For the big bridge connecting the highways, you should make tollbooths at the beginning of each side, possibly modded WCA ones. --- Post updated --- I’m excited for the map, keep up your good work!
Has there any unevenesses at the highway dividing strips? It would add more immersion to drive (as other near road's surfaces).
Good idea. Maybe I should also add some to another highway as well (the tunnel bypass, highway closest to camera on previous screenshot). Edit: Do you mean the cable-stayed one far away, or the close highway? I assumed you mean that bridge before, but reading it again makes me think you were actually referring to the bypass closest to the camera. The layout is custom, the buildings are from East Coast USA, although I have included a lot of custom assets to make the town (custom train stations, bridges, footpaths, signs, etc.) The edges are mostly flat, although I have included ditches on some parts. When I first created the map, I took the terrain object and scaled it up. It turned out later that this became an issue with the resolution being a bit lower than what I should have (I think the resolution could be set, but I have no idea if it can be fixed now). I managed to hide it for the most part, but it limits how much I can alter terrain near objects as each terrain face is about a metre, so I get metre resolution for the entire 8x8km map. So, with this limitation, I cannot go too much into making rough edges. Maybe I can get it done by faking it with invisible meshes, but I will have to see. It was definitely on my mind that the median strips were not as realistic as they should be.
Update! That was a very challenging change! I have gone backwards in map quality this time, but with this update, it will soon become much greater than it was originally. What I have done is replace the entire terrain with a higher resolution version. I couldn't figure out how to do it, asking didn't get anywhere, and there was no proper documentation anywhere. This new terrain is now twice the resolution. The heightmap is now 4096x4096 (2m per pixel) rather than 2048x2048 (4m per pixel), giving higher quality landforms and hopefully much smoother roads. I felt this was a necessary fix that was worth the many hours I put into trying to make it work. I noticed before that slopes were way too bumpy, unrealistic for parts that were supposed to be driven at highway speeds. It was like the least maintained roads before in terms of roughness. In addition, the higher resolution terrain also provides better mapping of materials onto it. Grass can now go right up to the roads in a less blocky way. See the images below with a before and after shot: The negative? It will mean my map takes more processing power and memory. That's not too bad however, as if you can run any of the other large maps available for the game, you can definitely run my map. Here's the thing with this change, for me, that would result in many more hours of fixing things, as the raw heightmap data is not that nice. Everything is almost as blocky as Minecraft (see image below), so it is now time to smooth every metre of the map. Every road needs to be smoothed, and materials have to be cleaned up. I also lost some of the materials during this change to a new terrain, so I have to re-add the cliff and farm materials to it. This isn't too much of an issue as I had to clean them up anyway. It appears 16 bits aren't enough for the heightmap as all the bridge and object alignment is all over the place. I have to align everything again to the right height. I would say maybe 10 hours extra to do this. Oh, and one last thing... Billboards:
Amazing work but how do you create a map? In track builder i doesn't have skin material for a road etc. I wanna make a map too but I need to learn how
Update: Smoothing of the map due to the higher resolution terrain update as I posted before is now mostly complete. That took a while, and because of that, plus the extra work to smooth the edges of the roads for double the resolution materials, the map will take longer before a release. I am not ready to release it until I get a bit more highway done and the map feels full in the centre. The outer edges will be what gets updates after the initial release. Here are two images to look at. They show some more updated forest.
Edit 3: I have managed to fix the trees as mentioned below. Turns out this was fixed by clearing the cache for a second time (I have no idea why it didn't fix the first time). Here's the situation. The most recent update to the game (the new industrial map) has caused a lot of issues to my map. The big one is that a lot of textures no longer work. I have spent a lot of time trying to fix it but it hasn't worked. I don't know any way to fix it and I don't understand why the update has prevented them from displaying. The missing textures can be found on a lot of objects. Many roads now have no texture, and many trees too, especially with the changes between LODs and imposters. Take a look at the screenshot below to understand how much I mean: Because of this, I have absolutely no idea when this can be completed, or if it is even possible without an entire overhaul. I am hoping I don't have to replace every tree but it could end up being the case. Same for the roads. A lot of them for some reason are messed up. Could it be an issue of me using old game files including the original materials.cs from East Coast USA? The files are copied from the original map. If so, does that mean I am supposed to fix up hundreds of materials? The trees are the biggest concern if I want to complete the map. The trees are copied from the new East Coast USA and Italy. They worked fine before. Nothing changed in the files except that the game update which is why I am so confused. Even trying to do all sorts of edits to the materials don't change anything, and in some cases add more glitches. Edit: I have decided to take a look again today. Perhaps something will be figured out. Possibly the materials aren't actually being loaded. Edit 2: Fortunately, I have finally figured out the road textures being missing. This was due to one being deleted from the files (did the game do it), as well as using glass_invisible (for vehicles) which possible is broken or changed due to the update.
A race track design was made up and placed, so that is currently the only proper drifting part of the map. Otherwise, some areas can be set up for courses (e.g. industrial areas). Perhaps I should add a bit more. As for swamps, they weren't ever considered, and I have no idea if I will add any or not. I suppose I have to figure out the right materials and physics to make them work first. Finally, there are lots of dirt roads that take you all around the map. Currently, you can travel from one side (the dam), all the way to the airport by only driving on dirt roads which cross many roads and weave through many areas.
This project looks dead, but it isn't. For the past few weeks, I have been working on new areas, trying to bulk up the map so it is presentable when I release it. Today, I again fixed some missing textures as the new update (JRI update) has broken it. I managed to fix them without too many problems and I have also done some adjustments to the file management to ensure it doesn' happen again. I also went and improved the sky and shadows. Here is what it looks like now: New area The release date is still far off and way past when I initally planned as I had all sorts of other things get in the way. I don't know exactly when this will be released, but like I said before, the initial release will not contain everything - I will instead gradually add updates to the map. For now, I want to get a good amount of content in to the map.
Looks good! I am curious what the texture problem consisted of and the proper fix for it as I am in stages of building a map but haven't reached a point where I wanna do some custom textures yet. Keep up the good work!
My map is 8x8 km, American road is 11x11 km, so no, my map is smaller. It's not that bad when you get the hang of it. With the new world editor, it should be much easier to understand what happens when things go wrong as you have a much better system for material selection and other things. I find that my issues fit into either two solutions: Either the game needed the cache to be cleared (especially true for trees and their billboard/imposter generation) or, The texture locations or syntax of the files were wrong. Examples of issues with this include the new update causing missing textures as the locations of the files were moved around and the files that were referencing them could no longer find them. Another thing that I have done too often is the incorrect structure of the material assingment files (materials.cs or main.materials.json). I might target the wrong location, mess up what needs to be included in the file, or even as simple as mispelling the texture name. With starting out doing new materials, I recommend just opening up one of the material files, copying a material's code and pasting it in that same file and edit with the image textures of your desired new material.
I have been mostly successful grabbing what I am after from other existing maps, but I do have some textures outside of the game that I want to bring in.. I imagine the "old way" of declaring materials (with the .cs file) works, but since I am new to this trying to learn.. I been trying to stay consistent with using the new editor, structure, files .. etc. to try and make it less complicated to learn. With that said, when adding a new material to a main.materials.json file, how do I get the "persistentId" or is it even needed when declaring a new material?
According to https://www.beamng.com/threads/how-do-persistentids-work.66332/, they are not used. I haven't bothered doing anything with the persistentIDs and everything seems to work just fine, so from my experience, there is no need to worry.
