Important Note: This is not the release Thread, well, atleast not for now, only for showing it off and getting feedback from people! Welcome to Spark City, a heavily Work-In-Progress Map made by me, featuring a shit ton of Assets imported from other Maps (With their creators Permission ofc), only being 6 GB Big Currenly. The Map overall is mainly American Inspired, but also draws inspiration from Europe, and my own imagination. It doesn't has one theme, but I can say its not left-hand traffic, so its not Asian xD (Or British). Anways, Spark City will be a City Themed map of a total Map size from 16. Square Kilometers (6.5 Square Miles), and only feature the City and very close Area around it. I don't plan, nor want to make a Map like Belasco City, or Los Injurus, where beside the City are other areas like a County Side. So instead I decided to make this. Spark City currently features: - Area inspired by the Vespucci Canals - Custom Build Fire Station (Vehicle Bays are Accesable) - Harbor - A entire Bus & Tram Depot, additonal to it a Bus Hub - Several Bridges that span the Canals seperating the Canal area and the Downtown Island Spark City will feature: - A Emergency Service Training Facility and a CERA / FEMA base included in it - Several Custom Fire, Police and Medical Buildings - A Central Train Station - Industrial Area near the Port area - A Suburban - Narrow Backroads leading through a High-Rise Residental Area - A Financial District - Custom Billboards - Working Street Lights - Custom Street Markings that are not inspired by any nation but rather made up by me. It will also come with its premade Fire Department, Medical Rescue Service and Police Department. But they all will be their seperate mods Spark City is still in development, so I'm open to suggestion for what to add, and actually want to know what City Maps lag ingame, and what would be cool to have. Okay, Picture timeeeeeee: Downtown SC Fire Station Spark City Bus Hub Transportation Headquarter (WIP) Canal Area With the Police Station Narrow Backroads Custom Bridges The Entire Map
Good to see someone make use of the 8-lane highway pieces. If you need special pieces, I may have them or be able to make them. If you're unsure how to link it up to other pieces, also do let me know (or look in my map, there's plenty of examples of how to rig the puzzle-pieces together to make good highways IF you should need ideas). I am also elated to hear that you don't want to just basically duplicate another map - it's good to have variety. Just mind the draw calls, and VRAM use; those are your two enemies that will stop any WiP city in it's tracks. You'll know you ran into the draw call limits when you have 1 CPU core at 100% with a single vehicle, with all the rest of the CPU cores and the GPU use well below 100% (like 40~75% use on GPU for example). Draw calls can be reduced with spending more time modeling objects such as connecting all the UV's you can, and duplicating others that cannot be sewn. I've even gone as far as to connect faces by making secret (invisible) faces that connect said faces behind brick walls (Etc) to keep everything friendly to FPS. Expect slowdown anywhere north of 4000~5200 draw calls in a scene without a vehicle, depending on your PC hardware. Look up portals and visibility blocking in this game-engine (you can hide them in rows of tall buildings, hills, etc), and it'll help cull stuff that is 'out of view' to the player. Just don't let the player get inside of one, as odd things WILL happen. Intel's up-coming GPUBUSY software will be helpful when looking at 3D performance, as does the directX SDK, and the ever-reliable always-available MSI Afterburner. These are in addition to the in-game performance metrics. --Best wishes! P.S. Use any of my road pieces you wish, if it's in the MRK folder in my map, it's fair game!
Honestly the Map will be a performance eater, it will be detailed and feature several buildings that are made ingame, and not in Blender (Because I don't know how to do it xD). But well, it hopefully be a good map, and I'm sure as the specs of PCs improve the Map will be more accessable to more people. Though I will see about the tips you gave me. Also I honestly don't know how to aline Curves of the Highway, could you maybe help me out with that? But I do prefer if we might do that over Discord, because I'm not checking the repo every day? (thane4175)
The one thing I’d like is for there to be quick travel/spawn points at places like the Fire department and Police station. A lot of maps don’t really do that. But the map looks good, can’t wait till the full release.
There (hopefully) will be several spawn points to choose from, set in each Districts of the City, some will be at the important points, others won't. But it's definitely a thing I plan on doing later down the line
First Update and Help Search Hello All, This post is just a small Update on how the Map is currently going. I can't report much, beside a setback in Progress through a Unknown Issue I had last week. I had to use a older Savefile and now am at a Point where certain Areas and placed down Assets are gone. This includes the Fire Station, but I'm currently working on getting them back. Beside this I finally included some Billboards I created. If anyone got an idea what I should do next as a Billboard feel free to suggest it underneath this post. I also want to ask for help from any Map Creator in the hopes I can find someone willing and possesing the knowladge to import assets into the Map. I tried it multiple times but so far had no luck in getting Custom Assets from any Website into the Map. If anyone knows a trick or wants to help out please send me a DM, and I will go into Detail there. Areas that need to be redone: Billboards The Billboards also add a Tiny Bit of Lore, including the Nation Speer County & Spark City will be set in, Ghara. Ghara is a reference to a small Indie Title I played in the Past, called "Lacuna". The Ghara Security Forces are the Army of the Nation, and the Billboard obviously tries to get people into them. The smaller Advertisements will be placed underneath Lightposts in the Downtown Area, and at Bus Stops.
This video helps a lot to understand how to get assets in other formats to BeamNG: To get the right structure for the asset for the lod and the collision mesh you can use this great blender add on: https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-easy-export-for-blender.85294/ If you want to get rid of all unused assets in your project before deploying it to the people you could use my tool: https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-tool-for-map-creators-big-update.89058/ Best!
this is looking amazing! not sure if it's part of your list, but a cool thing to add would be an airport. I can imaginne that seeing the city from the air would be quite incredible
I actually tried the Tutorial from Spencer, but it just isn't working for me anymore. No matter what I try objects just don't show up in game. They are in the Asset Libery, but they don't appear at all. But I will try out the blender add on and your tool as well, probably will be handy when the Map is a state were I want to release it xD --- Post updated --- The Idea is nice, but I don't think it will have room for an Actual Airport. Maybe a small Dirt Track in the Mountains will be suited for that, but since the map is also empty aside the spawned area I wouldn't advice to watch it from above either. --- Post updated --- I will add those for sure. Not many, but there will be a few around
It’s likely that you have material issues. The name of the material in blender should be the same as the material you want to assign in BeamNG. At least the mapto property must have the same name. If you did that already then make sure that the face normals in blender show to the outside. There is an option in blender to check it. https://cgian.com/2023/02/blender-view-normals everything visible should be blue there.
