Wow, you sure know your stuff man! Yeah, I found out that break angles are a big deal a good while back and other etc. things. I haven't looked much into texture modding but I may later. Only decal roads on this map. ...you like writing don't you
I feel communication is paramount. It's why humans have become the dominant species on this earth. It's also what forums are for! "Only decal roads" MY HERO! TY. Mesh is good for sticking a walled route to the side of a mountain, like a stone-wall lined road, with the high side of the road butted against the mountainside cleanly where you can't get stuck, but otherwise, they're to be avoided like the plague. They make better walls and bridge beams then they do roads A good height for medians is the window line of the 88 Pessima. Using the race version of it, is a good indicator to find your road bumps with, as it's hard suspension will prob cause the car to roll if you roadkilled a bunny. Good thing we don't have those - yet. You are definitely talented, and seem to stick with things to see them through far enough to enjoyable amounts of completion (a lot of folks aren't). So, do have fun, I will help wherever I can as I do find plenty of time to be on here. With written docs few and far between for this game, we gotta put heads together on this thing when it comes to the editor... so I'll be around. --cheers
Don't use the launcher clear cache when your game acts up, btw. Back up levels dir 1st (not mods/levels, just the beamng.drive/levels dir). Otherwise you'll have to dig it out of the backups.
Map placed on hold for now. There is a bug in the latest update of the game that crashes the game if "there are too many graphic impostors" (via stenyak). So in short, it's impossible to work on this for now.
Work continues! I have to redo the forest - it was causing a virtual memory error. Kinda sucks to lose 6 hours of work but I have to rethink my methods; there is lots of road to cover. Thanks for staying with me! A private pre-alpha may be in the next two weeks.
That's because there's so many trees and it's a large map. A map the size of your Desert Highway or my Tennessee USA map with LOTS of trees, will seriously want atleast 6+gb all to itself. Take a look @ my Tennessee map for example of how much to thin the trees. Put some grassy field props in too. It's the physics model to do with all the trees vs all the tree positioning. First time I did trees Beam ate 12gb! :x Got it down to 5~5.1gb when it loads to 6gb after you've driven about most of the map, changed the car, etc.
I think I've got a pretty good method now. In before, I was going for a very thick cover just to block out areas without trees. Also in before, the forest file was about 8mb of just text data. Currently it's at just over 3mb and I'm at where I was before I started working on it again in terms of map coverage. Now I'm doing blocker trees along the edges with a very thin forest on areas that aren't seen often (usually the fly-over areas). So far I'm noticing no hiccups but I've still got quite some miles to go.
Well, part of what you could do, is use skybox (with trees!) like ECA did. You can remove some bland areas of terrain with the terrain cutout tools (it's reversable), inside the terrain editor. Use this to help blend mountains into the scenery. I don't have a skybox in mine but it's something to consider (I just never felt inclined enough to bother as it's non-colliding anyways!). *Also, offtopic, note that I did reply to your issue with your cpu socket disabling Bank A memory on your PC. Magnifying glass + that data sheet I linked you in the post, my friend. Have jewelers screwdriver handy.
Progress Update!!: Basic forestry work: DONE! This was so arduous. Is fairly light on RAM for the coverage I wanted. There's a fairly decent cushion right now before the game runs of out virtual memory (on 8GB of RAM). Other progressions: 90% of roads are done. Still need to do more detailed offroad bits. Basic clouds for now - looking into making a skybox. AI mapped out and working well Proper water reflections Lake area is rather high detail now (bridge, parking areas, etc.) What's next: > Somewhere in between this and whenever, a pre-alpha may be privately available. Finishing up all roads including the offroad areas Fitting road signs and making custom ones Doing up info.json's and doing preview photos. Adding a lot of props and small details IE houses, mailboxes, small streams, etc. Having several versions of the map IE, FPS, Raining, etc. Custom modeling other simple props (out of mesh roads probably) SOUNDS. Seriously, I have a crap load already recorded from just walking around my environment here at home. Can't estimate completion date just yet. It will be a while before I'm happy with the amount of quality I want out of this. Pic dump:
I would say, if you want to make sure it loads/runs (on 8gb systems), try to keep it under 5gb Beam memory usage when the level is first loaded. I don't know just how BIG the map is, from looking at it, but that should give you 1gb of room atleast when people drive around, load up different cars, etc. I drove around for over a half-hour on my map, and switched to a different car, and memory usage was about 800~1000mb greater. It didn't really go up much past that unless I kept switching cars. The game's getting better about that though, with each new version. The map is looking nice, though.
It's big. 9216x9216 meters. Now, Beam doesn't have an issue with map size. It tends to when there's lots of objects.
Hey crap (Nick name for you, since your profile says crap . don't hate me) Is that the map you told the beta group a while ago?
Yes it is! Had a bit of a hiatus because it was crashing the game before the update. Turns out I probably didn't have to wait (the forest file got completely botched somehow) but oh well. --- Post updated --- Max use on normal settings is 1500MB
I guess it helps when you don't have 1gb level size ...Or 600mb in road textures alone! Good luck with this, looks promising. Using mesh-roads as leveling tools in the terrain editor can give you some beautiful banks on the corners. It's time consuming but - as I did this with Tennessee - the results are just so well worth it (though it's not 100% or otherwise near perfect yet!). A little smoothing when it's done with, and you can really have a glass smooth roadbed. Then you can install a decal road here and not rely on mesh roads - except for sculpting, walls, or other barriers. Make the meshes 3x the width of the road, and you'll have the ability to smooth the terrain on the sides without affecting the road. Just careful of drop-offs near the road, because with a large terrain size, the imperfection of terrain collision can become evident. It works by the corners of the triangles on the terrain, and by doing so, cause cause quite a bit of nastiness with sudden changes in height on the terrain. So basically, if you keep like a 'square and a half' or atleast one-square of distance between your road edge and the drop-offs next to it, you should be good. Learned this the hard way. Also can happen of you manually taper the roads (as roads in real life have the center raised up for drainage, water running off to the side), with large terrain squares. (in a little more step by step detail for you - and other mappers) Lay out your decal road where you want it to go, make a mesh road right overtop of the decal road 3x the width of the decal road, and lower both ends until it's flush with the terrain at both ends. Now segment it, and move the segments into position, then bank each node as you need. Keep in mind if you have more than one corner, they don't always divide well between corners so you'll have to pay extra attention when smoothing things out. Now use the sculpting guides added in 0.5.6 near the bottom of the terrain-editing side panel to bring the terrain up (or down) to the level of the mesh road (not the carve option). You should be able to see your decal road through the surface where it's proper. 95% of it usually comes out fine, and you can smooth the other areas that do not. When you are done, go into the object editor, and lower the mesh road below the terrain where it won't be noticed. Examine your roadbed length, and if it's good, continue to the next portion of road and repeat. If it's not good, hit CTRL+Z to undo moving the mesh road away, and re-apply your terrain tools as needed. If you're not quite done in the area with the terrain, drag the mesh road you used as a slope guide back below the surface and leave it there until you're done making intersections, etc, incase something gets goofed up, it's super-easy to move it back up again later. There's plenty of the hiding underground in my map that's in beta. I hope this helps (if you didn't already know all of this, anyways!). If you did, well, kudos.
Thanks man! Progress update: The folder architecture for selectable spawn points/map configs is set up (kind of a pain but done).
