https://www.beamng.com/posts/981463/ READ WHOLE THREAD. You will find information useful and a hierarchy tree graphic for which to abide by. Graphics should be done in BC7 format I believe it is (double-check, it's on the change log for 0.15.x), and only .dds extensions for gfx files. Please keep DRAW CALLS to a minimum for best performance. Please read up and familiarize self with DRAW CALLS, what they are, what they do to performance if you have too many (over 4000 = avoid at all costs, 3200 or less is best, even better if car is in view when number is taken). Game engine does much better batching and less state-change operations so is much more efficient now, and may even get better in the future, however, keep them to a minimum. This is what killed performance in my maps for the longest time, but a little work on the game engine, and that took 25fps to 70+ fps. Good luck with bringing your own assets, this community needs that. If you are building an incorporated town or city, please explain to me what you need model-wise in private and I may have something you can 'try out'. Best of luck, and the new graphics look nice. Keep in mind while you'll have to make your own normal textures, a lot of my road graphics in my maps I made myself (almost all of them), and they're 'free beer' to the community for use here with BeamNG (this abides by the prime directives defined in the EULA with this site and files hosted upon it). Keep your work backed up. I did have 98% of my stuff backed up within a week or three of losing my entire c: drive. Glad I did, but still, don't be me, backup WEEKLY. --Good luck!
I'm glad to hear this isn't dead! I admire your effort and dedication to replacing all the outdated assets and textures. You rock! Keep it up!
Explain BC7 compression to me please, I don't see an option for it in the GIMP .dds exporter plugin. And yes, I'm aware that all texture assets need to be exported in .dds format, hence why I was saying I was ripping out all of the old .png shit and replacing it/converting it, depending ofcourse on whether or not the textures are any good in the first place. The rest seems to make sense to me, thanks for the info though --- Post updated --- I added another one in; They're definitely too low res unfortunately, so I'll probably be either redoing this decal road as 2 separate decal roads running opposite directions, or increasing the image resolution and grafting in details from higher resolution images. But this is to show off the visual effect I'm going for. I also did a quick sky color change, it now fits the overall tone of the scene much better than before. More soon
I went ahead and raided Italy and West Coast USA for some assets. Unfortunately there's not much I can pull from official maps in terms of ground cover, however I can pull some other assets, such as decal road textures. The biggest change so far is I re-ran the decal road I showed above as 2 smaller ones, and it looks a bit better, though I need to neutralize a few spots in the texture itself that are turning out to be eyesores. I also added in some road edge textures from the Italy map, and added a dirt overlay that I had laying around to part of the road.You can barely notice them, but that's the point. The sole reason they're there is to visually cover up the excess terrain material providing the groundmodel for the road, and to cover up some not so pretty looking edges on the low res road texture. The bottom image shows the transition between the newer and older pavement textures Just so you guys know how long it took the devs to do Italy, it took me 7 1/2 to 8 hours non stop to do all of this, on a single road within about a 1024x1024 meter area, and I'm not even close to done. I'm imagining that closer to a day or 2 will be needed to fully detail this small section. Not including vegetation or new assets needed.
What you could do with these textures you showed here, is you could run some road "sealer" down the middle in a squiggly line and that would make the middle seam of the texture appear much nicer. I will link a picture below as to what I mean exactly. Obviously these aren't right down the middle of the road, but I think you get the idea.
Thanks for the idea, I'll try that later. No, not yet, for multiple reasons, one of which is that I can't currently host the map on the forums or the repository due to how large it is (Primarily a ton of test assets I'm trying out in game, among other junk files that I'm experimenting with.) When the map's closer to final, and all the junk I've decided I'm not using is removed, I'll do a public beta or 2 to narrow down major flaws, areas that are especially rough on performance, etc. I'm working on some more areas of the map; I brought over some stuff from West Coast USA and Utah to get some more diverse and higher quality plants, aswell as made another experimental rock model. And I've also started swapping out the grass in the forest covered areas for a mix of dirt and grass. I made a slightly more in depth post here in Dev. Screens; https://www.beamng.com/threads/deve...-contributing-post.1575/page-1009#post-984451
I like how the rock face and road are going a t two different angles. You see that a lot in the southwest US when they have cut through a mountain.
More beautiful work, keep it up! I'm excited to see this map finished! +1 on the touge/drift roads, hopefully you have some fun twisties in there!
