WIP Beta released The Tennessee USA Roane County 0.71 Beta Discussion/Suggestion/feedback Thread 19.3.1

Yes i meant Payday the overkill PC game about stealing crap. Dont matter if you haven't played it. I just thought of it as a chance.

 

Technically I can't really put in anything used in other games, as that'd be plagiarism at it's finest, technically speaking.
However, I can feel free to mock chain stores, franchises, etc, so long as it's not TOO similar (the Awffle house is REALLY pushing that). + Rockstar (formerly DMA games) is pretty ban-hammer happy with their content, even if I merely keep a name-sake. Will keep it original here, we'll set Beamng.drive apart and keep everything one better, like it belongs. GTA (and other Rockstar games) will have some catching up to do when this game is done. GTA, etc (all those crime games really) is a criminal simulator first and a driving game a distant third (and a shooter in between). This is a purpose built driving and crashing simulator, so I'm going to make a fun map regardless, but I would be lying to say I didn't take some design cues (jump placements, map-flow) from San Andreas.
San Andreas will always be my favorite GTA series game, it was by far the most fun, and brought character building into the equation.

Well glad you approve, it may become BIG WANG chinese food, but I am not entirely 100% sure. Will take what is said into consideration.
I am trying to keep people chuckling while still keep a map that flows well and looks like it could really be a real location, well as close as my level-making skills and bending the rules of the game engine allow. It needs to look real because it IS a real place. I had to simplify some things and forgo a bit of detail here, or there - but slowly & surely I am finding ways to fit it in. Simplifying bridges, while keeping the same character, and making sure to keep the terrain from showing it's low-resolution/low-detail near the road edges with obvious height differences and grass being jagged edged (not all of the square-grass will be gone, just where map detailing is DONE).
On simplifying things, I might have to forgo 1 or 2 out of 10~15 businesses on a road because they might not fit with the building models I am using, or there might not be room with an optimal layout, etc. Or the terrain might not be up to the task of many different height changes frequently (getting invisible collision or terrain that doesn't line up with the visible terrain accurately), or it just plain looks bad.
(pardon my on-coming run-on sentence)
There are however, a lot of mesh road objects used as bridges and I am trying to take some of those out for the sake of FPS, as when they're in view it hits the FPS very badly. I replaced them with facsimile versions of bridges so it still will look good, but if the game has some default bridges, and I can save say 25 objects which would let me make many city blocks nicely detailed and fully realized, by using one or two game-default bridges in their place, and it has the same function, nothing is lost, only gained.

However, long story short, there's lots of ways to rig gobs of detail into a map. Lots of ways. I only know a handful, I am sure there's another handful of ways, but I must work with the cards I am dealt. That being said, I will have more progress to post in a day or two.
--Cheers

 

One thing i always find odd about this map that its very detailed but doesnt look as good graphics wise like the devs maps an i dont know why that is because my settings are the same and on you pics it looks just as good as a real map maybe my settings are the problem? But ill see it next month when i have a new graphics card

 

Absolutely love it! love the highway great for police chases, drag races and generally driving fast . Best map I've ever come across since I installed BeamNG in 2015.



Just wondering though, did you use a program for the terrain of is it all handmade?
Also how did you got the map to be 21,300 x 21,300?
I was wondering because I want to create a map bigger than the default size...

 

Depth of field (DOF), HDR, filtering/AA/SSAO settings, I usually have the details up pretty high, even though I only have what barely is considered enthusiast graphics (it lets me know where it gets quite slow). Normally I don't even like Depth of Field as it gives me eyestrain/headaches in some games (Stalker series, for one, and Fallout 4), but in this game it is really well done and doesn't do that and makes the trees look really nice (and doesn't hit FPS here).
1050ti 4gb graphics cards can be had (new!) in the 165~175$ range if you know where to look on SuperBiiz and Amazon.

For those (if anyone is) having slowdowns, reflections are a big hit (done on GPU), as-is shadows (done on CPU), for what it's worth.
--- Post updated ---

Thanks, it was originally a 'large map test', to test functionality of a large map in this game. It only got released as I started adding detail and such that made it look good. Despite floating-point precision loss 6~10 miles away from the starting point of 0,0,0 in a game-world (which is merely visual), it does function well - though the forest brush collision and location database / index uses lots of RAM.
I used L3DT software which is commercially available for about US 30$ on the Bundysoft website, it's a cheaper alternative to World Machine but isn't as easy to make everything look good without more knowledge.. I just use it to generate 4k height maps after stumbling a lot with World Machine, and the trial of World Machine doesn't let me generate more than 512 x 512 maps, so I wasn't interested in wasting my time on them. World Machine 2 is also 200$, to use for free mod making, they can kiss my rear being that expensive. I might pay 50~60$, but 200?, they can go pound sand.
I am aware that some places of the map (just hidden grass spots) are too dark, that will be fixed.
I picked the rock color to mimic sandstone, which we have here among other types. I tried to make the grass look like normal grass in my yard, not the lime green that's used otherwise (sorry, the developer's maps are very beautiful, but grass isn't lime green!!!).
I actually yanked a chunk of it out and plopped it on the desk while matching the color up.
If you want something as close to a real life driving situation and have the whole town to yourself, this is it.
--Glad you liked it! You will love the next version.

 

Ill try turning those up as high as possible then also ill probably go for something bigger like 1080 or 1080ti if i have enough money

 

Thanks, it was originally a 'large map test', to test functionality of a large map in this game. It only got released as I started adding detail and such that made it look good. Despite floating-point precision loss 6~10 miles away from the starting point of 0,0,0 in a game-world (which is merely visual), it does function well - though the forest brush collision and location database / index uses lots of RAM.
I used L3DT software which is commercially available for about US 30$ on the Bundysoft website, it's a cheaper alternative to World Machine but isn't as easy to make everything look good without more knowledge.. I just use it to generate 4k height maps after stumbling a lot with World Machine, and the trial of World Machine doesn't let me generate more than 512 x 512 maps, so I wasn't interested in wasting my time on them. World Machine 2 is also 200$, to use for free mod making, they can kiss my rear being that expensive. I might pay 50~60$, but 200?, they can go pound sand.
I am aware that some places of the map (just hidden grass spots) are too dark, that will be fixed.
I picked the rock color to mimic sandstone, which we have here among other types. I tried to make the grass look like normal grass in my yard, not the lime green that's used otherwise (sorry, the developer's maps are very beautiful, but grass isn't lime green!!!).
I actually yanked a chunk of it out and plopped it on the desk while matching the color up.

Vega 56 or a geforce GTX 1070 (and new 1070ti coming out not too long from now, it's on guru3d if you want to read the news, i don't think it's out yet though). If you are looking for a card, pre-order that 1070ti if you can find it for pre-order.
Davidinark (a youtube reviewer who has checked out my maps) says his runs my over-detailed or just plain over-sized maps quite well, so you don't really NEED to go higher than that, but make sure if you pony up to get the larger of two VRAM sizes on the card, I am already (just ever-so-slightly, and with mods included) over-topping 4096mb of VRAM usage between Beamng.drive and Fallout4 (both with mods, obviously, and my maps are really textures by the shovel full, more on this below!).
I also have a friend who does the 2560 resolution (or whatever it is, close to that, like 2.5k or whatever it's called) and has the 1070 and has no issue at all with it. So I really don't think you need to stretch all the way to a 1080 or 1080ti, but if miners jammed up the price of the 1070s so much the 1080 is almost the same price, well, you decide there with the 20% performance difference between the two. If the 1080 is 20% more and delivers 20% more performance (it does), it's a no-brainer if you can use the power it has, and have the funding.
My Rx 480 8gb is not quite fast enough to do high detail as still run Roane County's most detailed part super-smooth, I got down to 27 (!!!!) fps with all options MAXED on downtown Harriman (the main route through town, though it will get some optimizing where I can manage to figure out how). However, turning down reflections or turning them off solves any and all reflection issues. Beamng.drive in it's early state + my mapping abilities aren't the most conducive to high fps. I can make a beautiful scene very detailed but it's not going to run as smooth as GTAV.

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Editor screenshots of today's work.
Are you tired of coming home, and being too inebriated to find and enter the CORRECT house? Well YOU'RE IN LUCK, because now you can live in something besides red brick boxes or white siding polygons!
All at the cost of 1~1.5mb of new textures or less, and 10mb of models (total).



shot immediately above on left-most building shows default game-included model

shot above, left most model is the default game-included model
Now everything won't look the (censored) same anymore.
They still look like their originals when they're a block or more away, but honestly, it doesn't bother me too terribly badly.

I will be doing this with more homes and buildings so there's more variety.

These screenshots are not representative of the final product and the placement and location is temporary. I just wanted to demo them for y'all. Welcome to the 80s~90s town-home craze.

 

Thanks for the info price wise theyre nearly the same sometimes but would a 500 bucks saphirre vega 64 be a good idea also cant wait for the next map update

 

You have to look @ price for performance, you can read the Vega reviews, there's also an FCAT frame-pacing analysis (micro-stutter detector, in tech-terms). You have to see what the going rate is on the cards in question, as prices vary wildly.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-categories/videocards.html
First page should have most of the articles that you need, especially near the top.
AMD cards do a lot better in games that use Vulkan rendering engine, so if you play those, that is a consideration, and also on directx 12, both cards show performance increases due to multi-threaded rendering pipelines that dx11 and previous does not have.
The Nvidia cards have lower power use, but the AMD card has this new 'rapid packed math' feature, which may be helpful in the future when games start using it, and also, the AMD cards have HBM2 memory, which is much less latency as it's basically stacked right on the end of the GPU chip itself instead of an inch away on the board surrounding the gpu processor itself.
If the 1080 and 1070 are the same price, the 1080 is a no-brainer.
I would choose based on price and what the performance is for games you play.

Do read the articles though! Hope it helps. I can't say to favor one or the other. I just bought an AMD card almost a year ago so I'm set for a while (I hope anyways) because the last one lasted 3.5 years, and also because they don't scream like dying rats (coil whine) as much as the Nvidia cards I had (they all did except one, it is enough to drive you mad, look up videos on "coil whine").
Coil whine + high FPS = audible screech through the speakers, the higher the fps, the more it screams... some nvidia cards, namely a GTX 260 about 10 years ago, screamed so loud (I could hear it upstairs and two rooms away!) I had to buy an amp to filter it out on it's too-many-bands-to-remember equalizer. The sound card equalizer wasn't helping enough. It's due to the power delivery on the card, and both brands can do it but from experience the Nvidia cards are a lot more likely to do it. Non-reference circut boards and such are less likely to do it, if it's not just a reference card + fancy cooler (like many cards are). I had a custom Gigabyte Windforce model Nvidia 4xx (470 or 480?) series and it didn't make a peep. Was the only Nvidia card that was gaming-able that didn't do it since the Nvidia 5700fx cards.
Vsync can also put a big muffler on coil-whine if you have a 60~75fps screen, it won't scream so much.
I care more about silence than I do about FPS so long as it's full motion in what I do. 60fps is nice but 30~45fps is enough, so again, that's why I bought the AMD card, but pick what you want (do read user reviews though!) and what the reviews say is good.
The AMD VEGA 64 ASUS model card review may not be up currently, but they're due out any day.

Geforce 1080 and 1070 driver support will be more bug-free and mature than Vega from AMD, obviously, as VEGA just landed a month or two ago or whenever (a month?).

You pick, I can't make the call for you

 

Townhouses are done! I started at around noon or so...
scripting in all the townhomes, making the new graphics, and re-skinning some old ones (or re-coloring them as needed)...
scripted all into the forest brush, yay, everything worked 100% the first time, that's a GOOD thing.
This road is several blocks long with no cross-roads so I found it the perfect place to put this HOA-like townhome development.








There's actually a house across from it also, with a rather overgrown lawn.

With THAT ^^^ right across from it

What's that, a dirty disgusting polluting INDUSTRIAL ZONE right next to the pretty residential development??? YES!

Enter, NIMBY Industries! Towering over the beautiful residential neighborhood practically surrounding it, destroying property values.


For perspective, this all is shown in a shot of the pre-existing road (in the previous version), in Rockwood (it's just to the south east of the spawn by less than a half-mile, or maybe just that far to the far end). The buildings past the far end of the stream, is where the spawn point is (and was) ... Stream color was updated to be proper and is a green-ish color now.

So yeah, up the four-lane road, making a left about half-mile up, and you cross the tracks & that's where the spawn point is for Rockwood (in the version everyone has already).
A good solid 10+ hours of work on this tonight. yay. Lots got done.
--- Post updated ---
Make Sprawl-Mart great again! It's grey now. I will do the jumps (A bump-out so to speak) in the wall where the doors are located tomorrow to make that a little more color-matched if I have time.

 

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Thanks! I'm quite familiar with World Machine so I'll probably use that.
A large map test. ha. Turned out to be a pretty good large map test!

I have some freezes in game even though i have GTX1080 with 8gb of vram plus 32gigs system memory and an i7 7700k. Does anyone else get freezing in game? Or is it that BeamNG isn't made for large scale maps?

 

Make Sprawl-Mart great again! It's grey now. I will do the jumps in the wall where the doors are located tomorrow to make that a little more color-matched.

Are they just like quarter-second stutters? It's streaming in data, there used to be many 1-second-long pauses, sometimes when loading a bunch of models on a sector of the terrain (it's divided into many grids like 500ft x 500ft or something close to that), it can do that, especially when coming up on a town or something of the such, mostly the first time you enter it.
Basically it's throwing things from the page-file to the system memory.
Keep in mind you will have lots of page file usage here with this game!
(I have RAID-ed planar MLC nand SSD's and they're always 85~90% full, they're 3 years old now and 88% life left, page-file doesn't hurt!)

To answer most certainly, it's the game streaming in data, lots of data, and juggling lots more of it than it was intended to this early.
The game has gotten GOBS better at doing this over the past year, I can assure you, since this map came out. Several one-second or half-second pauses are now gone, there are very few pauses of which they are about 250ms or so or less (I will try to catch them on frame-time checkers next time, Afterburner has frame time graphs).

Here's a fun thing, if you're a bit bored and have time:
You could haul a tractor trailer full of pianos with that machine. It's fantastic. That will last you many many years (3+, 5 if you skimp on video settings 4 years from now when stuff is more advanced). I am limited to 22 pianos max, 20 is OK + truck & trailer, with 16gb of ram. You are best to place one piano and one vehicle, and then shift-drag to copy inside the f11 editor, to put those in the truck. Don't copy too many at a time or it crashes! Happy piano hauling, it's a laugh!

The skips could be Windows processes that are multi-core enabled. My music player does it to me now and then, but this simulator is known for hitching a bit now and then...there's just so much data. IT will get better in time and I am optimizing, there's *LOTS* of 4k textures and even an 8k texture or two.

I guess my piano truck can't use the FEE FIRST's (bank) drive up teller window thingie:

 

I Have done a trucking thing but really i love doing insane crashes. though pianos might be fun!
I think the 4k and 8k resolutions probably explain my freezing because i don't think my ssd will be the problem.

The other thing is my apps freeze for up to 4 or 5 seconds.. probably my processor bugging out...
dont worry it was one of my apps bugging everything out.

 

It does it here, which app was causing that, a few people - my self included, noticed 'HUD MINIMAP' lagging, along with speedometer and other infos. There's a memory leak in something with the UI.

On other news, Tell the Wife her new piano is here!

 

lol about the pianos!

Yes it was the minimap app that froze my speedometer.

 

So excited for the next update. Keep up the good hard work, Bob!

 

More people are having issues with navigation apps freezing the other UI? I thought i was the only one.

 

Thanks to the both of you for making me aware of this. I noticed it but I rarely bring up stuff like this. I will check out my other maps and try to figure it out. The UI exe will also sit there and over a whole day of doing things, slowly start eating it's way up to 11~12gb if you give it enough hours to. There's something seriously flawed with it. I think it's getting backlogged so far it's buffering everything it has to do, slowly getting more and more buried, like an AMD 80-486 dx/2 66 running the Duke Nukem 3d demo, where it crashes out in the ice/water area of one of the 2nd or 3rd episode maps. So it looks like a memory leak, but it's just the game UI burying itself, and it's new to 0.10. Maybe it's a new 0.10 "feature", "Auto-lost" ... No map for you! I will see what I can figure out in time (it's not high priority, it's more on the devs to fix that).
--- Post updated ---

Thanks, for all the knocking this map got for it's low detail stretched terrain, glad there's plenty of folks out there to see this come to fruition in it's intended glory.
Again, my work is here for the community to use. This way we can make stuff that looks better and doesn't repeat like an old cartoon when they have a scene (and they run past the same repeating scenery 20x each cut-scene).

A collada file is just plain text xml. If you know what to look for you can easily edit which external texture pointers it has. Have to catch the indexes for it not just the pointers to it, or it won't find it and you get 'notexture' symptoms.

I will give a tutorial how to do this, at a later date. I have to work on/fix/clean my house today as my nephew's 24th birthday is tomorrow... so I gotta pull a Donna Reed or Patty Duke on this place in a day :x At-least I won't be risking falling off the roof today (glad our house is a ranch!), otherwise I'd come out looking like the pianos in the shots above.

Oh, Back at the other guys for pointing out the UI issues, (not gonna re-edit everything more formally), I will give the devs a shout-out.

Also, BUG: this map's AI paths through the towns are broken with split road feature set to on (called in-lane, now). I have to work on this. They changed something with the auto-junctions creation. I will remove the dedicated paths and re-draw them correctly for use in the new version, when it comes out. After-all, AI is one of the more useful and fun features of this game, and these maps primarily are intended for crash-recreation as a close-second for entertainment when not driving solo.

 

I'm so happy to see this being worked on. Its one of my favorite maps,

 

Thanks, I am working hard on this. I wanted to wait for the game to progress a bit more before I did more with the map, but it's getting far along enough, and computer hardware is advancing, so I can finally start to fully 'realize' the detail I originally wanted in this map.

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Map progress!
A bunch more progress with planting houses, trees, finishing scenes, and a few yet-to-be-named business have been put in.
I haven't done signs for these yet.













One is a dry-cleaner, one is a car wash (bet you can't figure that out, heh), other one is a Lawyer or something else (converted house). Another one is an auto-part store. There's also a mechanic's garage and some other little building, insurance office I think.
The park is done! This block of it, anyways.




Finished up the street that is the Rockwood starting point (mostly).



One non-descript government building.



RAM use on load is 5gb of RAM not including the UI (That's loading, and starting in Rockwood with high detail textures with an 88 Pessima).

That's two days of mostly-the-whole-day of work, I didn't have enough material yesterday to show for it so did pictures today - hope I made up for it. Have a majority of the main route's commercial property done.

Whilst testing:

...it just kinda got stuck like that. It's totally free-standing. So yeah, don't do 100+ mph through the fee-first's drive-thru.