I had the crazy thought of having the whole island of Tasmania in BeamNG for the fun of driving the Targa Tasmania.. But is it possible to have a 250x250-ish mile map in game? Or is that just too much to process
I think the max Torque3D map size is 4x4 kilometers And you can't use very detailed height maps And who is going to make this island? So no. Not going to happen unless Torque3D massively improves and someone comes along who actually wants to make this obscenely huge map.
The Isle of Man is about 15x35 miles... Still a bit too big Very tricky finding a small enough real island.
Maps larger than 4x4 km are possible, you just get bad flickering between the ground and any objects like the waterplane. I just made a 41x41 km map to test. It's ok until you add water, vegetation or objects to it. Would be hard to make it look good with 10 or more meters per pixel anyway. Maybe if we get working tiled terrains some day..
We'd need a system like most games with massive maps use, an active loading type thing. Instead of having the entire map loaded at once, just the bits and pieces we need are loaded. Im sure torque3D will implement something like that in the future
You could generate chunks of the map procedurally, LOD absolutely everything, or both. The biggest problem would be that nobody will ever be bothered to "make" Tasmania. It's about 68,000km[SUP]2[/SUP], or about the size of West Virginia. Consider that the official maps, which are much, much smaller, still took quite a while to make[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]. Also, as NINJAHOBNOB mentioned, the resolution of the heightmap would go to shit on such a large map.
You could make a map based on it though, just keep it under 4k. I wouldn't advise anything over 1km if you're starting out making maps; that's already a huge amount of roads to create. The whole of Tasmania would be impossible using conventional methods in terms of work load alone, let alone rendering issues.
If you had a massive team and all the heightmap data, and a paged terrain system, you could conceivably construct it out of a crapload of 4096x4096 heightmaps or something. But we don't currently have a paged terrain system, and heightmaps that big don't really work well. You'd also need to write some software to get the roads from Google Maps (including their width) and generate spline roads (unless you want to do all the roads in the entire island of Tasmania manually).
The Test Drive Unlimited series based their world on the hawaiian island of Oahu and it feels massive and that is the entire game world, not just one level (although TDU2 added ibiza island too, they already had most of the work done for oahu from tdu1). Oahu is only hawaii's third largest island and is only ~70x50 km. (checking wiki, it's 1,545.4 km[SUP]2[/SUP])
