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

MOAR! I have officially spent about 13~15 hours last-minute-cramming all the stuff I needed to do in the map into one day. The Bob is very tired now... but it's 99% done, it's just got to be tested / QC'ed and given a good test for a few hours before I bother spending half a day editing it.


All bridges I wanted to replace have been replaced (7~8 since last post). Not including railroad bridges. Not including the two bridges right in downtown Rockwood because I have to make custom stuff for those two. The 'GREEN BRIDGE' on the south-east of Harriman hasn't been replaced, it also needs a custom bridge made for it. I will do that one on the next update.
Made a custom new bridge for downtown Harriman on the south-end of town (last two pictures). You won't hit the sign post for Dollar Miserable anymore when trying to hit the rock jump in the last pic, either.
Road patch textures were intentionally made darker than matching, so it looks like a road patch. It's intentional (fourth picture).
5Th picture is the new traffic light, and the road on the far side of the intersection that goes to pasta purgatory was intentionally removed from that intersection (it does not exist in real-life).
Finished all on/off ramp AI paths. These should be much better now and the AI shouldn't hit signs or drive down the road-shoulder. The AI should NEVER drive down the shoulder in this new update, let me know if it does it consistently in some spot(s), also let me know if the AI goes the wrong way anywhere except very rarely on bridges (that can't be helped).

OK so I will be testing the heck out of this tomorrow and replacing the last bridge that hasn't been replaced yet (10~15 minutes of work with that bridge), that still needs to.
16 hours of mapping in one day doesn't make The Bob very happy, but it will be worth it when you get it. The quality difference and bug-amount should be easily recognized by most folks who frequently play the map. I got lucky with my back today. I will count my lucky stars on that one.
Will upload this after I do some more testing tomorrow (technically later today!).

--Cheers!

 

Excellent work - can't wait to tear my way up and down the US40 and all over, with TRAFFIC!

I'll be sure to post a video or ten once I get back to my old stomping grounds

 

Well right now I'm debugging a bit, and going to remove some out-of-the-way roads from AI behavior, because I've hit the 65536 limit of AI nodes allowed - and now the AI is completely chunked. Traffic tool or not, it went BUST.

Code:

|E|libbeamng.lua.V|*** FATAL LUA ERROR: [string "string"]:1: main function has more than 65536 constants

It's always something. I will figure it out. IF AI is missing on some back-road, no one's going to mind. If it's missing in the whole map, that's a downer. Regardless, if I cannot fix it, release will still happen, it may delay a day, but that's all I'm willing to delay. They will have to fix the limitation in the game's vehicle brain lua file. It's the game itself that's bombing out with a soft-error (not crash to desktop). I will remove AI from older roads, or remove old roads altogether if I must, to make it work.
--- Post updated ---
Fixed, this thing is now working again with traffic. Indeedy there were just TOO MANY AI NODES.
Sheesh, game's not even out yet and I've out-done the limits again.

REMOVED AI PATHS to make this work include:
Stuff by the power plant itself - none of the major routes.
Stuff out north of the Airport, where there was literally absolutely nothing. The main route (Airport road itself) still has AI function. Only alternate side-routes out there were disabled.
Dead-end rural roads / rural roads that meet no other road that lead only to the map edge were removed from AI use to save on nodes. You won't be missing anything really. The roads are still there - but the AI won't appear on the dead-end ones. AI use may go up to 1000ft (360m) past the last intersection or cross-road to simulate AI traffic, but that's it.

Best to use 1.3x the spawn distance (spawn rate I believe is the value on the box), especially if you're on the highway.

Will commence uploading within a few hours if nothing else comes up. This is Roane County 0.15.x to match game version.

 

Well, AI is working well, have a bit of touching-up to do on on/off ramps, but other than that, it's pretty decent.
It even goes over several jumps in Harriman Downtown area (well, it TRIES to go over jumps, that is).

Yes, there's a limit, I am within 100 nodes of that limit currently, but it does function fully the way it is. I am sure not to cut out any major 'loops' in the map, everything that matters still has it.
I will inquire with the developers about it, to see if they can filter the non-AI functioning nodes from the AI nodes instead of looking at the whole heap, before it hands the value off to the AI engine to index (That would cut it in half or at-least knock a good third off).
So Gull it's not your bug at all, I checked, and it does it without the traffic tool, it's only pulling a 16-bit value (max 65536 nodes), which is half the math to process, but still - quite limited obviously.

In other news, AI will also attempt these jumps, too.

The two opposing pairs that cross the rail tracks may be attempted by AI, the pair sitting on top the wall in the top-right won't be noticed by AI though. They might be able to make these two pair, though, unlike the other one I showed above (unless you max out the speed limits).
--- Post updated ---
Now the AI is working on on-ramps fine.

The light in-front of SPRAWL MART will be broken for now, sorry, but it's not going to hold up release day here -
Never-mind, I replaced it since I couldn't figure out why the animation didn't work.

For those of you in the USA, sometime before NOON there should be a msg via PATREON (for those supporting the Los Injurus City map), with a download link via Mega.
For those folk other than the above, you should be able to download this by Monday (it gets a few days of testing, in-case I buggered anything good).

 

Thanks - it's surely very impressive until you realize at 66,000 points or so (give or take 50~100 points), that you've completely broken the AI until you remove a few much-less-used roads.
Who would have thought that the AI brain is only using 16-bit values - unless there's a SNES or Genesis / Mega Drive port of BeamNG I don't know about?

Thankfully, this map already has a majority of it's road networks in. There's a few roads out in the middle of no-where I can add when need-be but that won't be until the city map project - Los Injurus City Map - is much further along. I will be getting back on that in a few days. The Los Injurus City Map has it's own thread, in the forums section. If you search for it, you will surely find it.

A Patreon-sourced message went out with the map link today around 1100 to 1200 hours CST (USA Central time, about noon for you civvies in the bunch).
The message contained the description, summarized change-log, and a link to the 1.2GB (EEK) Roane County map file.

For those in-the-know about my other maps, Tail of the Dragon / Deal's Gap, and Nevada Interstate - both these maps are working again due to a recent bug-fix two to three weeks ago. So go ahead and try them even if they say unsupported. I will have them changed back within a few days. Deal's gap should work great with AI as it has LOTS of nodes.

This thread might go a bit dormant for a while (unless someone messages in). Forum-hosted version will go live sometime around MONDAY for the general public, provided I didn't butcher anything.
Only errata is that on a few of the on/off ramps, the AI isn't totally centered in the lane, and the railing texture on one of the houses sourced from Garfield Heights isn't 100% perfect, shouldn't really be noticeable unless you stare right at it while stopped. Nothing that's a deal-breaker.

--That is all for now. Sometime on or immediately following the weekend, when I am sure no more bug reports will come in (none have yet) from this, I will get back to doing things for Los Injurus city map, since the other maps I planned on updating are currently fully functional. Nevada Interstate may get updated later this spring for use with the traffic tool. It's a non-obligatory update, however.

 

Bugs fixed:
AI going the wrong way on the road BEHIND the sprawl-mart (not immediately behind it, it's like a quarter-mile behind it, the 5-lane portion had it's nodes spaced too far apart, traffic tool doesn't handle this well yet).
I fixed a missing 'one way road' setting where it goes from two to four lanes here just now, too.

Cars were heading the wrong way down this road often, not good, and also to the section to the bottom-left of the shot as you drove up to it from Kingston or Spend-a-Lot.
There was also a section of dropped roadway on the side where the purple circle (cursor) is, very minor but fixed now.

AI not holding lane on the last half-mile or so of Route 27. This is where the jumps are if you take the main route out of Rockwood and keep going with it until you reach the jumps and then the map edge.
AI brake-checking when getting on or off the ramps at Westel Rd and Airport Rd (the western-most two interchanges of US 40 highway). This was due to AI nodes too narrow for the ramps. Narrow=slower, I did so to keep it in lane here, but now it shouldn't be a problem. Also would rarely happen on the interchange of US 40 and the road to Rockwood/Harriman (Roane St / US 27), so I fixed that too.
Two unnecessary models will be removed (there's no textures for them anyways, they aren't used at this point), dropping the 1.2gb download by a meg or two (WOW!), and the zip will be better compressed next time (saving a little space but maybe taking a few seconds longer to load on quad-core or less systems). Friends don't let friends use 'normal' compression settings... unless they're busy testing AI and want it to go quickly. Stupid 4+ year old computer...
If there's any other bugs out there, let me know today or tomorrow at the latest. Tomorrow's bug reports might not make it into this version's upload, but do send anyways.

I will be uploading a new version tonight. This will be the release version for the BeamNG forums here. I will have a link via Patreon also, for those interested, they can get it a bit earlier as the new one won't be up until Monday.
There's very little difference, just a few small changes to the AI, so unless it was bothering you in a spot regarding one of the above-bugs, you won't have to re-download it unless you want choose to.
--- Post updated ---
OOPS, AI still rammed the barricade under the bridge in Kingston, at the Kentucky St overpass under US40. The barricades to the north-side of the bridge that push traffic into the left-turn lane got moved back a bit this time. That should fix it.
Turns out that was caused by old AI routes still in use that should have been deleted, that weren't. This frees up another 80 nodes or so now. Now the traffic will properly use the on/off ramps at Kingston Kentucky St.
Added another node on each side of each bridge for AI routing described above with the barricade incident... this way cars shouldn't go the wrong way in two spots. Fixed some of the grass-in-the-road here too.
Fixed a few very small texture mis-alignments that no one but me would notice at Pine Ridge Rd interchange...

 

Still making last minute amendments to the map. Lest I forget something and then have to spend 5~7 hours uploading the stupid thing again.
Got lots of testing done yesterday, saw lots of stupid AI but again much less than previously (actually it's a LOT better now). Most of it is resultant of checks for changing lane settings NOT getting done (four lane divided roads going to two lane bidirectional, going from two-lanes one way such as divided roadways and turning into the left ONCOMING lane of a bidirectional route and so-forth). This isn't something I can change - that has to be done by the traffic tool. This also can sometimes happen less-impacting though on an on-ramp or off-ramp, it can sometimes cause the traffic to go to either side of the single-lane (driving over the edge of the lane by two feet or so, about a half meter), running over curbs or into signs. Again, that's traffic tool department there - I can't fix that (except where there were phantom AI lanes that shouldn't have existed - hopefully got those all out by now). Trying to make this finished-product release as good as possible (technically it's still WiP but I want to get it polished up nice so I don't have to fix it again right away). Will get it uploaded sometime today so do check by tomorrow morning or noon-time (USA time) that there is or isn't an email via Patreon with a totally optional non-obligatory new link. Non-obligatory as I stated because if nothing has seemed amiss in your version, nothing would even be noticed!


Again fixing some MOAR stuff:
AI acting up on on/off ramps and running over the curb in-front of Worst Buy - the some of it which was caused by an old AI route still there on a few of the ramps is fixed, some of this is a bug in the Traffic Tool.
Some of the above can be caused by the traffic tool not checking for changing lane conditions being present, sending it into the wrong lane / going wrong way / not maintaining lane properly - bug already submitted.
Added some more nodes to the Kentucky St overpass on US40 to stop wrong-way drivers from appearing.

I would hope this doesn't happen anymore here @ Kentucky St. US40 Overpass. Tests OK now.
Added some more nodes to Ruratin Rd overpass to lessen chance of AI going wrong way here, too.
Adjusted nodes on Pine Ridge Rd so that the gap is not so long over the bridge (for the AI again same as above).
EDIT: OOPS! Grass/mud in the road @ Thomas J Pickel JR bridge (west of Kingston), fixed.

AI traffic nodes were really really messed up between here and the bridge (out of shot left-side). Tests OK.
That two picture section above of roadway was actually one of the most tricky ones to fix. "Sleeving" the joint with a second AI path going for 2 nodes each way from the joint, actually fixed it (it did for other before, too).
What makes these tough is if you overlap the two separate sides at all on the multi-lane side, it ends up with them auto-joining as intersection can/do, when they shouldn't, in weird ways, and you end up with a giant pretzel of AI routes that confounds AI easily and is very hard / time-consuming to fix.
Fixed road-blending under the US40 bridge (well next to it on the north side) on the road that goes to the Kingston fossil power plant. It was entirely missing any road-blending on two of the three intersections on that road 'triangle'.
Removed some AI roads that weren't needed (intersection pieces had AI use; they shouldn't, as it causes them to eat stop signs). Re-enabled a missing AI route on the route to Harriman from the fossil power plant. You can now have the AI going from the Power Plant to Harriman and back on that loop as a portion is no longer deliberately removed from AI use.
Fixed brake-checking on the hill-crest on the two-lane portion of road immediately next to where the AI was driving the wrong-way behind SPRAWL-MART (it went the wrong way on the four-lane portion), and a brake-check condition near where I enabled the AI route above. AI may still be dodgy on the SMALL bridge with the high center (and green beams) going into the SE section of downtown Harriman but it SHOULD make it across. That's one of the few remaining old-style mesh-road bridges, but I don't have a new 'bend/arched' piece for the smaller bridges yet and that will take some time to make.

Listed in post above but some amended and some popped back up again to be fixed!:
AI brake checking immediately after, or before on/off-ramps & between intersections for ramps under Roane St Underpass on Route 27/40 interchange, southbound only (this change amended).
Bug reported and fixed: Road pictured on above post had several things wrong with it. Took 3 attempts to fix but IT'S FINALLY FIXED. There were several things wrong here & I really hope it's fixed now, tested OK.
Bug noted by me and embarrasingly fixed immediately: Barricade-seeking vehicles (noted above, this took 2 times to fix after I thought I fixed it before release). Crash, Crunch, Smash bash crash... Yes and the barricades are moved back just a bit too so now there's NO WAY this can happen. It better not.

This is finally considered fixed. Sheesh.
This hopefully should make the REPO by Monday-Tuesday or such.

 

So after spending the last two days eating humble pie (never mind the last few weeks) fixing my map of it's glorious colony-worth of bugs the upload is approx...
I even used "T-rex-temper-tantrum stomping on meeces level of compression" and it still took forever to be done (but it was 8.x MB smaller *grins with halo*). Link will likely go out within an hour for those on Patreon. I will send the site admins a copy too. The admins can decide to put it up whenever they want to (after-all, like everyone else I am at the mercy of them, I'm no better than anyone else). Hopefully they don't start charging me hosting, because their bandwidth is going to go through the roof when the 2nd most popular map gets downloaded like crazy and it's 1.25GB. Nothing I can do about that - I am sure I can go through and knock out 50~75MB of assets that aren't used any longer but the chance is great that someone's going to get a nice greeting from the orange 'no texture' committee - and we wouldn't want that.
Legendary Quality Hint: Don't make asset changes to the map just before shipping it out - this leads to lots of OOPS! work later. I've already learned this lesson a long time ago.

If the moderators put this up during the weekend, consider that good-graces & absolute sheer luck, but I doubt they're in on the weekend. If not, surely by Monday-Tuesday something will be online as stated before. For the next release I will work on rooting out some of the older assets that have been outmoded or otherwise "who's services are no-longer-needed", maybe can get file-size down a bit. It's a monster-sized map though so actually 1.2GB is small if anything. It's hard to make such a huge map without using a lot of different textures, ergo everything will look too much the same.

So it's backed up now, it's online, it will be on the servers HERE when the moderators here decide to voluntarily take time to connect the right wires, IT WILL BE THE SAME THING that is going out via Patreon messages right now, so if you get it there, you don't need to get it here. This is 15.2.x I believe, vs 15.x before. Not much any difference again between the one that went out (Wednesday?), and now just some bugs fixed and stupid oversights no-longer oversighted...

--Cheers
P.S. Look for Los Injurus City Map stuff coming next week! I will be happy to get back onto that map, the terrain is so much easier to work with.

EDIT: The link has been forwarded to the moderators. So whenever they have a chance to handle their messages, the resource will be updated, and I will discover that I am inundated with notifications :x

 

For anyone who has the 15.x or the brand-new 15.2.x version of this map and wants to use the traffic tool the way I do, please see the attached screenshot for optimal custom settings.
It's found under traffic_tool_gull\ge\lua\extensions\freeroam in the zip for the traffic tool and the file is dynamictraffic.lua. This makes the traffic spawn in and out about the same range as GTA's traffic does.
When the traffic tool has been updated (there's a bug-fix in the works), I will re-download it and send it back to @Gamergull with my values, to use specifically for this mod & the city map.
Having higher spawn-out and spawn-in values prevents stopped-vehicle incidents from happening on the high-speed motorways found all over this (and Los Injurus City map) from happening as much, as vehicles will have longer to get up to speed. I mean if you like stop and go traffic that's fine, but that's not always what everyone is after. My values are roughly fifty-percent higher to double of the 'stock' values.
I also use 95MPH speed limit or so, but you can keep it to 70~75mph as that's about what people do on the highways (and 70 is the speed limit) - that's up to you folks.
My well-aged 4790k 4.4ghz (all core, chip delidded, multiplier locked at that speed through BIOS) machine with 32gb of low-latency 2400mhz DDR3 RAM and an RX 480 8gb card all were able to run 7~9 vehicles, at most. 7 or 8 vehicles were the best experience. I'd say 7 vehicles for 4770k or 4790k / 6700k / 7700k owners, you can try 8 or 9 but very rarely it will begin to drop below 20fps if the cars are crashing often.
Please don't add any custom pathways for AI for those who know how to use the F11 map editor, it's at the limit currently and you will cause the AI to break if you add much more than a city-block long roadway with it.

One day I am going to have to think about building a new computer, one day, just not yet. With the traffic tool, I finally have a reason to use more cores with testing the AI (the more cores I can obtain, the better off this AI will function as I can test more efficiently, with more cars in-play at once). This machine is getting rather old at 4.5 years as-of next month... so yes, for reliability sake, I might need to think about replacing some things - If not now, then definitely by the fall. Heck, I've never even owned the same machine as my daily for more than 3 years in my entire life, and I've been computing 25 years now.
It certainly won't come out of the city map's funds though, this will come from my own pocket - so no 9900K machines for me unless I win the lottery, it will be a Ryzen.

I have also uploaded a LUA file if you would rather use this in-stead of editing the values manually.
PLEASE ONLY USE THE LUA FILE WITH TRAFFIC TOOL v 1.1 THAT IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE. USING IT ON THE 1.0 OR 1.1.1 VERSION (PENDING) WILL SURELY MESS IT UP GOOD.
The lua file can be placed where I listed above on the first few lines of this post. This file won't stay and I will pull it when the next version of the traffic tool goes live, to be replaced by a custom mod of it, but I will leave the screenshot.

 

I am sorry this has not appeared on the repository yet. There is nothing I can do about that, either. Folks will have to message the moderators about it, if they're interested in doing so.

I am currently looking into hosting it (and eventually Los Injurus, also due to size) on MOD-DB to alleviate this issue.

 

Hey, it’s ok. The repository size limits are there to keep it stable. Large file sizes that are being downloaded at like hundreds of times at once can definitely bring the entire repository to a crawl, or worse, bring it down.

 

The devs have been pretty much MIA for pretty much the past 36 hours actually. Normally I would call imminent update, but there's no sign of anything. Is it a holiday in Germany or something?

 

I don't want to have to host via MOD-DB because it allows the pirates access to it too, and that's not fair to the developers (they deserve to eat, and have nice things, for bringing us fun).
I mean, I am sure they will get around to me eventually...

Developers/Moderators went away? Ah I am pretty sure I know where they went. It's not for me to discuss, it's business. They can elaborate if they wish on their own time.
Surely they'll be back in town by tomorrow or Saturday...I hope.
@synsol help my map is stuck (and on the repository yet), please help *white flag raised* I can't do this without your awesome helpfulness.
Please, they're going to lynch me in town square soon if I don't get this map out.
Or they're going to throw me into the angry porcupine pit for the 3rd time this week.
Or no, NOT THE THINKER, NOT THE THINKER, OH-NOES!
*runs away from angry mob of people wanting to play the new Roane County version, but cannot play it yet because moderators have been busy*

I will see if I can pester them kindly...without having to pull porcupine quills out of my hind-quarters for the next following hours due to the aforementioned pit full of them...

 

Note on repository "mod approval may be slower than usual, because of traffic tool, thank you from your understanding"

 

bob.blunderton updated Tennessee USA Roane County Beta, REAL TERRAIN, 8gb System RAM REQ'D with a new update entry:

NEW! Roane County Tennessee USA 2019 15.2.x Version 8GB RAM REQ'D!

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

Woot!

 

...This map will probably be my favorite map once I get a supercomputer. Wish I could have fun with it at some time lol.

 

It’s a blast with traffic, especially when you’re driving a T-Series ram plow.