WIP Beta released Barbent's Homerange (Alpha) 0.1a

Wow! Incredible!

Did you add custom sounds to a ground model? Or do you use some sort of trigger?

 

No, neither. The dramatic weather conditions repeatedly cause high tensions in the ice, which suddenly discharge audibly through groaning, cracking, and singing. This doesn't need to be triggered .

 

You never cease to amaze me with these ideas and execution. I am looking forward to seeing this in the map. Do you think the mechanics of these cloud objects could mabye be used for a sandstorm aswell? This is something that would be a great experience for many desert maps; and the last time I checked there was a big desert on the homerange aswell

 

Of course, but as I said, driving through it has an FPS impact. Therefore, I won't be using this technique excessively for ground-level effects, even if faster computers could easily handle it. Besides, you'd always need a very high area density of objects near the ground and thus the camera to make it look good. And that for an entire desert? It is also not easy to create good levels of detail (LOD) for such objects that are visible from far distance and are also animated, in order to reduce the load on the computer. I don't want to just keep increasing the FPS load of the map more and more. I have another great idea for the desert, though. .

 

Weather forecast: Here comes a downpour!

In the relatively flat midland region of the map, downpour is still what's known as weather culture. Who hasn't experienced this: Out of the blue, a thick rain cloud forms, and you don't have an umbrella with you? This will happen to you on Homerange with the upcoming update.

This inconspicuous, very special cloud object has a life of its own: It appears out of the vanlla BeamNG sky, drops the rain in thick bands, and then disappears again. It's not controlled by anything, there are no complex mathematical calculations underlying it. Only the use of special normal maps and BeamNG's simple material scrolling allow a complete regional phase of bad weather to run through fully automatically, ncluding a rainbow. This colorful spectacle appears, just as in reality, only when the viewer's angle and the position of the sun are exactly right, even while driving pass. Thanks to PBR and adjusting the rainbows surface normal in Blender. No geometry-based animations were required for the entire movement of the scene, except of course for the windmill.

This sky is alive. A time lapse in pictures:

--- Post updated ---

 

Always outstanding and innovative work, my friend, this and other effects will be something special to view, keep up the great work

 

Some more impressions of the Homerange Dynamic Weather System (currently alpha)

I've improved the visual fine-tuning and also optimized the performance a bit. There were also various unsightly side effects, such as a sudden flipping of the surface normal and an ugly translucent appearance in combination with water surfaces which I both could fix. Today, however, I found myself playing "Storm Chaser" for two hours, trying to get to a building thunderstorm front in time to avoid missing the rainbow .



But I think the main problem with this is that you keep getting off the road because you're watching the sky and the cloudy landscape instead of the road .



To turn the various weather phenomena on and off, there will be a weather control room on a mountaintop (with its own spawn point, to get there quick and easy), which you can enter with your avatar and play weather god : There, you can adjust everything (without the mouse pointer) by jumping on various contact surfaces and seeing the effect immediately. This way, you stay in the center of the action and don't have to mess around with another separate app. The LUA script for this is already complete.



If you prefer photorealistic skies, though, and you can do without volumetric objects and weather events, then you can easily switch everything off, or leave maybe the rainbows on and use something like the CK skybox mod. All the effects will be turned off by default, so you will not have a performance shock when entering the map with a slow computer .

 

Canned Heat

Homerange now serves your vehicles with a four dimensional environment temperature curve, what means that the temeratures depend on daytime, altitude and region.

Normally, BeanNG only uses the time of day and a little influence of the altitude to calculate the temperature around the vehicle. Unfortunately none of the most (vanilla) maps has enough altitude difference to make the effect important for the driving characteristic of the car and its engine.

Since Homerange has different climatic zones I decided to make these things more sophisticated by a much stronger influence of the vehicles elevation and by regional temperature curves. For example, in the desert there are now maximum daytime temperatures of 42°C, although there is also a much larger spread of the curve there, so that the nighttime values are around freezing point. This desert influence becomes stronger the nearer you get to the desert.

In addition, the influence of altitude on temperature is much more noticeable on the map. On the highest mountain, alpine conditions prevail, with temperatures of 6°C during the day and -10°C at night. For aircraft flying high above Homerange, temperatures can easily reach as low as -40°C.

Throughout the map, the temperature is more finely regulated in the morning and evening during the twilight phase to make the sun's influence on the temperature more noticeable depending on the region. Of course, in the desert, it heats up very quickly in the morning, whereas in temperate regions it warms up only very gradually.

The update rate of the temperature system is 1/3Hz and has no measurable FPS impact. By the way, BeamNG's engine physics are very responsive and sensitive to different ambient temperatures. Perhaps someone will build an intercooler or coolant heater in the future !

At first, I was a bit unsure how to bring all these influences under one roof without having to use too complex mathematics and algorithms. So, I first simulated everything with an Excel spreadsheet before implementing it in LUA. If you are interested in taking a look:

 

Wow very nice, you keep suprise us every time.

 

Haha, dynamic weather is so awesome! Maybe not, enough players pay attention to such details in games for it to be worth allocating resources to, but I really love it. I wish games like Snow Runner did something more complex with the weather like we see here. Also it reminded me of this game Rig 'n' Roll about trucking and it used a pattern of one year of real life California weather, which is a feature I have never seen anywhere else and it made the weather really feel more interesting because you could have a few weeks with no rain at all and than maybe a day of rain, instead of just boring cycle of little bit of rain, little bit of sun, little bit of fog, etc.

Anyways, amazing work.

 

Just exceeded 300km

 

Whoohoooooo, more roads to explore, more role playing opportunity's

 

Woow, I like those kind of improvements

 

Sound - some big enhacements under the hood

Since loading the map was a game of a waning patience due to all the hundreds of audio emitters, this became more and more a problem. I definitely didn't want to miss out on the audio experience, I even wanted to enhance it with more sound events. So I came up with the following solution:

Homerange now runs it's own dedicated LUA driven Ambient Sound Mixer. This way it was possible to delete a huge amount of the single BeamNG SFX Emitters. The Homerange SFX Mixer is able to serve the complete ambient audio. It takes several real-time parameters into account like position, elevation of the game camera, speed of the vehicle or daytime and even the current environment temperature. The appropriate sounds are then mixed together and played by just a few map global stereo sound emitters.

Several sound types of ocean waves, winds, city atmo or forest ambient are softly regulated depending on where you are or what you do. Additional airstream niose can be faded in and pitched accordingly if you are driving fast. The sound of wind gusts is dynamically added on bad weather conditions. And the avatar gets finally it's walking noise.

The mixer system is complemented by a dynamic 2D and 3D Jingle Player. This automatically creates and positions sound emitters with the appropriate sounds around you or at specific coordinates, depending on where you are or what you're doing, and deletes them again when new ones are needed elsewhere. This allows the map to work with a limited pool of SFX emitters, and I was able to delete another hundred individual ones of them.

Driving to the sea is now also great fun for your ears. When you're right down at the sea level (less than 5 meters) you can hear small lapping waves, and if you get a bit higher (around 10-50 meters) you can hear the thunderous roar of the distant surf. Because this depends on the camera altitude, the entire coastline of the map is automatically covered with sea sounds (the same applies if you are on a ship far out). Slowly, the higher you go, the louder the wind gets, especially if you're going fast. And the cicadas chirp, but only when you slow down and they fall silent at a certain altitude, and so on. Everything fades in and out gradually. And of course everything works in the editor too, and with this sound in my ears it's an experience for me, working like this. The ideas are flowing!

The system still needs some fine-tuning, and I'll have to play (and enjoy) it for a while. The impact on FPS is very minimal, as it continues to use the BeamNG audio engine, but is constantly controlled by the Homerange SFX Mixer. I haven't measured any significant performance impact. I will not make a separate mod out of it for now.

So, the bottom line: the map loads much faster, and the audio experience is much more engaging

 

That SOUNDS crazy

 

That Sounds like music to my ears ;>) Great job.

 

Awesome map,its ideal for railroad route

 

Do you know what causes scrolling materials to not scroll anymore even though they are still set to be scrolling? I've got 2 in a map I'm updating and one day they just stopped. I have no idea what to do.

 

That's a conceivable option. I actually already have two train stations on the map, but I'm putting it off because there's simply so much else to do first.

 

VS.




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