Released Sotenbori, Osaka (Yakuza Like A Dragon)

Sotenbori is a central touristy area known for its nightlife and iconic river/canal found in the Yakuza series, and based on the real life Dotonbori in Osaka, Japan. This is a port of the version found in Yakuza Like A Dragon to BeamNG.



The map is a bit smaller than Kamurocho sadly, featuring only a few loops of city road but this means it's much better for performance while maintaining a similar vibe to the other Yakuza ports without being a singlular road still screenshot map. This is mostly being made as a test bed for improvements to the porting tools developed by @Car_Killer in anticipation for future bigger projects, with the main strides being in properly porting the several different layers of sign/emissive materials that have plagued previous ports with uv issues that were not feasible to manually fix in the past. This means we are now more prepared than ever for working on even bigger and better ports (cough cough Hawaii) which should be popping up sometime in the future.

This map features all the usual features of these ports and some new extra cool stuff: full night lighting and emissives (now including all animated lights from the original game), optimised lods (looking better than ever now), full PBR materials from the original sources, all game props, particles, sounds, and other details to make sure the map looks and runs its best (within BeamNG's limits anyway).
Some of these are not on by default for performance reasons but are enabled from the map controller imgui (visible in the esc menu)



Unfortunately this map along with the others are currently plagued by lag stutters caused by the audio emitters, this is an issue on th game end that cropped up recently so while I've tried to set everything up to minimise how often these appear they are still there should hopefully be fixed in a future game update some time (fingers crossed)

Credits:
@Car_Killer - Large amounts of work on the map from creating tools to working magic on the materials to custom lua to just about anything else fancy featured in the map
@thomatoes50 - Massive help by decoding the Yakuza engine prop data formats to allow automated conversion of them for the map
@Dummiesman - Some lua extras
theturboturnip - Yakuza GMD tools
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio/SEGA - Original Yakuza series

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uFhjVNBTxbvFQZirsEie0vdrAHUEYcJ7/view?usp=sharing

And incase you fancy more Yakuza maps (the recent big ones have been updated with the same new lods as this map too):
Kamurocho + ADDC - https://www.beamng.com/threads/kamurocho-tokyo-addc-yakuza-judgment.83067/
Yokohama - https://www.beamng.com/threads/isezaki-ijincho-yokohama-japan-yakuza-like-a-dragon.93719/
Onomichi - https://www.beamng.com/threads/onomichi-hiroshima-yakuza-6.85669/
Ryukyu + Asagao - https://www.beamng.com/threads/downtown-ryukyu-asagao-beach-okinawa-yakuza-series.88557/
Yakuza showrooms
-https://www.beamng.com/threads/yakuza-series-assorted-showroom-maps-megathread.93720/
-https://www.beamng.com/threads/kamurocho-underground-carpark-showroom-yakuza-4.87322/
Yakuza traffic vehicles - https://www.beamng.com/threads/agents-simplified-realistic-traffic-mod-eu-yakuza.102034/

 

Since major part of porting is behind us it's time to share what's new in this Yakuza port in compare to previous ones.
All our previous Dragon Engine ports suffered from similar issues, bad-looking LODs, broken UVs, not 100% accurate materials, and missing material animations.

To solve bad-looking LODs I decided to change the approach, in previous ports for the last LOD we used decimated "low" mesh from Dragon engine that had textures baked into vertex color, this approach is very lightweight but sadly removes a lot of details and all color details rely on mesh polygons. I decided to try to generate simple UV for LODs then create 256x256 texture that is assigned to entire LOD mesh. This worked like a charm, and gives very nice effects and allows us to further reduce polycount of LODs in future maps while retaining visible details in LODs. This process is fully automated in Blender and allows us to quickly fix entire map in case we have some mistakes. Once Osaka is done I want to also update previous maps with improved LODs as it makes maps look way better.

Those screenshots were taken on Lowest mesh settings to make LODs more visible.

This is how it looks on Ultra settings.

Another step in improving Dragon Engine ports was fixing UVs and material accuracy. To achieve that I had to change some stuff in Yakuza GMD importer to get more data that we need in BeamNG. I also had to change material generation process to get data directly from Blender instead of guessing everything blindly from texture names, this solved a lot of issues with materials looking not right.
This also relates to UV issues. Dragon Engine uses the same textures in lot of different materials and shader combinations. That requiers us to change material names from "Base texture" to "Shader_BaseTexture". That way we are getting way more materials (and drawcalls) but it allows us to assign materials and textures properly and also avoid situations where 1 texture used 2 different UV maps, which was later impossible to fix in the previous ports. Now this issue is completely gone and all textures use expected UV maps.


And lastly, since we fixed materials and UV issues, it allowed us to add support for material animations from Yakuza. This makes the map look way more alive than before.

Video - Click to Play - Direct Link

I think that's it for now, there is still some work left with porting this map, but I'm very happy how it comes together.

 

This map notably does not require the insane pc requirements of the other yakuza maps and a solid 50% of the first post is explaining this, should run on any standard pc that meets the game requirements (unless you want to run the night animations, they need a bit of a beefier system to maintain good fps)
As for actual map progress it's nearly finished now hopefully releasing soon

 

Map released
Updates for the other big maps (kamurocho, yokohama and onomichi) featuring the new better lods from this should be arriving soon too