Creating terrain is a wonderful experience. So is Beamng.drive... So with the two, creating a terrain, usable, drivable is an awesome thing. There's a few hitches though, that's stopping a lot of people. You need an external program to load your terrain in, such as L3DT - which is commercial software, to make a proper 16-bit greyscale bitmap that beamng.drive will properly read. If you try to read a standard 32-bit color file, the terrain will load with the terrain features reduced. Mountains will be mole-hills, valleys will be more like small divots. This is because of how beamng.drive interprets the file's color spectrum. There'd be three ways to fix this: *Tell us about a program (that you know of) that does these things free (as L3DT personal only does 2k X 2k). *Tell us about a .dll extension/plugin for GIMP or Paint.net or similar opensource/free program, that'll let us save 16bit greyscale images, this would let us give beam a terrain to import that would work with what we have available. *Fix the import terrain heightmap, so that it'll read from more types of files, ones that computers like most users have can actually make Also, on another note: The ability to dynamically resize the terrain, say if you need more - or less - detail/density of the terrain mesh (say you have a 2048x2048 terrain and you want to rescale it to 6144x6144 while in the editor), as that'd help significantly if you get into mapping and working with the terrain & need to resize, you wouldn't have to re-do it from a 3rd party program. and most importantly: Beamng.drive will hang upon trying to import a terrain heightmap file larger than 6144x6144 - such as 8192x8192. It just locks up. Poof. Tried 3~4 times, just locked. Resized it to 4096x4096 and was fine. I'd LOVE to do a huge map with like a 16384x16384 map, which would give me a little over 100 square miles to put an expansive highway system for sports car cruising... but I had to make do with one-quarter the resolution, and hence blocky terrain (at 4096x4096). We're really going to the next level here? I mean, the game is, I don't think it'd be too hard to do this. Many people who are used to playing open-world games come to this game and thing "gee the maps are small and you get bored fast/run out of things to do"... well this would allow users to create maps that would cure that. People LOVE huge maps - I have gotten an overwhelmingly positive amount of feedback on publicly releasing large maps for this game (you can't have a highway in a SMALL map now). Other unrelated (as much) notes: Beam shouldn't attempt to draw trees from as far away such as like ~5 miles... it's just slow. Maybe give us a tree population slider & distance falloff slider, that'd be in graphics options, for those with rubbish gfx cards. Using a square size of say 5~6 to make a huge map with rolling hills works, but the terrain graphics (such as grass/rock) seem to 'split' apart, and also, precision is lacking for things such as railroad tracks. If we had 2~3 more decimal places for saving the location of things in a terrain in the .mis file, this would not be an issue. Ofcourse, if the map size was smaller, it also may not be as much as an issue. Seriously, take a look at my Tennessee map (it's on forums, under maps/levels, not on the mods section, it's unfinished), near where you start, follow the tracks that run under the nearby highway overpass alongside the road, you'll see they aren't lined up. They don't save a fine enough precision in the .mis, so you don't re-load with the same perfection you saved it with. Convex objects, when manipulated in the sketch tool, get issues with collision going out further than the object itself. I've had serious issues with this in my Tennessee map actually. Cars tend to stick to this collision without a proper textured surface - because it extends out further. Manipulate some convex objects in sketchup F5 tool, and you'll see that pretty quickly. It's nice having atleast some collision on them though. Also, on a last closing note, I have gotten dangerously close to the 4096 item limit already - even when putting things into the forest! Can this be raised - like significantly? Or would beam run out of memory? The only reason I ask is for longetivity of this game with the modding community. Also, on another note, when going past 2048 items in a map, references in the map editor (for determining selection) get crossed, and often times TWO items get selected instead of one. I noticed this when I was doing pillars for my bridges before releasing the map, on So-Cal Interstate (which is available, bugged like that and all, still perfectly playable) in the MODS/LEVELS section. The worst side of this bug is deleting something you don't want because it selects two things at once. The editor seems to get 'lost' or mixed up internally, beyond 2000~2200 items somewhere, and beyond. Select two things, "4 items selected"... grrrrrrr You CAN manually un-select the other items, to continue to work around it, but if you don't always check for it, you could end up deleting hours of work like I have accidently done before. Seriously, run So-Cal Interstate, open the map editor, and start finding bridges or bridge columns and selecting them (F1 object mover), sure enough you'll get something else. It might even select the water plane (!)... I hope this is not overwhelming. This game is really awesome. I tend to hit limits in everything, but honestly, your game has pushed the limits of what I can expect out of a game already. It's a pleasure being able to make my highway maps for it. Sure beats Cities Skylines, I hit that game's limits in <2 weeks from buying it the day it came out, dropped it like a hot rock. Making roads I can drive down sure beats laying them down in a city I can only sit there and WATCH other people drive on!
