but we'll find out. @Brother_Dave might know. Help: @Fufsgen: Bridge, Other ideas. @krallopian: General help, possibly original help with staging lights. @TarTi, @BlueGinge123, @krallopian: Help with fixing textures and being awesome in general. @DuneWulff: Tutorial on a night version of map. BeamNG Developers/Map Makers: Multiple other objects and textures. Beta Testers: @SebastianJDM @BlueGinge123 @fufsgfen @Skoops[FIN] Feel free to post any criticisms or questions about the current state of the mod. Below is all of the known changes after this beta version. Spoiler: Post Beta Screenshots
It looks pretty nice actually. Gotta say though, the amount of trees you have is really going to effect performance.
that long turn with the mud outside looks harsh, in a good way lol. maybe add more bumps in the actual path, maybe even some large-ish holes, and areas where the side of the path is sort of "washed away" into the mud. obviously the details aren't done yet, but i think you should add some more interesting decoration on the sides of the path (like twigs, stones, large bushes, dead shrubs, logs/fallen trees, flowers, etc.) to add more immersion, realism, and interest factor. and speaking of immersion and realism, is there a way to blend that gravel texture better with the rest of the dirt? it doesn't look bad how it is, but it could be a bit less of a hard edge, and a bit more of an imperfect scatter of dirt and rocks mixing. i think it could also be a good idea to add some dips full of water to splash through, and maybe fill the bottom of the ditch with some water
I was wondering if I should have a few open sections, but I don't know how to really make it look good. I want the forest sections to feel restricted, but the open sections feel more open. Like how Powys, Wales in DiRT4 did. Either way, is there anyway to fix that? I'm not surprised it's gonna be laggy. Could you send me some examples? I don't want it to be too bumpy, but not too smooth. I will probably do a bit of that once I finish the road, yet the end of the fallen trees and logs have no-texture (Where the tree was cut) And I don't know how to fix that exactly. No idea how to, but I was hoping that was possible aswell. Maybe someone smarter knows? Because of the types of trees that really fit this type of map, I was hoping to find something darker. Is there a simple way to make that dirt texture darker in Paint.Net?
you'll have to add some rolling hills i suppose, with lots of grass, and you'll have to put more forest in the distance, maybe with some type of cabin or campground or something (so that the open area actually makes sense, rather than just a random hole in the woods). look at ECUSA and the open areas (particularly the logging area with all the dead trees and stumps) or maybe JRI where the big open mudding area is (spawn at observatory, go down the hill and take the first dirt road to the left, follow it and you should find what i'm talking about). just some ruts and holes, random imperfections. definitely. if all you're looking to do is darken it, and maybe change up the coloring, hover over the adjustments tab at the top, and click curves. darken it by decreasing the luminosity curve in different points, and make the colors a bit richer by adding some red (and maybe a bit of green?) in their respective curves. also check out https://www.poliigon.com/, they've got some really high quality PBR textures, and you can have a 30 day free trial. here's just a few good ones: https://www.poliigon.com/texture/ground-forest-002 https://www.poliigon.com/texture/ground-forest-003 https://www.poliigon.com/texture/ground-forest-004 https://www.poliigon.com/texture/ground-forest-005 https://www.poliigon.com/texture/ground-forest-roots-001 https://www.poliigon.com/texture/ground-gravel-013 but they have an incredible amount of choices, whether it's snow, mud, natural forest floor, tree logs, gravel, really anything you can think of.
I was going to do that soon enough. And the first ditch isn't that deep, so just that is fine. Simply hoping for some depth modifier for it though. I'll make sure to check those textures out. To add a new texture into the material.cs, could I simply copy/paste another few lines and change the name/paths?
as far as i know, yeah. try "defaultDepth" for groundmodel depth (measured in meters) https://wiki.beamng.com/Physics_Materials
Darkened the road, dirt, and grass texture. Looks much better. I checked that before, but didn't know how. Where do I go to change those paremeters? I've never seen those anywhere.
Rally Finland, there is great sources of rally stages, like this for example, you can get altitude data from topographic map, from every stage that has been rallied: https://www.rally-maps.com/Peurunka-Ralli-1993/Vihtavuori https://www.retkikartta.fi/?lang=fi...rs=440070;6914845;Start:441852;6915859;Finish I have many times wanted to make rally map, but haven't got around, but way I have thought to do it is to take many screenshot of that topo map, stitch them together in gimp, then make 2D plane in Blender, put that to BeamNG world editor, then make altitude curves to terrain based on that. I guess it would be even nicer to make in Blender if one would have skills, but with such incredible amount of data, it should be exploited somehow. Also there are incar rally videos from stages, some smaller events, some big, so it should provide data to make quite realistic road layout. Also there are these kind of stage videos videos that can help you make realistic next to road areas for rally stages, not sure if there are such from other countries, but at least haven't found free topo maps from other countries: Even if you don't want to replicate real world location, those can help you to get real feel to your map as transitions of banking, turns, altitude changes etc. IRL those follow certain pattern and if that is not correct rally stage is not feeling so natural. That is good in Dirt Rally game, those stages are from real world, so driving it feels natural. I also attached one GIMP image file, where I have stitched one rally stage together, so it just need to be saved as png or something and then put to Blender and exported to game. I'm not sure if I have copy of dae and exported image, but it should be quite simple for anyone to make. Also anyone saying trees will affect performance haven't done testing, there is no way to get performance slowdowns with trees, any gaming grade computer handles limitless amount of trees. What happens is that as trees go further away, they disappear, you will have only X amount of trees visible, no matter how many you put them to map and most will be rendered as one batch, anything like gtx1060 or faster can run any number of trees on high details, using lower details reduces amount of polygons for weaker hardware. It is false impression that trees would cause any performance impact. Using several different types of trees can cause impact though. Does JRI run slow? How many trees there is? Cutting number of trees will pretty much only lower visual quality, modern GPUs are insanely powerful compared to CPUs and with new optimizations in 0.15, mostly one needs to worry about number of different objects and especially number of different textures/materials. Don't worry about number of trees, that is really wrong end of the stick to look for performance gains. I think this game has enough maps optimized for iGPU and alike, there is need to have maps that really tax gtx1070 on highest graphics, there are lower settings for many less powerful GPUs and those can be made to look like what high on many iGPU optimized maps looks now. What BeamNG could use are maps that have visual appearance of modern games, which requires use of more polygons, those are really cheap at this era when GPUs are so strong, being afraid of polygons have been so out of fashion from computer graphics industry for 10 years or so, but myth still lives strong. However it is best still to make those polygons count, no point wasting them. Even light in this engine is not the best, I'm certain it is possible to make maps look much nicer.
Thanks for replying. I would try doing that, but last time I used Blender, it was at 1FPS. Nor do I think I could figure anything out with it...I'm still really stupid, and am simply confused on how depth works. I didn't think trees would add too much lag to the game. Not like the whole floor is covered in trees, pretty much only around the road. I'll go ahead and look at some videos, but I may either do some touching-up later on or on my second rally map. I doubt this will be the only one I make, didn't expect to have some fun while in the editor. I was also thinking of trying to recreate a real-world location, but that would be too difficult without Blender/Heightmaps and LIDAR, which I really don't feel like trying.
If you extract two files in zip to yourmap\art\basemaptest then open world editor and import that rally_finland.dae in world editor, game should create proper materials.cs and it should have proper textures so that it is usable. It should be 2048x2048 size in game. No Blender needed, you can then see how it looks in game. That was one official Neste Rally Finland stages, can't remember which year though. It really takes many attempts to get good map, one learns so much better ways doing things while making new versions of map. Oh and textures.com is free for textures if you need those, their licensing is bit confusing though, but for example Ghost has used those at his maps.
Alright. I’m gonna favorite this and maybe try it for my next rally map once I get home. I’ll stay with what I have now. Sorry if it seems like I’m begging, but do you have any idea how to use depth when texturing sand?
Custom groundmodel is what you need, but it is not working right now: https://www.beamng.com/threads/new-patch-seems-great-except.60342/#post-987317 Check posts by dunewulff on that thread and you see how it should work.
Huh...alright, I'll check that out once that happens.I'll just continue working on the map. So you said that I can add as many trees as I want and it wouldn't lag the game too much?
Just don't go crazy with it. One big thing I've learned when packing a ton of stuff together in one area - hit Ctrl+F twice and make sure your DrawCalls aren't going ballistic.
Not too high (number depends on your computer) and, in my experience, you don't want the number jumping around. If its at 1000, you ideally don't want it to be jumping to like 1150. You'll know when it starts being an issue because the game will start to slow down in areas of the map.
So pretty much, make sure the Drawcalls don't go above too much to where is lags? I guess that makes sense, LOD's shouldn't lag the game pretty much any. I'll make sure there aren't too many trees able to be drawn. Aaand I was looking at the wrong Drawcalls. I'm getting up to 1,000-1,200 average when near all the trees. This is the line that said GFX.
Well, Italy goes up to 7000 or so at some areas, depending from graphics settings. With 0.15 issues with drawcalls are less. Also with pine trees you can't go too high with drawcalls, it is not possible, you can't fit so many trees in single space and ultimately editor will crash before you get anywhere near to performance issues from single type of tree. Everything from JRI, tens of thousands houses, I don't know how many trees, but really many multiple times of what was in JRI, drawcalls were not going past 2000, editor was crashing before that and 0.15 game version is a lot better than 0.13: Surely, gtx1060 would not be able to render that at 60fps, but then again, you will never have anything even close to this level density and yet, when going into normal driving altitude, GPU load dropped a lot so that gtx1060 probably can do this too or at least almost, with water this is very challenging scene and 0.15 is again much better than what 0.13 was: So simply it is impossible to kill performance with trees, setting quality to normal will certainly allow even gtx1060 to keep up 60fps even going totally crazy with the trees. Drawcalls increases when you use multiple types of objects and materials, not from single type of tree. I did gather something to this topic that has links which might help to understand it more, but as you are not a modeler it might not have quite so much affect on your work, but still it might help to understand where drawcalls come in more detail: https://www.beamng.com/threads/opti...nd-others-differences-has-lots-of-info.57689/ But there is no way you to get any kind of issues with single type of tree. Italy houses are made from pieces, there is really huge object density, it still runs quite well and I doubt that you will ever get to such levels with a rally map as single type of tree does not count as adding object density really.
