WIP Beta released The Tennessee USA Roane County 0.71 Beta Discussion/Suggestion/feedback Thread 19.3.1

This. map. is. huge=awesome.

 

Yes, the large, realistic, open space gives you room to really enjoy ANY vehicle, especially a fast one! The real setting makes it that much more fun!

Yes, it's a monster, it's not a hobby - it's a full time job making this, I don't quite think I realized how much work ALL this is, even with other folks (kindly, thankfully) supplying some of the non-Beamng assets - but I AM committed to seeing this through as I am able.

On other notes, working on adding more to the map, and weeding out the console errors (this in itself is both overdue and is time-consuming). Little things here and there, furnishing/populating it, rebuilding road-edges, things like that, fixing terrain, getting rid of the last few unbanked corners, converting the last of the .png assets to .dds for a slight fps increase and so it doesn't throw errors in console about texture assets (png/jpg/jpeg/gif etc non-dds textures won't be supported in the future so it has to be fixed NOW, this broke a lot of maps in the past few months).

The next update should be out within the next week or so - I am hoping, provided it all goes well. It will feature:
More buildings! This takes LOTS of time but this map has far, far too much open empty space devoid of civilization! I'm fixing this!
Just slightly more roads, as they need to be built, I am putting them in, just little roads here and there, nothing major at the moment.
Texture fixes, lots and lots of them. I still might change-up the highway textures for something less extreme and more high-res (ok, they suck).
MOAR banked corners (2-lane portion of Roane State Highway mostly - it's the road that winds east of kingston, goes over the river by the highway, then takes you to & ends at Rockwood after about 6~8 miles or something close). The AI here will be fixed, and made to follow the road better through corners.
NEW signs are in and working beautiful, as mentioned previously, I am going through area by area and updating them.
I think I fixed some of the dark-asphalt-being-too-dark bug because of the normals, it's not too bad now. Working on this! Affects offramp texture, too.
As I do the sign updates, I will make sure traffic lights all can be seen from inside the pessima/covet (can't always), if not, stop-bars will be moved back, or the pole-mounted signal (usually for pedestrians) that's at about 7 feet, will be installed in addition. OR the light will be set back 4~6 feet further. Something's not quite right, you SHOULD be able to see them usually! I mean, bad things happen enough in this game so as it is. We don't need another excuse to crash, or do we?


And a big-box home store is born. It's not named yet. It's not decorated yet, but I did manage to use vanilla-Beam assets to make it
This will be in more than one spot, though. there's quite a few of them in the area. This simulates a building-supply store.
So yes, it's hideous currently, but yes, there's progress, it will look better shortly. The parking lot will be finished up next.

--cheers!

P.S. Yesterday I found out that the case-fan speed adjuster switch thingie (it's got 3 speed, 12v, 7v, 5v, for the Arc XL fulltower I have, by Fractal), will, when adjusted to or from it's lowest speed, will CRASH the bios of the XFX Radeon Rx 480 8gb (I took the 4gb back and got the 8gb for 22$ more when the 1st one rattled after a few days). I have the XFX model, considering updating it's bios, when I get around to it. This is part of why I kept the old card so long!
No, serious, it sure quiets things down when the VGA card's bios crashes :x It's not supposed to do THAT. 3rd time's a charm might as well just get a Nvidia 1070 but I have everything set for Radeon here... sheesh. It's never easy, is it. In 20~22 years of PC hardware, I've never seen THAT happen.
Switch is good, PSU is good, tried a different PSU rail too (it has 4 8pin plugs, card needs one, but it didn't help), the mobo is fine, it's something faulting in the VGA bios because the idle-off fans spin up for no reason and the display cuts out - but ONLY if I hit that switch. I can start the machine with it set to that slower speed, but if I switch it back, it acts like it did if I had lowered it the 1st time. Screen loses signal, idle-fans stop idling (they idle when the temp is below ~60c). I am sure they will resolve this eventually but still time to talk to the manufacturer.
12v = normal operation for fans, 7v = a little more than half-power, but much less noise, 5v = silence (and crashed VGA bios)...
It's never easy and straight-forward is it?

Edit, added a further-out shot, as I am getting things further, for a general idea where it is.
I think I'll call it "Blowes" Home Supply Store. That or Home Cheapo.

 

I reference Kingston, Tennessee, below. This is the part where BURGER WORLD and the original spawn point (was, and also waterfront park spawn) are.
Completed both the intersections infront of the shopping center that's started in the above-post's pics.
Completely reworked about two miles of the eastern-most highway, that was 100% level. It's not now, and has it's real-life grade(s), the bridges over Kentucky Ave (Kingston exit), and the large Samuel Rayburn Memorial Bridge were re-worked and re-sloped.
Basically everything EAST of the Fossil plant. Took several hours. Will have pics when it's tested and done.
COMPLETELY re-did the junction of Kentucky Ave (Kingston) with the highway. It was completely outta whack and waaaaay to wide on the south side.
Why???

I have to re-add a bunch of trees and protesting environmentalists I bulldozed while working on the highway grade, and fix the AI paths (my map doesn't always use the roads themselves as AI paths, which is partly how I get it to stay in-lane, a secret I found out about myself).

This makes room to put the missing roads between Kingston itself and the highway, intersections included.

Kingston I am trying to finish up before the next update, which will be getting uploaded sometime this weekend! Yay! New version soon!

While it's not a night a day difference, the detail is getting more and more done with, as I get through areas, they're really starting to shine.

Inspired by great mappers in both this game, and others, and professional game dev teams, I am working my best, and pulling out all the stops, and putting in all the tricks trying to bring that 'big open-world game map' to Beamng.drive. WITH detail. WITH realism. NOT a boring, bland, huge nothing of boredom!
Why? Because, the small pack-in maps that the devs made, while they're awesome in themselves, do a DISSERVICE to this game engine. This game can be so much more with a decent machine to run it (and a mapper that has lots of TIME and sometimes can't get out of the chair due to disability).

Beam is awesome, and a big map really makes it shine. I am trying to make THAT map. The map's only half the story. The missions will tell the rest, but those are a month or two off.

The only part that stinks about making this map is whenever I have to drive to Knoxville, I must take the highway that I made in THIS MAP. It feels so @#$%ing weird driving through my map without being in the Beam game. Ugh.
On the bright side, I saw some things I've missed (I live about 20 minutes from the west edge of this map's location), and am adding them in.

---

Edit, Kentucky St (Kingston) interchange revamp completed, looks beautiful now, as it should.
I SPENT 6~7 HOURS REDOING THIS INTERCHANGE... yes it takes a LONG time!
There's now light fixtures and light-sources on the Samuel Rayburn memorial bridge (where US40 crosses the river not far from the starting point), I think the other 4-lane bridge over the river will get them too.
Added some pics of the progress. There's also a pic of driving @ sunrise coming down from the top of the mountain... it's something beautiful this game is.
Some pics are dark, those are at sunrise to see how the night driving is.
There's also one of me at the traffic light - notice you can SEE the traffic signal heads from inside the car - yes I am aware a few of the lights are problematic sight-wise, I am both aware and working on remedying this.

 

Sounds really good. I feel the same about the maps, Beamng needs a big open world map to really show all that it got. Im hoping the maps the devs are working on is a step or two in that direction. Meanwhile im enjoying your map all day long. When i get alittle more energy off work, i can learn Blender (knows 3ds max inside out) and maybe help with for example buildings, since its a daunting task just to put everything together.
Always had an idea that we (Beamng community) start a Map Resources-part of the forum, where we add 3d models of trees, building, signs, rocks, mountains and so on that can be used for one or more community-built maps.

 

Oh most certainly. I am open with the resources (such as road-textures) that I've created. Most all the roadways are 2k x 4k or 4k x 4k textures, there's 700+ mb of them in this map - yes just road textures! When you created a whole COUNTY in a game, you need a LOT of them. A LOT. Not every road is the same you know. While I can't hand away other's work without speaking with them, I can hand out mine all day long, and readily will for anything for Beamng.drive modder's needs.
I uploaded some railroad tracks actually, not too many months back to work with the trains available on this website. The same author who made them made the trains, he gave the green light on that.
When this map is more-complete, I will be readily handing out some of the resources that I made in packs. I am waiting until it's closer to 90~95% done, so I know what I have. Until that happens, anyone interested can send me a private message about said-requested resource(s), and within a day or two I should respond. If the resource doesn't belong to me, I can always point you (or anyone) in the right direction (for example, signs I have received, or another asset I messaged & got permission-for-use for, I don't use assets without the author's permission - NO exception unless it's from BEAM or a Beam dev).

I am generally 110% for anything that makes this community - and henceforth playing the game - better.

Dave, when you get time, if you can make something - I can always use houses, businesses, stores, etc, anything you'd see common place in a map. As always, no deadlines, no commitment, no hard feelings if not. If you can make it - great - I can and will try my best to make best use of it - if not - hey - you tried or at the very least - it's still fun to go screaming down terrain that really exists in real-life and not come home with a phone-book sized pile of speeding tickets and other violations

I find myself easily racking up 50~60 miles testing things, listening to music, and going through atleast a quarter tank of fuel in the older naturally aspirated 2.0l Pessima sedan hatchback, before I even realize it. That's the best method for a mapper to know that part or portion of the map is complete, or that the immersion is getting to the point where you want it. The highway is getting there, the highway itself is just about 'done' as far as detailing goes, sans a few random signs here and there, and town-name signs. It needs metal guard rail in spots too, it will be a 2d one (like the open-railed bridges I have), to keep processing power/faces displayed down, and time-used-for-placement better budgeted (read: it's 100x easier to make that textures than do this all manually).
When you have what's fastly approaching 150 miles of road (whatever it is OOPS), over 144 sq/mi of terrain, you do whatever you can to speed things up - afterall, I want to get this map done before this game ends up like MS-DOS :x

--Cheers!

P.S. Updates will be more frequent up to the next rather-near-release milestone of this map.
Oh, and don't try to use the bank drive-thru in downtown Harriman :x OOPS BUG BUG crash smash

 

I was 'cruising' around, and after a while beam stopped working due virtual memory limits, I have a 4gb card as you know.. Beam was the only program running on the gpu
Anyway, it hasn't happened before, and I hope you can finish this map without more hardware problems on your side. Also, if you like the trailer in my screens, check out my skin pack

 

I have used the terms Virtual memory and Swap File interchangeably below, don't get confused, they're both the same for sake of argument here today!

You should look up an article or how-to for increasing your computer's virtual memory limits for your version of Windows. I have a 16gb system here, and I frequently use up all the memory. General rule of thumb is virtual memory is 1~2.5x the size of your physical (RAM) memory.
Virtual memory has nothing to do with a graphics card, instead, it's a cache of drive space (usually on drive c that's used for temporary files in the computer for use when it runs low on, or in lieu of RAM. So basically, when I am editing, or sometimes in a game, I can have a combined working data set of 40GB! That's a LOT of memory usage. 24gb in swap space (drive c and 16gb of memory (while 15gb was in use!).
RAM usage for this map has GONE DOWN over the last several months (not necessarily with this version), over the course of a few game revisions. It's a huge map with a lot of assets, but so long as you have a 8gb of RAM or more on 64-bit operating system, you should be just dandy to run this.

Virtual memory used to be a button on one of the tabs in the MY COMPUTER properties, I am sure it's not too far from there, hit Windows+Pause (windows key on keyboard + pause) and poke around just try not to break things :x

If you give your computer a 32gb swap file, and the machine has 16gb of RAM, you will generally be fine. That's what I did here and I have yet to have this error even with the editor running. If you don't have enough swap file/virtual memory, your machine will possibly lock up or slow down incredibly.

Fear not, If I ever run out of memory to where I can't work, I will go out and buy more memory, or update Windows home to Pro, etc. Work on this map will not stop even if the whole PC blows up.

Edit: Almost forgot, the truck delivery skin is rather well done, if that's you're creation, you've done a fine job. Should make a matching logo for the doors of the truck, if it's not hauled by independent truckers that is.

 

thanks for the reply, it will look it up

It is indeed my skin, part of : http://beamng.com/resources/blijos-skin-pack.1566/, and there is no uv map for the trucks yet

 

I really need to take the time and learn Blender, would be nice to be able to contribute to your map. The amount of time you put down is really impressive and i like what your goal is.

 

i hate myself for not having a lot of money and having so little RAM....good map. 5/5.....:'(

 

Not unique to this map and the explanation for it is in this very thread, some pages back.

 

Was just about to post that. Here's the explanation:

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I did run across one small issue next to the large industrial-looking building. The ground tries to eat cars.

And a more zoomed out shot to get an idea for the location.

It's only in that small area behind the crash barriers, but I'm not a map creator so I have no idea what it could be.

 

It's a trade-off with the large ground size on this super-duper-large map. When your terrain squares (each chunk between 4 points is a square, more precisely, a pair of triangles making a square) get to a certain size, you notice the half-precision of the terrain... e.g. when you get to a certain width of these squares, on very rough terrain (or a terrain 'jump' in ground level, like the edge of a road), you may see the car sink in part of the ground just for but a moment and as soon as you move a few feet it's fine. Conversely, at the bottom of sharp banks of cliffs, you may notice small invisible hills leading up to the top edge of the cliff. This last reason is why all the cliff walls in FALLOUT were made out of chunks of meshes, made to look like eroded cliffs, rockfaces, etc. This is common in games. Fallout 4 actually uses about the same square size (4~5 size) in terrain as I do here on this (5.2 i think IIRC).
In the end, it's a known shortcoming that is worked-around by using things like concrete walls, placeable rock faces, heavy foresting, or just lots of smoothing.

That industrial building is the Kingston Fossil power plant. I am sorry I couldn't make a better one, but I stink at model creation. It looks fine enough from far away I will eventually replace it with a pile of forest-meshes (buildings) that are scripted in. For now it stays though.
Beware going too close to it off the road will cause you to find out how bad it's collisions are!!! Read: invisible wall nightmare, though it doesn't affect road traffic nearby. If you stay on the road you're fine.

There's a few places around the map where the terrain collision being less precise than it LOOKS is noticeable, I am working to lessen these issues as the map gets further along. In the end it's just all part of the price-of-entry for making a large-scale map like this one with the tools available - it's just 'can you make this work?' or not, and I CAN.

---

Progress update follows:
So my texture-making part of my brain took over everything and completely re-vamped the highway textures. With lots of restarting the game over and over to test the textures (sometimes they update LIVE but for normals* sometimes I have to restart it) Thankyou RAID 0 SSD's I love you - you are worth every penny x 2. I made the new silvery-taupe type color that often the roads are down here. I don't know if it's the higher sand/sandstone content of the aggregate** or what but this is often the color of roads in sandy/costal regions. Conversely up north the roads often had a 'purple' or 'plum' hue from the stone used, which was some type of compacted clay-stone often found in the region. We don't have those here though. These textures are brand-new and this map is beta, everything is subject to change.


Below is super-technical stuffs, road-buffs will love it, but maybe not the rest of you. Most of this is off the top of my head, so bear with me if it's disorganized.

*normals = bumpmapping
**aggregate = stone usually used in pavement, larger aggregate for highways and high-truck-traffic areas - conversely such; lower size aggregate for more malleable pavement that lasts longer, cracks less etc but won't hold up to truck traffic without deforming/washboarding especially when it's HOT. Usually base-coats of asphalt (the road foundation of stone has this place atop but under the wearing course) have higher sized/amount of aggregate than a wearing course. Of course this is all technical mumbo jumbo, but it's pertinent when designing a road-network and the graphics for it.
Smaller aggregate is also used for things like Micropave(tm!) and it's clones, and tar-and-chip 'painting the road black' classes of processes.

The part I speak about below is gotten to by taking the Harriman Downtown (DT?) Spawn, make a left to go north onto the main road through town. It's reached after about 0.8 miles from the spawn point.
Okay so onto map-work. I was getting some of the road finished off & signed north of Downtown Harriman. The corners are now banked, the intersections (three i think) are ready to be added on to in the future, and signed for, so it's ready for some super-high-speed now. I will have a bit of reforesting to do but only a few minutes worth. Overall, just over 2 miles of roadway were updated.
The new asphalt texture can be seen here with it's associated patch textures. The intersections are NOT finished. They're merely prepped for restriping for the turn lanes and such. The old 'highway' texture was replaced with this - BUT it looks rather nice, though still needs a bit of the crack detailing and weathering effects. Please excuse the strange-looking-bridge-texture (in the interchange picture) that's oddly dark blue-ish or just too dark, it's a normal-error I am working out. Its not going to be like that in the next release. The interchange there is unrelated to the north-of-Harriman roadwork, it just is there to show off what the next highway texture looks like.
Now obviously, these textures need just a bit of tweaking yet, but overall it does show how good it looks now with the appropriate color of pavement. This was matched via GOOGLE maps btw.
Almost forgot, also these pics show the new cross-over prevention barriers (median) made of standard USA DOT-approved ugly metal guard rail.
Added another pic just now showing the intersection of Pine Ridge Rd (takes you to the highway US40) and Broadway of America (right to left), US 40 is in the background. This pic is to show the texture unification. No more mismatched stuffs (aside of purposeful patches of new pavement!). The big-box store I built the other day is in the background on the left side of the pic. It's still not done!

 

Fixed the @#$%ing bridge texture's normal error by deleting the reference to it's normal That works.
Installed ALL the guard rail on the mountain portion of the highway, and all the way east to the river-bridge. I will install more later, post-update.
Finally got around to banking the two turns on Roane State Parkway, where it winds through the park. Everyone crashed here because of that... no more!
Fully signed this area too. Should be much more forgiving. There's a small box-culvert style bridge (well it's close), along this road section now.
Fixed up the last (hopefully) of the mis-matched textures due to the highway texture change. Most of the textures are 100% too. Might need some little things.
There's almost 1gb of textures in the ROADS directory alone. The map is like 1.55~1.6gb uncompressed, though memory requirements on run-time and loading are little more or the exact same as the previous version. I am making better use of the assets within the map now. Some of them were always here, some were added a month or two back, and just seeing use now. The Beamng.drive updates are the main things that brought memory usage down.

This will stay running on 8gb RAM system just fine with a few cars. More vehicles increases the memory use when using lots of AI quite a bit!
Object use is 3575/4000 (actual 4096 limit, my limit is 4032 to allow for 64 cars or track objects in future per track).
Object use does NOT increase with signs, trees, buildings, etc, those are in the forest brush. Only bridges, rail track pieces, roads, and deliniation markings increase it (for the most part). I will most likely add another few spawn points, because it's such a monsterly huge map (ugh).

Noticed some lag when running the map for the first minute or two, once you get a few miles of driving in, it seems non-existant, beyond occasional frame skips here or there, those on a hard drive might have a tough time for the 1st minute or two. This is mostly the same as before, it's more due to the version change in the game vs the map itself. This SHOULD get better in future versions as streaming is worked on. Fast SSD's, lots of high-speed DDR3 or DDR4 in dual or quad channel helps loads here (ofcourse processor too).

While this is a huge map, any SSD-equipped modern Haswell-or-newer PC eqipped with atleast 12~16+ GB of memory will have NO issues here. Again, systems with 8gb of ram are still and will remain to be supported by this map. There is NO support for those who do not have at least 8gb of RAM. The game (Beamng.drive) is not natively designed for environments this large, so expect the unexpected! Expect to have fun, though!

See pics to see what the highway on the mountain now looks like. It's a little better with some rail to keep you from crashing completely off the cliff.

ALSO, GOOD NEWS, AI WILL FOLLOW LANE UP AND DOWN MOUNTAIN PERFECTLY, from the 3-lane bridge over Roane St (Rockwood/Harriman exit) at the bottom of the mountain to about 500ft short of Airport Rd exit (past the top of mountain). I made separate AI paths here, took an hour or two but it's worth it. It'll stay in the right lane, too. So for those wanting to set up some scenes, it'll work out nice. It cut too many corners before.
Will consider doing this to Roane State Parkway where it cuts corners a LOT (where I just banked turns).

 

Okay, so I've uploaded the new version, it's pending transfer to the server via the moderators at 715mb (!!!)... yeah. It's that big. heh...
When I hear back from the moderators, I will see to (or they will see to) updating this post to contain the new version of the map.
NO LINK YET, Check back in a day or two!

The new version DOES contain lots more finishing touches, like proper signage, better/more road grading work, less AI-cutting-corners, MORE graphics (make your computer CRY), 100~160 more hours of work (easily) over the last version, some more buildings, and over-all feels much more complete than the old version. The new version DOES NOT have significantly more roads, as I've stressed to complete what's already here.

Credits signs are posted. One on each direction of US40 (the main roughly east-to-west highway here) - see attached pic.
Runs on all systems 8gb RAM and above, though a good 4gb-VRAM-equipped video card is required to max the graphics settings out.
File link will be posted within 48 hours.

ERRATA:

Console errors abound, though it affects NOTHING the player sees and does not affect gameplay. It's mostly for unused assets.
There's still a select very few jpg pictures that aren't DDS yet. Getting around to fixing all of these.
Collision problems at the bank in harriman and the Kingston fossil power plant. NONE of these affect ROAD driving.
Tractor trailers (articulated / commercial lorrys) might still have some issue with landing gear on rail crossings getting hung up. Try to avoid them! Many of the main roads are bridged so you don't have to worry about that stuff, so stay to the major roadways.
Some random bumps or glitchy collision with the landscape you might never ever find, as it's in places where the player should never go or cannot get to.
Occasional decal road errors such as jagged lines or other missing chunks, though I fixed the lion's share of these issues there may still be some.
Unfinished roads on the far south-southwest-west section of the map, and 2~3 north of Harriman, I haven't finished these yet.
Poor performance while the map is still loading up data for the first 2~3 miles of driving, less noticeable on high-end recent PC's, this is more game-engine than my map besides the fact that this map is HUGE and has loads of assets, it's very straining for the game-engine.

While I have done my best to make this list all-inclusive, there may be something I have missed. No previous bug reports are valid.

 

nice!
Maybe I will make a few skin's for this map/you when the exam week is over and i'm not dead (too many students here, so they just make the test a few times more difficult )

keep it up


edit:
Took a break and made this :

 

Great to see this being made. I'm a native of Sevier County.
This map does actually look very much like Eastern Tennessee, but imo all the real fun roads are on the other side of Knoxville up in the Smokies, so about an hour's drive east of this map.

 

That's awesome (and hilarious), heehee. Great work on that. This will do quite proper for some couch-hauling missions! Will see to enabling this for a couch hauling missing on the next game-version update.

 

Please tell me where to download? Or give a link)

 

Keep an eye on the forums in the next day or two. Things are changing and this is in the process of getting properly hosted on this site. I had to go through some hoops because it's significantly over the size limit. Being that it's THE largest map for this game, this shouldn't be a revelation to anyone. I could have kept it under the size limit, but everywhere would look the same, and it would be super-boring and hideous (this game has great graphics if you take advantage of it). That being said, there's still plenty of things to add to this map, just have to stay within memory and FPS constraints.