WIP Beta released A new *CITY* map - LOS INJURUS 2023-12-20

What i would like to happen to this map is a more fluid and livable city. More building types, and higher density.

I have no clue how bad performance-wise this would be, but this city is not the most flowing nor natural if one were to look at Google Earth of the most populated. Even just some less similar tall buildings, because they are all just big glass rectangles. Coming from a religious Cities Skylines player (i remember you saying you don't like the game due to lack of realism in highways or something along the lines, but maybe check out the mods Node Controller, TMPE and Intersection Marking Tool. The modding community has revolutionized the road tools in the last year), lots could be done to make this city feel more like it has evolved for hundreds of years, such as thinner roads in downtown, definitely more density in downtown, less car parks in downtown then reducing to large single family houses far out. Of course considering this is in America, this is actually quite realistic in its current sprawls of apartments, stroads and car parks .

The city on the other side is looking great to start with, just even those slight bends in the road plans look very promising. just don't keep those big middle finger looking buildings please lol

Please don't take this as a harsh criticism, if the map were to stay as it is i would be perfectly happy. But more could be done to make it feel less like kilometers of palm trees and brick apartments within the city. Also if you don't mind me asking, do you plan to release other assets the same as the road packs? Such as your buildings (apartments, houses, commercial). That would great!

tl:dr
Number 2, 14 (see above lol) and 3.

 

Just realised I haven't been getting notifications for the thread or the past couple months, glad to see progress is still going strong.
For the poll I'd have to say 2 - build more of the city as I'd say that's the main standout feature this map offers over most other things on the forums (and I'd go as far as to say it's the best city map out there if you exclude WCUSA), especially with the amount of effort and detail put into every road and building that I am yet to see anywhere else to this scale. The highways are cool and all but there's always Roane County and Nevada interstate for the pure pedal to the metal long distance driving, the city (especially with all the assets like the shops, pavments, bridges, etc) is probably my main reason for keeping coming back to this map time and time again. As for actual additions to the city, I feel like a closer packed commercial-residential area would work quite well but I'm not exactly sure how well that would merge with the more american setting and I'm not entirely sure if you really have that sort of area over there. Speeding down tighter back alleys is always fun though so maybe worth a shot, can't hurt to throw the idea out there. Option 10 is always a safe bet too, can't do much harm

 

All great ideas! Thank-you to all (dozen or so) folks who took the time to respond (and others may still do so from now until eternity, it's always great to have other's ideas out there).
I will surely be taking care of most of the issues that have been mentioned.
First and foremost, the tunnel slowdown is due to exceeding VRAM with current model size and texture detail, the tunnels are just too much for current hardware - even my 2070 Super 8gb card. This will hopefully be fixed in the next release by removing the guide-rails from the tunnel or at-least reducing the quantity of them to lower model size significantly. We don't really want to deal with <5 fps to have three dimensional bolt heads and pipe hangars. I WILL be saving the original (current) models (and the original 4gb source model, it's 125mb per piece in game avg, for four pieces so 0.5gb + textures), so that in the future they will be a drop-in replacement.
To give you an idea, the hanging vines and plant material found in the original 4gb model has three dimensional leaves, each leaf is modeled - it's that much detail and is why it's currently plant-less. The stone sloped areas were about 8x more detailed. I believe even the rusty air vent is three dimensional in that tunnel currently, though it has no 'inside' surfaces if you were to peer into it, to save FPS.
The tunnel is definitely next-gen, and was the best, most realistic tunnel, that I could find. It's a bit too much so it will be simplified a little bit - BUT it will entirely keep it's character.

For folks who were wanting more things, such as buildings, go-kart track, higher density city with narrow roads, there will definitely be good news in the future about that. I have the Brownstone model pretty much done.
@Agent_Y Please take a picture of the unfinished part of the map you were speaking of, so I can bump this up on the time-line so that it gets done sooner. I think ALT+O is the screenshot uploader combo.

I will be consolidating textures in the near future - there's too many (there's some 60+ concrete / stucco textures, and dozens of asphalt variations). There will be more asphalt / concrete terrain layers though to compensate.

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I have been EXTREMELY busy lately, BUT I've also been working with my city generation tool. I have to get license clarification on the models from the author, so that I can include them in some form in the city without a DMCA or lawsuit of some sort. I take a lot of care and effort, and WE as a community put too much into this map, to have to deal with stupid license snafu's. Thankfully, being that I'm turning 40 soon, I know the laws pretty well and know what I can and cannot do, what is creative liberty or freedoms I may take as a 3D artist in my country, and what is taboo and can't be done or included.
Multiple TORNADOES whacked the town Wednesday, along with HALF A FOOT OF RAIN that day. Some months we don't get half a foot of rain. It was nuts. I was out in it, trying to fix a girl at church's broken car on the side of the road. NOT fun. I got it done though and she saved a ton of money. She's a few years younger than me and just trying to get by, so I totally couldn't just keep driving when I seen her vehicle there on the shoulder. I had been heading to the church at that time after running errands in town, as I drive past it multiple (2~4) times a week and do maintenance there as-needed if I am capable of doing so, or whatever else is needed. Driving home I was dodging cloud to ground lightning all around me, I truly felt like hell was descending on me (I didn't do it, I swear!) at the time - and it was. I don't think I've seen a storm like that in over a decade, if ever. It was BAD.
Well the Wednesday storms in the afternoon/evening were crazy, we thought we were toast, 85mph wind gusts, tornadoes all over, bridges wiped out, and it clobbered the church's parking-lot and dumped about a TON of stone (not kidding) in front of the place. So guess who had to spend two days fixing it? Yep. I am hurting BAD, and not supposed to be doing anything even remotely like that - but that is what you do down here in the south.
So aside of working with the city generator thing, which has a lot of cool models, I am also working with my own (and purchased) models here, and also somewhat-taking-my-time on the texture / material update. It is going to take me a few weeks to get done with that, so after that is done I will likely have an update with some other things added to the map also - and hopefully the tunnel fixed.
So sorry for my hiatus, I got swamped (literally!). I am so in over my head here. Everyone needs Mr. Fixit. I wanted to get everything done before fall set in and it got cold - well it was 80F today and so I guess on the bright side I still have some weeks to get it all done, and get this project worked on also.
So even if things are slow here for a bit, just know that when you drive down the road and eventually have a vehicle break down, I will be the one who stops and does whatever he has to do, to get you going safely on your way.

Oh, and for the person that said about flying down back alleys, there's a back alley that starts near the new warehouse buildings I added into the map near one of the flood control canals (not TOO far from the stunt park spawn), you can scream down that and if you can keep control of your vehicle for a few blocks, you can jump clear over the highway just after the parking deck. There will entirely be a lot of narrow streets with brown-stones and lots of alleys. There will even be interiors connected here and there so if an alley ends at a building, you don't have to always stop and turn but in-stead can go through it.

That's all I've got for right now. I am hopefully going to start having more free-time very soon, as this being-swamped-with-to-do's is slowly getting done with. If incoming work doesn't stop, it's slowly wearing me down to the point where I will end up temporarily crippled for a few weeks healing and be stuck at the computer doing map-stuffs anyways. So either way, I will soon have lots of time again.
All is well with the project though, and especially with all those good ideas, Los Injurus City Map Project will NOT be one that is left unfinished. I will work on this through hell or high water, but it will get done one day - and it will be as awesome as we can think to realistically make it - especially with all those good ideas.
--Cheers!
P.S. Sometimes there's lots of good things about being a RENTER vs owning your home. More time for YOU. Sadly this is not the case here.

 

You wanted new buildings built?
You wanted DIFFERENT buildings?
Needed a variety?
Well, you've got it - and this is the importance of the Patreon, too. That enables me to make sure all folks have what they're looking for here (or will soon in the future).
Most signs here will be modified somewhat to have english and foreign language on them, depending on what/where they're used.
The streets will not be re-used here, I have better ones in the game already - but the buildings and much of the sidewalk stuff (collectively called 'map furniture') will appear also.
Textures on the buildings are very low resolution except ground-level stuff (ground level stuff is 'meh' resolution but I'm not going to worry about that right now until the game can stream assets in AND out, not just in). So I will use textures I already have in the map for the building facade material - though much of the windows / doors / shop fronts will remain identical. I don't believe the shop-fronts, doors, and windows of the buildings should amount to over 10mb, if they do it will be quite close. However, trying to use all the facade textures that are 1/8th of my typical texture resolution would just be awful. Some of them are about 1993 Doom resolutions! (128x128, 256x256, 512x512 which starts to look 'okay' but should be avoided using 1k x 1k per floor as a minimum where possible) Some folks run this at 4k resolution or close to it, and I don't believe they're looking for MUD textures in the current gen of games.

In other news, got a deal on a nice rock set that will compliment the sandstone-colored rocks currently in the map, so I will be picking up those this week also.
Two pictures below show the city unmodified from it's import into Maya, as-purchased. Will definitely look into scoring more of these when the guy makes more, as they're detailed enough without going overboard (and causing me to end up in development hell for the time it takes to do the textures / UV mapping / FPS improvement by having better connected UV's than 90% of folks make as a goal).

Have time to work on the map today/tomorrow, so expect some progress updates soon. I should have some time this week to get a substantial amount of work done on this project (close to full-time employment hours, for the record). I still have plenty of other things to do around the house but I need to devote some time to this project, as I refuse to let it languish.

Edit: Appended an additional photo to show the airport decoration pack that I purchased, which will make it into the following beta if it does not make it into this one. What you see is what you get, which is many individual models that can be placed where needed. Making these models eats up a ton of time (as if the airport didn't have a month and a half to two months or more of time into it already), so purchasing them for what it costs is a wiser decision here.

 

Wow those models look amazing! Can't wait to see them in game

 

SPOILER = post, done for neatness, we're already on page 102.
You may CRITICIZE my map / project all you like, that's how I can be aware of an issue or shortcoming, and then if possible and within reason, improvements are made. If you feel guilty doing so, start off with the good and then talk about the bad - that's called constructive criticism (learned this in middle school actually). Can't fix something or improve something that I am not aware of being disfunctional or sub-standard.
That having been said, it's exactly what this thread is for, so folks can have good input - be it commentary / compliments / complaints or criticism. I am not even remotely insecure (exactly the polar opposite to be precise), so DO state your mind, I will have zero problems with that - in-fact I will have less problems with that (as will the project) if you DO state your mind VS not doing such and leaving issues on the table undiscussed.
Building packs may be released at a later date, but only the buildings I've created and NOT the purchased buildings as that could violate the rights of my license to use them, and cause DMCA or lawsuit type issues. I will make very clear which is which by placing things with restricted license in a commercial folder of the map be it textures sounds or models etc. This won't be an issue in released building packs because those would not include commercially licensed materials. I am not allowed to make available any download containing materials created by another artist or person / company, that would compete in the same form as the original purchased product. So I can include these textures / buildings in my map files, but can't say 'here you go, download all this stuff I had to pay for' and make such content freely available. That said, being a city map, it will still have LOTS of stuff that can be used, and plenty to build a decent size city.
There will be more of a selection of buildings / different models as time goes on and more models are purchased, refined, and make it into the map. I've just been getting lots of infrastructure done in the past few releases so I know where to put the buildings at. Can't have buildings without a road to get the materials to build it - or you - there!
Don't know for how long the middle finger Government Motors buildings will be there, they may be in the end release, they may not be. I just did it as a bit of a tongue in cheek joke because I can

First, I do NOT know if I can fix the load times, they're much better after the first load (per game version) though. This will get better as time goes on and the game engine is more refined. If a 'low detail' version ever comes out, it will definitely shorten load times. This map is monstrous, and full of content. It's natural that it takes quite some time to load.
Go-kart track might be pretty cool if we have go-karts at some point (or golf carts, for that matter). Definitely more race courses and tracks needed though. This map will have at-least a handful, and even more made out of roads in the form of mission races when the AI is better at that.
The SKY issue I am glad you pointed out, I haven't noticed anything like that previously, but I haven't toyed with the time of day much. It could just be that my perception of color is off in some way, or that my color calibration settings are off again for some reason (I've had to fix it before!) when I last tested it / checked it out. I will see what's up with that. Please let me know the time of day that it does this the most (take a picture of the slider or print a number out if it gives you one). If it's more than one, list both or all.
Dollar stores (formerly five-and-dime stores) will be added before the year is over, along with a few other variants and brands of low to medium density retail.

I may have forgot to respond to this one previously, apologies if I already did (my memory is absolute rubbish).
Tourist traps, small villages / towns will be featured here and there in rural sections of the map. Rural area will be expanded when I figure out how much room the suburbs will need and take up.
There will be another quarry not even a mile from the end of the highway updates I just have done. When you exit the city and drive up the mountain on the highway I just re-did, use the first new exit (there's two new interchanges), and make a right off the end of the exit ramp road, taking you over the bridge and then down (and then up again) over some sloping terrain on a mostly four lane road. When the two lanes on your side merge into one, there's a dirt path with a future quarry / mining operation going in there on the left. If you fly around free-camera mode over the terrain, it'll say mine here or something like that for future reference.
So yes, entirely, lots of good ideas here.

Sorry to those who did not get a response, but I loved all those ideas, and will do my best to accomidate everyone's requests.
In other news I've managed to lose around 15lbs! I also got LOTS of stuff done around here. This weight loss helps keep pain at bay with less weight on my back / legs / ankles. Hooray!

In not-so-good-news, I can hear the Quake 3 announcer (or was it unreal???) yelling INTESTINE IS ON A RAMPAGE! INTESTINE IS UNSTOPPABLE! ... not feeling so good here, but I get stomach bugs rather frequently to make up for all the nose-colds / flu I don't get as much of. Hope this helps with weight loss and isn't 'cheating'.

Just putting this next bit out there to be transparent, I am saving up some Patreon project funds to afford myself more drive space in here, as this morning I woke up to the message 'Drive C is almost out of disk space', and it wasn't kidding. I kept looking for stuff to remove off the C drive, but even my other drives are filling up AND the project downloads/files/resources drive only has 100gb free (that may seem like loads of space for a 9 or 10gb map, but it's NOT, because it's all the stuff I use to help make the map from software to textures/models/SFX/BGM and instructional materials too). That 100gb is the majority of space I have free / about the only space I have free except on my backup drive(s) which is an older HDD. Sadly, I won't be affording the best NVME drive out there, etc; but I will buy whatever is best bang for the buck so-to-speak when I have enough funds saved up. Maybe then I won't have to shuffle files for an hour or more every two weeks to keep space* open. I would sooner have a 2tb consumer-grade NVME SSD than a 1tb fancy-brand-name / top of the line / PCI-express 4.0 supporting nvme drive that has half the space. Speed is awesome for loading up texture thumbnails in Maya or Beamng editor, but when you run out of space then work stops because programs (and sometimes Windows) will crash if memory gets tight too. Currently I don't even have enough space free to do certain productivity-related tasks here related to making the map and the things in it. That said the project is in no way halted what-so-ever, but this issue is starting to become downright annoying when I am trying to get stuff done. So I best address this ASAP and get it licked *before* it does put a hurting on map production too often. My poor 1tb generic NVME drive is full and has been for well over a year now and it's getting very difficult to squeeze any more space out of it. Oh, and yes I've already deleted GTA V a while back and moved many of my Steam games to other drives (don't get to play very often anyway, I should be mapping and modeling & not playing games).
*There's a space-monger program or something like that on here that will display visibly where all the huge files are hiding, so I can find them and move or delete them to free up space, thank heaven for that.

I will readily admit that I had ZERO clue just how much space is needed between all the assets, production software, instructional materials, and so-forth and so-on to make a game / game world just a few years ago. It was fine when just making a map and plotting roads and then putting someone else's completed buildings in... but creating from scratch and/or adjusting & versioning new models (and purchased ones) takes A TON of space.
See what happens with a 4k .PDN (paint dot net) or photoshop / gimp file type is in size when it has 5 or 6 (or more) layers and you need to save a few copies of it when creating textures from multiple sources, such as when I was making the canal textures. These versions are sometimes made 4x larger than the destination texture size in-game in order to give a more realistic & sharper image when down-scaled after completion especially if blending materials (graphics) that have different resolutions. To put it into perspective, I have worked with 16k x 16k and 32k x 32k graphics on here. Yes, that eats not just drive space but eats through 32gb of system RAM in no time at all. Good thing this is what I enjoy the most - the game making stuff - not the drive space issues.
--Cheers!

 

I spawned 24 cars on this map, with AI set to chase me, and the game ran fine at around 40ish FPS

Ryzen 9 5900x
GTX1070
GTX1050 (dont question me)
32GB 3200MHz dual channel
1tb Samsung 970 EVO

 

GREAT performance there!!! Thanks for giving information on the speeds you're getting. Any word on your RAM timings? If it's default timings for said speed, please give your model number. I take it that it is also 2x 16gb sticks (I have that here as I wanted to have 'enough' to start out and expand more later when 32gb or 64gb pairs of memory come down in price). Only running cas-15 3000mhz here though (it was on sale, what can I say, I'm a sucker for a good bargain I guess?!). Just interested for comparison purposes if an upgrade would be worth-while.
That said, you're doing what my *STOCK SPEEDS* 3950x can do, and possibly more, so that's pretty awesome bud. Nothing here is OC'ed for stability sake, except the RAM timing is DOCP/XMP enabled to get 3000mhz. So to put it honestly, that's really good performance and in-fact so good I'm going to drop CrashBoomPunk a line to see if he's getting any better than this with his cost-lots-more-than-mine-is-all-i-know 5950x system. Just don't bother upgrading your GPU for this as it likely won't be needed (unless you wish to have more VRAM, which could prove useful for this map to stay on high texture detail).
Your system is quite awesome, do enjoy it. Just try not to roast yourself out of the PC room with it, as doing FPU-work for the physics REALLY can get things toasty (that is worse on intel chips, considerably worse, for comparison my 3950x makes much less heat than my slightly OC'ed 4.4ghz all-core 4790k, which had 20% or less max performance than this does, which was a pig and could not go 100mhz higher under any voltage).
Let me know if you have any serious snafu's with the AI though, as you can test it quite well with that (as well as I can!). The AI on the newest sections of highway should be MUCH better than the older stuff.

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Just for those people that wonder what the heck I do all day, when it seems as if I'm not doing anything on the project at all. The following is merely one texture from hundreds that came with recently purchased models that I've gotten in the last two weeks as I had a tiny bit of project money left (at end of month, left-over money after paying for existing & new software and such is used on assets to further the project). The textures often are low resolution, or just barely passable, or do not tile properly and must be amended in programs such as Paint dot Net, Gimp, or Photoshop (there's multiple brand's Photoshops for those curious to getting into graphical design, be thorough in your research before purchase if looking around to make sure you get the correct one).
I was able to double the resolution each way, and make it a little better (1k square VS 0.5k square) to look at since we have walking mode and all that without making it too blurry or looking cheaply stretched. Layering rules the roost here, to make many types of graphics outright, or just making them better. Whether you layer these pre-run or within the game engine itself via texture indices and required fields, is up to you. Layering is the single most useful tool in medium-grade or pro-grade software after copy-paste stuff.
Left is before, right is after. Notice it has more grey colors and the tile is slightly less saturated. We don't want it too flashy, attention-grabbing and unrealistic. The game engine brightens colors a little bit so that grey will become about an off-white color and otherwise look very close to the original tile colors. In-fact, later on in development, the blue tiles will go to grey also, so that I can layer color on only as-needed and thus use much less VRAM or disk space VS different colors made manually where each is it's own copy and one layer. Another layer means another draw call, but if you keep draw calls on your model to a minimum, you will have a lot less issue here and the performance impact will be almost nil.
E.G. A subway using 500 instances of tile is alright if not much of the exterior world is 'seen' to be drawn with it. Doubling this could use up as much as 25% of the scene budget, and that's awful if you must draw anything else past it for just one area. However, if just drawing the subway itself even with doubled draw calls is perfectly fine. However, if you sew lots of UV's (texture surface info = UV's), the scene will draw in only a dozen or two draw calls for the tile (in addition to whatever else), making almost no difference in FPS for the realized savings in VRAM.
For those in the know, a while back I created a grunge-tile texture for the subway complete with dirty water and soot/dirt/grit staining running down the walls to depict an old worn station. Things such as that texture are saved in layers while being worked on, so that if I attain an upgraded texture later such as this one, I can insert it quickly and get a like-for-like upgrade requiring little or no model re-work.
This is part of why when I woke up today and flipped on the screen, space on Drive c: was approx ZERO bytes free. Yeah that was fun, I couldn't even get a weather radar image to work properly. All this stuff must be stored during the work flow (for years now), so that if I need to do things such as this, it takes less time and thus I can spend more now-free time making more meaningful changes / doing less double-work. Work smarter, not harder, and all that what-not.
Food for thought!
Oh, and yes, I really, REALLY, need to get a bigger C: drive here, this is getting in the way big-time even when NOT working on map stuff.

 

I read 3% of that, but I just now, in about 5 minutes, am putting new ram in my PC. 32gb Cl16 3200MHz rams
--- Post updated ---

16-20-20-38
--- Post updated ---
I have a question, why don't the traffic lights work properly? Is that a BeamNG issue, or something else? It's just something I noticed. Also, one issue I came across had nothing to do with the map AI routing, but the base games police AI. They tend to... break and ignore other cars and just drive right into them haha

And if you have to know, I can spawn 32 cars reliably and play just fine

I'm willing to make my PC scream tho if you want to know the absolute limit hehe

 

The traffic lights are still broken for me as well, even after doing a deep cache cleaning. Bob, as you said, perhaps that graphic you need to replace is in more than one place? Sorry I wasn't able to answer sooner!

 

Here are the sky problems that i have, note that the Cloud Cover setting only has one texture for partly cloudy skies, even if i turn the slider all the way up it still shows as partly cloudy skies, and for some reason around the noon time the partly cloudy skies disappear before coming back in the afternoon.

 

From my experience the best way to fix lighting on a map (at least one where it's pretty normal) is simply just to copy the settings from the latest version of a stock map, so much stuff breaks and changes over time that map lighting in particular seems to break very easily and then isn't exactly a walk into the park to fix. I haven't looked into this one's myself in particular so it might be a case of just flicking one tick box somewhere, although I doubt that given the screenshots another user posted here. If you do replace it though, slightly adjusted WCUSA or Utah is probably your best bet, I'd say they both fit the vibe of the map quite well and are certainly some of the games nicer stock map lightings

 

PERFECT! Thank-you. Now I know what I need to replicate before I can consider fixing the issue (if I don't have an issue here, I can't promise to be able to fix it; conversely if I can replicate it and make it go away permanently, then I can say it is officially 'fixed' and have a chance of most folks seeing the same result). It's very hard to fix something that isn't broken (on my end), without breaking it (or making it much, much worse).
So thanks! I will keep an eye out for that, that looks terrible, except if it's on Mars or something.

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Yeah I think it's in more than 1 spot, I believe that's the issue. Likely they were added from a stock map to Roane County (hint: they were!) then merged over into this map from Roane County, and then re-added into this map during an update later using the updated game models / textures - without realizing they were already somewhere else also. When I simplify the map structure, this will happen much less.

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The traffic lights are broken due to either a conflict, duplicate, cache issue, or game engine issue (although the last one is a very very small chance unless it's only on one driver revision or brand of video card/drivers, which DOES happen from time to time). I will keep folks posted on how this is going once I can replicate that here reliably enough to feel I've fixed it. This is more 'early access game and map' type fun than 'me being a complete idiot' type, but there's no doubting the latter happens from time to time and I'm 65535% ready and willing to admit that, too.

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That would be best here, but I will make sure I don't murder my color settings that I intended (how things used to look for me pre-Vulkan). Vulkan is a touch brighter but can help make colors 'pop' more. I will just try to exterminate the whole Mars-look that it's getting. I've never EVER seen it get that orange... so I'll be on the lookout for it. If I can't nick this (small chance, very small) I will get into contact with the staff here about it, can't leave it like this.

Traffic light info is typed above.
Sometimes the AI might mess up if there's overlapping traffic routes which definitely has happened in some areas. They may not realize another vehicle is there if the AI is only looking at the route it's on, and the other vehicle is on another road that's overlapped. I will try and not overlap things, but there will be a little bit of that now and then to keep AI from doing a U-turn where it shouldn't on a one-way or divided road.
I agree that Utah and WC USA do have some of the better lighting in this game. Those both are two very good candidates. I believe with the updates to the game engine and rendering system, copying stock map files into the map's sky folder(s) would be a best bet to save lots of development time for me. Why re-invent the wheel, when I could be making yet another 'boring brick box' for the city?

Incidentally the person who mentioned the fact there's lot of boring brick box towers / apartment buildings / condos / whatever. That's most of what I had when I started this, plus the city is missing over half of it's intended CITY buildings (read: not included rural, race course, or tourist trap type stuff and more). Since it doesn't have a big variety yet (from other folks and lots of stuff I purchased for this project), all you see is a bunch of brick boxes of various shapes, sizes, and colors. That and I have over 100 brick textures on here (though only 10 or so of those are in the map, and it'll likely not be more than 20 when the map is 'done'!), being that brick and concrete are two super-duper common surfaces / building materials today.

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Thanks to CRASH BOOM PUNK via Youtube!
I wish to thank this supporter as he's stepped in to help when I needed it the most (and it's not his first time), and provided some extra funding so I could enlarge the main drive on my modeling PC here. I was working with a 250mb or so (+/- 10%) set of models, and being that it auto-saved every 5 minutes to a new file to avoid losing work to a crash, I was losing 1gb every 20 minutes! I cancelled some of my plans this week to be able to make up for lost time that I couldn't spend modeling (what I was working on), so I can try and get progress back up to speed here on the project. Seriously, this guy is my hero. Check out his channel of BeamNG car crash compilations using a variety of maps, including Los Injurus! Subscribe if you haven't, as it'll help this project out in the long run. The channel is safe for work, and should be kid friendly too. I wish I had more time to watch Youtube Beamng related content, but this is time I need to spend mapping and modeling (and scripting texture indices until my fingers go numb). Channel link follows.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN1i5mDtOx0m_3Z18WsSibA
I had been riding up against the disk space limit for over a year (18 months or so?) and there wasn't much more I could move from the main drive before I was out of luck (I hit 0 disk space several times in the last week, sometimes multiple times a day). While certainly no enterprise class drive, I could care less what brand or speed class it is, provided it's as fast as the old one and gives more space for the project. I am extremely thankful to be able to put this behind me now and be able to save my work without worrying about free space existing or not. Just to be clear, I was out of room on all the drives except the off-line cold backup (spinner / HDD) drives.
Why would he do this, though? Well for one he's a nice/good guy. Also, next time you see a map not made by me get a sudden update unannounced (usually says 'fixed by Bob Blunderton' somewhere), know that he may have been the reason it got the update and enjoy. I've done this a handful of times in the past (and then asking the author, or failing that method then ask the staff, to update the original post so it does not look like I took credit for producing someone else's now-fixed map). Mammoth valley, Yellav Valley to name two right off the top of my head, that have been worked on since this Los Injurus project began.
Moral of story? Always help others; treat folks the way you want to be treated, and so-forth - as you might just be the guy needing help next time things inevitably go south. Sometime you will thank yourself in the future for that moment in time when you saw someone else in need of help and stopped, put down your things / errand and did something positive about it. Sorry if this sounds like some convoluted self-help tape (remember those?), but honestly I couldn't have done this without y'all supporters and of course him too. The income via supporters keeps this project's progress secure and much more guaranteed to not suddenly go stagnant for a multitude of reasons, and for that I wish to thank each and every one of you for making this map & it's continued updates happen.
Remember, the best of Los Injurus is yet to come. There's got to be a reason we're still in here!

--Thank is all

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Oh, almost forgot to add, for sake of transparency:
Prior to having the drive-space monster finally kick my unsuspecting behind, I had gotten some models & other assets not yet mentioned (from what I remember).
I purchased a Post-apocalyptic model/texture bundle, building generator (untested yet), sound effects, on-foot movement routines, among other things. I believe these will come in handy for the project, and I can't wait to put some of the post apocalyptic stuff over by the mall - you folks will LOVE those (they're really tops for quality and realism - close to current AAA levels of realism).
I don't know how well I will be able to use the on-foot-movement scripts/code, but I might certainly be able to figure out how it's programmed and improve upon (or help someone else improve upon) the game's walking mode in due time - though walking mode refinement is currently not high priority (for me anyway, provided we even have it at all I am quite happy).
If I ever figure out a reasonably way to license the Miami Vice background tracks by Ian Hammer, I will definitely do so provided the price is in reason. Perfect for car chases! Just throwing that out there while it was on my mind. For those who don't know, Ian Hammer did 'Crocket's Theme' which I believe appeared on a radio on GTA Vice City back around 2003?

 

Thank you for the ultra detailed answer, I am even more excited for future updates. Also, Crashboompunk is amazing for helping out!!

 

I just tabbed over to YouTube and hit the red button on his channel. I always wondered why you had a spawn point named for him.

Let's hear it for helping others! That's one of the things that makes this such a great game.

 

Thats what community is about most times. Unless its a certain game... we just wont talk about that one. xD

 

I've been part of many online communities over the years, and I agree, most of them have been pretty good, with members supporting each other. I'm not sure which game you're talking about (because few of my communities havbve actually been games), but yeah, there are some troll-fests out there.

I took a break from my projects last night to poke around in the MRK. Wow, I didn't realize just how extensive and detailed that is. I think I'm going to start making some roads... although I want to copy it from the Los Injurus folder into a common folder. Duplicating that for every level would fill my drive pretty fast!

Bob, is the MRK a work in progress? Are you adding more pieces to it with each release, or are you pretty much using what you currently have?

 

So a while ago I suggested adding a facsimile of the old Chicago post office. with the addition of the recessed freeway I found a approximate area for the building as a suggestion. I have a couple of mockups of what it may look like and the plans for the under ground section. Thanks for your hard work Bob

 

That's a very good idea, I've been tabling it, but I think that's actually a REALLY good spot for that, sunken highway and all. I will strongly consider this, especially if I find a pre-made commercial model available for a decent price somewhere (might not be too hard, or might be able to find a CC-0 or CC-SA (etc) model too). So yes that's definitely a good idea and will likely be added (don't think it'll be on this update coming up, but maybe the next one).

The MRK is updated as-needed, when I need to. If I don't have the pieces I need, I weigh re-doing the area to make it work, or to make pieces for the area or obstacle I need. Sometimes pieces can be made easily, sometimes not so much, so that has a lot to do with the outcome. Time spent modeling and mapping is to be balanced in effort, to get the most out of each and every hour this project sucks out of me. However, sometimes some really cool stuff happens when I re-do an area (like the highway going below-grade, which is mentioned just above this where silvermanblu mentioned having the highway go under a Chicago-style post office as it does in real-life where it's terminus currently is due to not being finished). Even if an area is already awesome, if I have to rip a ton of stuff out to make it 50% more awesome, and it takes two weeks - that to me can be worth it - look at the highway being re-done as you go up the mountain (the stuff from the last update, hope everyone found that okay!) as an example. I did however make custom-fit tunnels for that, and used rock walls for entrances because my existing entrances wouldn't fit or were too cumbersome to use there. That worked, however, and it's pretty nice looking - and doesn't look like it's a band-aid fix either (hate it when those ideas look like a fancy band-aid no matter how hard I try sometimes).

So entirely, I DO update the MRK kit. The MRK updates SHOULD be painless, e.g. I will list if it will cause an issue when I send out the update, but if you don't see anything related to a warning about MRK updates, then you should not have anything to worry about. Deprecated pieces should be avoided as they're either too primitive, not optimized (and eats FPS once you get a dozen or two objects in), or don't work as well as intended / don't have the quality one would expect from the rest of the kit or map. So avoid deprecated pieces, and read review notes. This way when you update (at your discretion) the MRK kit in your own map, you won't blow the place up.
MRK pieces get updated sometimes via a texture only update. That doesn't cause issues as easily. Sometimes the models themselves get updated, this can cause placement or rotational issues. Before fixing placement/rotational issues, ALWAYS clear cache as BeamNG can sometimes rotate things 180 degrees as compared to the old cache, due to some issue with re-importing things or other issues I haven't figured out between Maya/Blender and the game. If you clear cache and re-load the map (and wait a WHILE for all the cache to generate again), that should solve itself. This commonly happens on the bridge abutments over here as when I last updated them around a year or 18 months ago, they jumped all over the place. After I ignored it long enough, the game updated (causing new cache to generate) and the problem went away.
DO NOT FORGET that when using the MRK kit, most pieces should tile nicely when using grids, but not all will. Also, you can hold CTRL, or SHIFT (depending on your editor version), while you rotate, to rotate to fixed angles. This can help make the creation of hilly or sloped sections much, much easier. This also makes building roads at all 15 degree derivative angles easy, too. Just make sure that when combining slope with various directional angles (like a diagonal roadway with a slight slope, that you do your slopes first, and then your angles. When making a long road and doing things in batches, lay out an example mesh road by where you build them (small flat area comes in handy for this, especially for bridges!), at the angle you want, then matching the road angle between 'batches' should be fairly rudimentary.

When using the MRK, you will eventually want to line up all the back faces of the sidewalks and the ground, so that driving into a lot feels right and/or is level with the sidewalk, while the road is 4~6 inches lower (6~8cm?).
The best way to do this, is to level your roadway to the level of the sidewalk, causing it to just barely show out of the terrain. Select the square brush for the terrain modification tool, and make the size a little bigger than the space distance between each curb face. Then use the first tool with a smoothness of 0 and a power of around 3~15, and push /pull the terrain until it is at the level you'll want it. You can look at your average height before/after for hints at how high / low you should go. If you successively make the tool smaller after you've done all the curbs to the right height, you can then raise the center of the road in this manner, too, but it'll take a little while especially if it's longer than a half mile.
You can also use MESH ROADS to carve to the height you want, though the LAND PLANE (if you have added one in) can tend to be 'caught' by the carving tools, and might need to be hidden first (if you forgot to hide it, it comes back next editing session if map is reloaded, so un-hide and re-hide if needed when reloading if you remember). How to carve a tapered / cross-sloped road with a mesh road? Simple, select the mesh road object itself (in the mesh road tool or in the object editor), and edit it's Z coordinate (the road itself, not the points on the road) up 0.15 to 0.2 meters higher and hit enter - the entire thing should move. Keep repeating this and carving the ground to the brush using a smaller brush each pass, usually square brushes are best (raising it a little bit each time), and you can carve out a pretty awesome slope on a road. This is an alternative to manually raising or lowering terrain to make your road. Be aware some perfect or close-to-diagonal angles for some roads, when adding cross-slope, can cause collision of the vehicle to feel like a wash-board due to the way the terrain is 'smoothed' by the physics engine (don't ask, wasn't my idea). My metric of raising for each pass the mesh carving road by 0.15 ~ 0.2m is for a map square size of 2.6. So if you have a map square size of 1, you'll only need roughly 40% as much rise per meter since my squares are 2.6m apart here VS 1. For square size of 1, measurements for height increase of 0.05 ~ 0.07 between passes should work OK, any more and it risks being unrealistically steep for cross-slope (without including corner banking) or hard to drive straight on. Honestly, unless you're strictly sticking to Department of Transportation or Department of Highways specification (or the national ones), you'll have the liberty to choose cross-slope you want, if you want to invest time in putting it in at all, as it's your map.
If the MRK should prove difficult to use, or otherwise exceedingly difficult to assemble, DO give a shout. It's supposed to not require too much thought once a person knows a little bit about logical infrastructure layout. You could make a maze or a road-roller-coaster if you like with loop-de-loops in it should you be so possessed in doing so, but it's not always recommended nor will it look great. It CAN be done, though - just putting that out there.

As stated, any updates to MRK pieces will be done as painlessly as possible. If something breaks, I will let you know ahead of time so users of the MRK kit can make reservations for this when building or updated the kit. It won't be a SURPRISE IT'S BROKEN type of deal unless someone really screwed up good somewhere.

He's a good man, that's for sure. It's not the first time he's saved me when all I had was a turd for a paddle on a creek I am fairly familiar with. Hopefully this chases the disk space demons away for a while. I have my old drive as a backup in the event of complete disk failure, it's not where spyware/ransomware can get it as a signature collision prevents Windows from using it while the main (new) disk is active. I plan to leave it this way, if the new disk file allocation table fails or even just doesn't show up any more due to hardware failure, the old disk will boot without any input as if nothing happened, restoring the PC to exactly the time I outmoded it, with everything just the way I left it.
That's the way backups are SUPPOSED to be. Think of it like a spare disk in a server just in-case something breaks. A disk signature is unique like your car license plate is. I could change it at a whim if I so chose to do so, but you can never have two disks in the same system with the same ID outside of server environments with redundant disks / RAID technology active or implemented (e.g. volumes of data that spans more than one disk, excluding mounting drives as directories, or large backups of the sort). So basically, it's a deliberate bug that doesn't do anything except throw 3 lines of text into a Windows log at every boot, that will keep me mapping and modeling in-case I come home and this thing is displaying TILT on the screen and responds to nothing else. Stupid technology!
Will be honest though, these newer smaller drives are not nearly as easy as sliding a 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive into the case and hooking up two cables with the hot-swap feature on here. I have gotten spoiled by hot-swapping large metal (and plastic) pancakes in and out of the tower over the last 10+ years when I need a backup or to add/remove a drive. Thankfully newer motherboards are all coming with twist-locks for the m.2 drives. You can purchase those separately if you wish to save yourself a headache, available for a few bucks online almost everywhere that stocks drives themselves, next time you pick up a fast modern m.2 SSD. Don't. Be. Me. ... me who did not have those on hand. Those teeny little screws are next to impossible to hold with adult fingers. Who ever thought that was a good idea (screws that small)? If it bounces away, you will never, ever, ever find that thing either, so if you don't have twist-locks to tie down the m.2 drives, make sure you get some. Otherwise, I'd rather hamster-punch (to death) a T-rex that has been cross-bread with a porcupine with Turrett's syndrome. You have been warned!

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Rant aside, I am going to fast-track the building models going through the optimization process right now, in-order to get more content to supporters of this project in a sooner time-frame. This will hurt optimization only a tiny bit and only on the most stressed out systems (old ones, under-spec for the game). Otherwise, it'll let me get the buildings done 2x~4x as fast, and I can catch up and perfect / optimize the UV's on them at a later date when I do an optimization pass as-needed / when needed. example is, In-stead of spending 4~6 days on a model, I'll spend two or three days on it, and it'll be at-least 50~75% the render speed that it would otherwise be. This won't murder performance, in-fact most may not notice, as when it gets a half-block or more away they generally drop a detail level to where it'd be the same amount drawn anyways. I can then make up for some lost time here, and come back to this (as I will also have better UV helper-script-tools and such when I buy some down the road as funds allow, which will mean I can work faster later on with UV texturing VS now in the modeler software).

The model I am working on below has had over 80% of it's UV's optimized. It was 100's of draw calls (blech!), now it's around 60 or so. Trying to get it down to under half that, and we should be good (20 or less draw calls is excellent / god-like for a building like this, so 30 or less - less is better - would still be quite good). The more UV texturing I sew (connect) together, the less separate draw calls it takes to render during the frame, the faster the frames accumulate and hence your FPS goes up. Working on large buildings is a lot more forgiving as you have much less of them per block VS houses or medium-density / mid-rise buildings, so hopefully I can make some time here. Rest assured as it'll be optimized and otherwise be as good as it ever could be, when I do the next optimization pass (this spring? not sure!), but for now we need good amounts of content at a respectable FPS.
If there are any other questions, give a holler; and if I missed anyone (derp), you know whose eyeballs to scream out with large, dangerous, pointy letters, all to common on the feroscious interwebs here.