I hear you, Haven't even bothered with the torque in-game editor for ages because it became broken with no talk (that I am aware of) of being fixed.
That's a shame to hear. I hope you'll find the materials and/or the motivation to 'repair' this problem...
I have every intention of making this happen. New SSD, fresh BeamNG install, saved copy of map etc. Learned a lot so this should be twice as fast hopefully. So much to keep tabs on it's insane.
Forgive me if all I'm about to say, you already know. When you save the level in the editor, the materials, terrain, and .mis files are all saved to either the BeamNG.Drive>cache folder or BeamNG.Drive>levels folder, rather than the Documents>BeamNG.Drive>mods>levels folder (assuming that's the one you're using). Recent updates have prevented some of this, but nevertheless, older maps still likely use this hierarchy in part. When the game is updated, it switches this information out. The mods>levels folder is untouched, but the cache folder is replaced, as is any information therein. BeamNG has backups of former cache files under BeamNG.Drive>backup. Some of your map's data should still be in there.
Thanks Occam and no problem, appreciate the insight because it does clear a few things up for me, especially the second paragraph. Forest Hills was built out of the contents/levels folder and updated from the documents/caches and users/documents/caches folders. I never had the folder in mods. All I remember was having incredible difficulty making and keeping the guardrail texture. I went into the material editor, made the specific texture, saved, and saved again, closed BeamNG, opened it back up and it was not in the queue....ever. I could apply it before saving and closing the game but then it was gone when I restarted. I found the guardrail material in a lone materials.cs in one of the caches (can't remember which one), and copied it to the main level folder right under the .mis, .ter, DECALS etc. That didn't work so somehow I copied that same materials file over another materials.cs and that blew all my materials. At this point I just saw red everywhere and my logical thought processes shut down. Suffice it to say I nuked the map into oblivion in a fit of rage. I still had enough of the map to work from but I just said screw it because I really do not know what I'm doing. My saved map copies would not work either. I made the decision to start from scratch and am working from the mods folder this time going extremely slow and double checking everything. The only thing I know is I'm not going to give up learning this because I love it. Your second paragraph nailed a question I was planning on asking about keeping a map in the mods folder all of the time, appears so? I'm not sure what to say about all this but I'm having a tough time staying focused on all of the intricacies involved and am just going to go slow and do something occasionally I hate....ask for help . All this is giving me an opportunity to correct a few things that were bugging me anyway and one of those was a nagging dislike of my "custom" grass textures and just stick with the garden variety ECA stuff. Tweaking the macro in WM is happening as well. I'll figure this shit out eventually when I'm tired of suffering and losing hours of my life for nothing. Being impatient and OCD doesn't help either. Long winded rant end.
Well you have these people who come and post in your thread, so you have that. Plus we like the map, so there's that, we all could use a map, even a mini one.
Back to WIP. The same layout with additional roads. Using basic materials for groundcovers etc. Tweaking the macro for more variety. Still having trouble with the info.json and I cannot get it to update and show in the selector, can someone explain how/what/why Torque uses this so I can troubleshoot it?
Well I'm finally making some progress figuring out what happened. Say hello to the reborn Forest Hills.
Yay! It's still beautiful... Any major differences so far? What did you do to fix the problem? Or did you restart?
Thanks! The map is a total and complete re-start from the same heightmap. I've done this so many times the process is quite subliminal now. The only differences are a reconfig of a road I was having trouble deciding what to do with, I went ahead and made it a windy/twisty little affair, nothing big but got that headache out of the way. I was toying with all sorts of heightmap changes and road changes but decided to leave them alone. The screens in the first post still reflect the way it will look. I added some more arid and grassy "patches" if you will to the macro and it adds a little variety. My focus this go around is to not get all tied up in shit I know nothing about. I'm taking this real slow and calculated AGAIN. What happened?...I'll put it succinctly: My ignorance of the materials system and my ongoing resistance to the zip/mod system. I just got too godamn comfortable.
Your welcome again! I was expecting you to restart using only the heightmap. Good luck with roads! One suggestion that may apply. Not sure how many roads you had previously, but if there were "too many", it would probably feel too crowded, or not remote enough, etc. (Hopefully you understand my point.) If that was the case, then I'd say add less roads if your terrain allows it. Well at least you probably understand map-making more now and learned from this. Otherwise, I sure hope you get to the end of this project!
I had a road that I started in World Machine in the beginning that was going to terminate at a parking lot with buildings on a mountainside. As I progressed with other parts of the map and time went on that became less appealing and I let it sit. Because of that everything I did made going back to WM to continue the road more difficult. This hiccup provided a great opportunity to rectify the problem and for simplicity's sake I just linked it up with an existing road and made it real windy. The issue of road congestion is largely nullified by the geology and trees and is in one small area of the map. Very astute observation though! There are plenty of "remote" areas to wander through and just gaze. Being able to put on headphones with some relaxing music and slowly crawling around the landscape is a goal for sure.
I think I like the idea of one congested area better than none. Good that there are many quite empty remote areas too though! As for relaxing music, I'm listening to "vibraphone jazz" from JAZZradio right now... I feel it would suitable for going on a slow cruise in the moonhawk. Also when you said: "slowly crawling through the landscape" I thought of intense rock crawling with mellow jazz in the background... Not so fitting lol.
Mountains getting more attention this go around. T3D tools are a bitch but can be finessed to do my bidding, albeit on their terms.
Going nuts on the mountains...lol. The views are great though. Why am I getting duplicate terrain materials? I'm doing something wrong with the cache write backs? The .mis and terrain materials.cs aren't calling for two forestfloor materials but they and other new materials are showing up twice in the terrain materials selector.
