WIP Beta released A new *CITY* map - LOS INJURUS 2023-12-20

I wouldn't see why this would/could/should be a 'no' answer, so I would say yes, that could come as a later map addition after the bulk of the obligatory work is done. So much is promised, at this point much is a bunch of hot air, but I will slowly get those to fruition. As I get more things knocked off this map's bucket-list so-to-speak, I will surely get more time for things like that.
Yes, I still have to do the Roane County update this month. So entirely, in due time, I will get to these things.
Have to make some fancy (read: functional with LOD's) bridge pillars for my new bridges in now, and something for the high bridges to use, also (as there's LOADS of super-high bridges in this map). The current bridge pillars lack draw-call reduction and also lack LOD's. They are but merely a concept.
I will just be a happy guy once I get rid of more of these pillar-less old bridges (the columns are there, you just can't see them, you can & will hit them though if you try).

The good news and silver lining is as I said in the previous post, the reflectors on the new 3-lane pieces are actually WORKING like they're SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING. Now I have to go and re-do a bunch of the 2-lane pieces so they're working also. Getting things 100% back as they should be isn't always easy so that'll take a day by itself.

 

ay dude look, you don't have to give everything you've promised to people right now, you have time and frankly either way you're giving a lot to people. I'm happy to have a new city/urban map in beamng and frankly it's awesome.

 

Spent an hour-or-two re-running pieces through Maya to introduce the new better-working reflectors.
Nothing like exporting and converting 30 different bend operations, then editing all those DAE files it exported so they don't contain certain lines relating to the image location on the disk drive, only the map-to name, and then seeing this:


Maya's automatic 'features' keep rounding the edges of everything and making hell for me. Oh am I angry. Reamed out support on the Maya forum again because of it.
Looks like the next beta will still have very distracting weird edges because MAYA SUCKS. Really considering learning Blender, apparently, this is one of the laundry-list of reasons why people use that in-stead. I had those vertex normals set PERFECT & bend operations to make pieces on gradients really just made a wreck of everything. They look fine in the daytime without the headlights on though.

So progress is rather slow, as I repeat the same thing over and over and over trying to see if it's not messed up.

Does anything work like it's supposed to today?

 

Drop-in replacement for 'concept' bridge columns is now complete (well mostly drop-in, will have to adjust a few).
Columns are TWO draw calls for the entire thing set of 3 pillars plus the concrete header at the top to support the load. Columns should batch as 1 draw calls + 1 for the top header section, the rest of the nearby ones should batch along with the first one. LOD's are a single draw-call which should batch across 3 columns. This actually took 2+ hours for something stupidly simple (getting sizes right etc).

Will have pictures up later with the new side-road bridge set I've made. That's what these columns are for also (all side-separated spans of highway bridges for 2~3 lanes + the side-road bridge share the same beam footprint so hence you can use the same columns. This set is extra extra tall and the texture for the columns tiles well so I can show yet another bridge later on that's already in over by HEH ISLAND later on. So if you've got a secret love for bridges, or a hankering for some digital engineering, you're in the right place. If you're sick of bridges already, well, might want to change the channel for another day or so. I did need to do these though as I wish to finish off this highway corridor that I was working on before/finish the interchange I'd been working on.

--Cheers for now!

P.S. Hope everyone got fat N stuffed like a turkey (stuffed with food, silly!), for the holiday. I LOVES EATING BURDS, BURDS IS SO YUMMY I COULD BITE AN EGG'S HEAD OFF! MMMMM...
...and I hope no one had to suffer with Chris Mess muzak already this early... ugh... help... Luckily, we have a ranch house here, nothing a good 'ol coat thrown over the satellite dish can't fix! Muahaha...

 

Just wondering, will you do another little drive around of the whole map? Now you don't have to drive over all of the roads but just maybe the houses, buildings, or land marks so the people that don't have beta access can at least see all of the progress " Put together " ?

( I just want to see if my house is in the game yet )

 

I can surely do that within the next week or two hopefully, provided my internet cooperates with it. It's sometimes next to impossible to get things uploaded.
I have not done any residential buildings lately, in the last 60 days or so; but I've got a whole bunch scheduled in, and yes your house is one of them. I haven't forgotten, just got tied up doing and re-doing lots of things due to vertex normal issues in Maya and generally rubbish features of that program as-such getting in the way.

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Got another overpass done. This used to be a level overpass very high up (a little bit higher than the high side is now, all the way across in-stead of sloped). Looks better - I think so anyways.
This is the final version (I might change the beam textures a bit!) of what will be the surface road overpasses. It includes reflectors on the bridge rails and on the center double-yellow every few feet.

Yet another one is done too...

I raised the road a little bit through here, though it's banked decently enough, and the curve radius of the lower road is much more consistent with a PLANNED road.

This is what you'll see from the cloverleaf by HEH ISLAND, looking up the mountain. This highway used to be all fresh black asphalt, but this looks much more consistent with the terrain looks, too. One of the new bridges is the 1st one pictured up top.

Sheesh, I guess after putting this up a few hours ago I never hit 'post reply'.. ...


This is done, too, now. All 8 ramps graded to perfection, blended beautifully into the models, it has everything except it's signs and occasional large scrub bushes or water feature.
A bit more polishing later...

I don't know of any more ways to OCD this to perfection without a sign kit, which I'll be making in the near future, or should say 're-making'. I have one, I just have to fix a few small things with it and do something about the car-munching collision with it (but I am thankful to have a great starting point!).

 

is there a chance I could have my "own" house as a patreon supporter? That would be super frigging sick lol

 

If your asking if you can get a replica of your house put in the map, sure, you can get that. I am going to be building several of them in the course of December the way things are looking now. I got a bit tied up with things due to tying a bunch of loose ends, and Maya throwing a wrench in the gears, repeatedly, but surely, I'll get caught up sooner or later. My health hasn't been helping, but being that's a factor that's *always* there to some end / extent, that's a constant, a given. I wanted to get started on my Roane County update, that's getting pushed back a bit, but I hope to have this next Patreon update fixed up nice in the next 2~3 days or so for this map.
There is always time to build houses, but I don't build things until I have a 'place' to put them in the map, and I need roads in first to have a place to put them. Hence what I've been doing as of late, lots of fine-tuning on infrastructure and improving existing things a bit (to see how much it helped, how much I like it better, and yes, it improved things a LOT and brought the highways I've worked on up to much closer to a 2018 standard than they were before).

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House requests fine-print for all to read:
If you request your own house built into the map, please:
*Take as many pictures as you can of it, or pull a few screenshots of google maps and put them on, trying to avoid trees blocking too much of the shot, etc.
*Do not send any revealing information like where you live, etc, beyond town or city names (which aren't needed btw). No one needs to know where you live either, or what house you live in, so do send these via private message via the 'start a conversation' feature at the top of the page on the right. You can scribble out the address numbers if you wish, the numbers are not going to be modeled in as that in and of itself would drop the frame rate, having draw calls to render each number (even if by a small amount, it's a lot of work for little immersion, that's a no-no).
*Know that I've never been there, so if you don't have anything more than the front half of the home pictured, I'll have to 'wing it' and just use my construction experience, to design what it would look like.
*The year, or close to the year, or the decade it was built, this is only important if you do not have 360 degree angles of your house, as it helps with the immediate above, when I have to fill in where pictures aren't taken, I have construction experience for new residential since I was a kid in the 80s (born into it, business is now defunct after family members died), so this will be useful to me.
*NO, do *NOT* send or make visible 'google earth' or 'maps' links that show what street you live on, etc. Most people aren't complacent enough to do this, but it must be stated for liability reasons at the very least. You shouldn't be sending that info to anyone except your insurance company or bank anyways.
*If you feel weird about any of this, don't do it, it's not worth losing sleep over it. If you think it's cool, hey, awesome; this will help the map not have all the houses looking the same.
Still want to do it, great, I'll get the messages within 24~36 hours, and will add it to the 'To-Do' list of buildings to build. Even if I get 100 of them, I still will be able to build them all, it will just take a [censored] long time. I generally do houses in batches, not just one-off, I get a blank slate with a basic box in it for reference/size with generic doors and window sizes that I can build from so they don't come out randomly different sizes and look all strange, etc (this is how the developers do it). Do know that I will do my best to match materials or window styles, but it doesn't always happen, since we don't have GPU's with 65536 GB of RAM in them yet either (don't worry, I won't slap DOOM textures on it).

Ever drive through a development only to see home after home of the same boring 1940's~1950's brick box? Or a townhouse development with 100+ iterations of the SAME THING!? Yuck! Don't want that. To a point it happens in real life, but after many many many years, they do end up being different to some extent as generation(s) of families make their mark/modifications.

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So yes, and on that note, glad people are liking the highway adjustments. It's not 100% perfect yet as driving at night still leaves some things to be desired, but it's getting higher quality/more impressive even to me, over time. It's taking lots longer than planned, but things often go this way in software/game development. It's not unexpected at all, only a matter of time before some delay throws a wrench in the gears, not even the developers here are immune - Just ask them how many times 'The Bob' went spastic after an update in the last year or two, and yet somehow didn't get banned out of some good luck or something else... I will consider myself lucky.
As they say "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" ...
Well, I respond with "Yeah but at-least it's paved, that's far more than I can say for some of these roads in the northern Rust-Belt areas of this country!".

--Until next time, I'm off for a bit, to relish/enjoy my migraine in peace...ugh!

 

A new lake and the beginnings of a (loop) dirt track is being created. The nearby bridge is also replaced with new stuff.

Deliberately with more than it's share of bumps and surface imperfections, you'll want to bring a peppy 4x4 in-stead of a rally car, though, if it's a tough rally car, it may be a worthy contender.

This will make the beta (actually, it's one of THE LAST things to go into the beta before it ships). AI paths will be featured here, and the nodes are very close together so it should take the turns as well as it's able to. The AI paths will not connect to any other roads, it will be an 'island' for the AI, basically, so it will not enter or leave the track until you tell it to.

Lots of S-curves with decent banking on them, and some rutting and imperfections on the low side. If you stay towards the middle of the track, you'll generally be good. I will try to put some type of barriers in place so that you can't cut corners easily. If someone wishes to make a mission for this, after it's released, that is totally acceptable and it will translate over to the final product just fine (as the track likely won't be changed at all except graphically, and things off to the sides of the track). If no one else does it, I will figure out how to make a mission for it without too much issue.

The track will be able to be driven both ways, and is wide enough to fit several vehicles side-by-side (about 17~18 meters wide). It will be a good mile or two long, though, so vehicle endurance matters. It should be flat enough that a decently powerful box-truck or cube-van can get around with a few pianos in the back, that's my tester, not that the pianos will be any good at the end of the journey.


Deliberately over-sized in width so that you and the AI can battle it out, and plenty of room for passing. If there's ever anything more than local multiplayer, or even just for that, or for when the AI gets it's passing routines implemented, it should provide plenty of replay value. Maybe over-sized isn't the word - if you think of a NASCAR raceway width track, that's about right. I won't rule out a pinch point or two, those make it fun.

It's also visible from both the inner loop highway (long bridge in 1st pic is inner highway) and the section of highway that goes over the mountain (that was just completely re-done from scratch).
The track again features a mix of long straight-away sections and lots of S-curves, though the straight sections will feature small repetitive jumps and surface imperfections, to prevent excessive speed.
Lastly, it's not above me to put some MUD in the lowest sections of the track just for kicks. It won't be on the hills though, nor will it be deep. There may be other more appropriate moments for that.

This is only one of the at-least half-a-dozen dirt, asphalt, or 'mixed' tracks that will be featured in the map.

So only 2~3 days as I stated late last night or this morning, and it should be available. It just needs to be working, and fun. I have one bridge to do yet, and this track, that should take care of loose ends.
The old Packard Plant is in, there isn't much else besides the building yet though, so more will be around that *after* the next beta is up.
--That is all, more pics on the track later or tomorrow, if I'm not too busy hauling pianos around it 'testing' it.

 

Sorry to rush, but how is Downtown going? You have any pics of it? Speaking of downtown, are the buildings going to be little Medium Sized buildings:



Or are they gonna be big, tall glass towers:

 

Are there going to be weathered warehouses here and there in the map?

 

Hey, I got something you could maybe add since this map is a desert like map. I was wondering if you could maybe put in a deserted/abandoned town somewhere around the map as the images I provided below or something close to that.

 

Oh god...poor AI's LUA is gonna esplode

 

Edit: DONE and graded!
Might need a bit of perfecting yet but all turns are sufficiently banked and it just needs a few barriers to prevent short-cutting (not going to put barriers everywhere, but some spots yet). The track texture color is what it will be now, I adjusted it so that it matched the terrain better but still can be seen.

The part that looks like it's underwater is only about a six inches to one foot of water on the low (inside) side of the turn, and none on the outer half of the turn's banking, meaning, if you stay to the outside, you won't hit it, but cutting down on the inside, will slow you down.
This has been a fun night of building. I got to listen to how bad Fallout 76 is, and that it's the worst Fallout ever, and that less than 10 days after release, sales stank so bad (they're +80% less than 3 years prior's launch of Fallout 4), that the game is 33% off already! Unheart of stench - and that I felt good about making my own game world for everyone to enjoy (when it's ready), and not playing that trash. So glad I didn't buy that one. I said the same thing the reviewers are saying now, many months ago when it was 1st announced.
--Cheers & stay here at the BeamNG site where you're safe from Bugthesda.
This coming from a guy who's played according to steam 2199 hours of Fallout 4. Yes.

EDIT:
Bad news: it's not 1~2 miles long
GOOD NEWS! It's 3 miles long. Hope your car is good for it!
fwiw: I got different odometer readings of 2.8~3.2 miles here, so 3 miles it is.
While heading back over the newer highway section (of old looking highway), toward the map center/city, it's on the left, after that bridge (if you've come from the 'outer' loop of highway). If coming from the spawn point, it would become visible just after the cloverleaf on the right on the hill.

Added last shot for bearing, if you free-cam from the spawn point, about 1~2 o-clock position from the direction your vehicle spawns in, past the big central lake, you'll come across this.
Coincidentally, the interchange in the background to the left of the track, might be upgraded a bit (at-least the overpass) by the time you get the beta. We'll see if I have time for it (as it's functional if a bit dated/ugly in it's state now, I wouldn't want to tear it up and start 2 days of work right before an update, introducing possibly yet ANOTHER delay). So entirely, I hope you guys enjoy it, it's surely a bumpy track, going 60mph+ will surely get plenty of air time over the mounds, it DEFINITELY needs some catch-fences or guide rails, if only for bearing sake along the ridge of the hill, it can be a bit ambiguous from the driver's seat (and that we do not want).

 

Awesome bro ! For when that map will be done ?

 

As with anything really, it is done, when it is ready. You might to wish to know when that is, but answer would be when it is done.

Development of these things is not quite straight forward and any estimate will be most likely way off, so it's done when it's done will be most accurate you can get.

Not this year though, no matter how much Bob works on map, there is much to be done and year is getting shorter by every moment.

 

I hope there's also going to be a rich-people's-district with huge villas and (very) long driveways, with gates, fences and different styles.
I love me some mile long driveways

 

I'd like to put an alpha version up publicly, when more of the texture/infrastructure work is done on it. Maybe I'll get that out by new years, I'd love to honestly, but I need more to show for it.

I can't just say it's going to be this awesome huge city and have a little village in it (well what is there now is more than a village, a town maybe, but it's not enough that's for-sure).

Working on getting ready to upload.
Maybe if all goes well with the upload, the Patreon folks can enjoy some of the beta by tomorrow evening, USA time.

Mud and dirt ground-model were added to the track, though the mud is mostly limited to the very inside of corners (the low spots) and a few splashes of it upon the track, as it does tend to really rock your world if it's just little bits for as deep as it is.
Guide rails were added to help you see your way around better and to prevent unintentional or intentional short-cutting of the track. They're just mesh road guide-rails but they will do just dandy for here.

To actually finish this map, maybe another year of work, maybe less, maybe more. I haven't the foggiest. Depends if things pick up pace or not, or get back-logged due to bugs.

Until then --Cheers!

 

The beta is out in the wild now, for those on Patreon. Do check your email, let me know if things aren't right.

 

Everything is really great so far, I actually love the "under developed" areas, and the highways and ramps are smoothed and banked to perfection. Quite enjoyable, but for everyone asking for a release date, it is no where near done, so Bob releasing it will only be met with backlash. It's definitely coming along really well, and the attention to detail is astonishing. The mall was pretty cool to drive around in,a s well as the really gigantic parking garage. Keep up the good work!!