West Coast USA progress

With Italy well underway, we're going to reveal a map that's been in progress for a few months already. Until recently it's been a "test subject" to trial new map-making approaches, but now that we're confident it is feasible, it's time to make this public.

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Everything here is a work in progress and in no way reflects the final quality.
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As a counterpart to East Coast USA, this map will also be 2km x 2km. However, we're mixing things up a bit by including a modern motorsports facility on the map, larger than Hirochi Raceway and accommodating several other types of racing, including drag, drift and dirt track or oval events.



Positioning the motorsports park in the centre of the map allows the perimeter to be used for a series of highways with some fast and exciting intersections, including two stack interchanges and a partial cloverleaf interchange. There's also a 2.5km (1.5 mile) straight of 4-lane highway which is long enough to max out most vehicles.



Other areas of the map will feature mountainous roads with tight switchbacks for drift or touge gameplay. We're also working on a unique vegetation set for this map, including various shrubs and grasses, radiata pine, fan palm, eucalyptus and redwood trees, and probably more as the map develops.



The city area of the map will employ a combination of terrain (decal) roads and mesh curbs, which has proved to be feasible and effective in experiments so far. This will help reduce polygon count, allow for more detailed road surface markings, and hopefully speed up the street creation process. So far city tests have focused on increasing performance by using modular facade components, placed as forest datablocks.



The street you see above is only a mock-up - none of the city area has been filled in yet on the real map, so we'll be showing lots more progress on that front in the coming posts.






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In the last couple weeks I have been resolving the road network and cleaning up on/off ramp merges, as well as adding some signage, road markings and roadside props.



Most recently I've added a direct elevated freeway into the CBD, and roughed out the road layout for the city. Below you can see a basic intersection mockup. There will be about 35 such intersections in the map's urban area. Buildings are placeholders so I can gauge the impact the skyline will have on the map.

 

Some work on intersections at the edge of the city:

 

Work is underway on the buildings of the city area. My current approach is to break up the city blocks into separate meshes to help with LoD effectiveness, and later on to add smaller sidewalk objects as forest items. This phase is somewhat of an experiment to see how much detail I can get away with, before noticing any performance impact.The buildings below are a mix of placeholder(mostly in the distance) and final-ish meshes and textures.

 

Continuing to fill in the city area, while also cleaning up the back roads and forested areas. Some screens below are from a nearly-complete Chinatown district in the city.

 

Over the last two weeks I have been focused on filling in the industrial outskirts of the city, which includes some rather run-down housing, factories and convenience stores.

 

Quite a lot has changed on this map since the last screenshots I posted. I've completely remade the terrain in World Machine, including backdrop mountains, added new vegetation types and filled in the city considerably. About 95% of the buildings are complete, which leaves only the port area (seen below WIP), a couple of small industrial areas, and some racetrack facilities still to come. Ensuring smooth road merges has also been quite time consuming, but that's finally all done now.

 

adding features to the motorsports park and polishing up the port and suburban areas:

 

Adding radio masts to the top of a couple mountains, with narrow dirt access roads:



(also dealing with an imposters bug currently, so don't mind the appearance of far-away trees and bushes)

EDIT: oops, linked a rather large .png image

 

West Coast USA is getting quite close to completion - below are updated versions of two of the screenshots seen in my second post in this thread. Also below you can see WIP images of part of the canal, the drift track in the parking lot behind pit lane, and road works forming a detour at the edge of the map.