Venting about giving up trying to make maps for now.

Greetings, chaps

I am currently very upset with the situation around mod making. This game breathes mods, and the current Wiki, sadly, can not help anybody making one. It's like you need 3 years of Blender know-how; a Software Engineering bachelor's degree and 2~3 months of Terrain Editor practice to make a single map.

After finishing the new Terrain Editor, the devs should really invest some time in updating the Wiki - and making sure the steps are very clear and comprehensible.

As always, sorry for the bad engrisch

Devs, I really appreciate your work. From far, BeamNG is the game I have most fun playing. Please understand the side of a player who tried to make his own map to feed the community with one more heart-made mod and could'nt use the game's very own Wiki because it was outdaded.

My best regards,
André Carvalho

 

TBH though, you need a lot more skill than what you described to mod most other games. GTA IV or V for example, you still have to know how to use modelling software and use their physics code, but you also have to know how to encrypt stuff and properly insert it into the game's files, (perhaps using OpenIV)
I do agree with your statement about the wiki being outdated, though. we really should start updating it.
if you have discord, I would suggest joining the modding for dummies server, as the guys there are open to teaching you how to do stuff, and are up to date themselves on most of the new physics implemented.

 

@CaptainZoll @tdev thank you very much for replying. @tdev I understand and am really looking forward to it!

Have a good day!

 

Sorry for thread bump, but is this official documentation going to have those wonderful downloadable high-resolution maps of the, uh, maps?

Speaking of, how are those made?

 

Are you talking about the one for the Automation Test Track? If not, what are you referring to?

 

https://wiki.beamng.com/File:Jri_map_layouts.png
https://wiki.beamng.com/File:Jri_map_layouts_roads.png

When combined in an image editor, those two images yield a full high-resolution map of JRI. Similar images exist on the wiki for a few other maps, provided by @RyvyLo, but sadly Italy is not one of them.

 

Thought you were referring to this:

Would be nice to see all levels get renders in this style, although they would have to be updated alongside map changes. This render even needs some improvements, as it shows the old village area with the unused DRI assets instead of the new ones.

 

Not sure what you're referring to by "the old village area with the unused DRI assets".

I do have to say that I prefer the simpler style of the JRI renders, because they make it easier to quickly and neatly highlight roads and/or parts of roads for my own purposes (like that giant master list of touges that I haven't worked on in forever). Italy, which is one of the maps that currently lacks such a high-res render, could probably benefit the most from such a thing due to having so freakin' many roads that you pretty much need a high-res map just to keep track of them all.

That's why I was asking how they were made. If it's just a simple matter of piecing together existing game files, that might actually help a lot.

 

Originally, the Automation Test Track used retextured DRI, ECA and WCA assets instead of the current ones in places. For example, instead of the current gas station, you had a retextured version of the gas station from DRI. Some of these are still used, and by the current gas station you can find a retextured ECA building, however others are unused but can still be spawned in the world editor (such as the gas station in question).

I can't find the videos for some reason, but the pre-update videos from various Youtubers featured the older version of the map that still featured most of these assets.

 

Not sure it qualifies as actual modding, but for someone like me who just want to splash around in the kiddie pool and create scenarios, car skins, and such, the wiki serves as an excellent beginners guide. And the rest can easily be learned by analysing and reverse engineering the original files. That said I do find the wiki and many of guides to be horrible outdated. If the devs don't have time to keep them up-to-date, then they should at least allow the community to do so.

They should have made high-res preview maps available for all official maps a long time ago imo. Been searching high and low for map of West Coast USA so I can create some proper thumbnails for Time Trail, but there's none to be found and no method to render one through the world editor as far as I can tell. Kinda disappointing really.

Edit: There's this old Italy map from 2018 by RyvyLo. It's not up-to-date from what I understand, but still better than nothing.
​

 

There's not really a in-game method to quickly get a polished map, but you can make a quick preview by exporting terrain heightmap (F10 editor, File, Export terrain heightmap), then loading the exported layerMaps (in the level folder) in a image editor, adding transparency and color for each layerMap and overlapping them.

 

Many thanks, I didn't think this image existed in high resolution or without text in the middle of it.

Thank you. Hey wait, this means it could be possible with mod maps too!

I did find images like that in the Italy folder, and figured a process like that could work, but just from a cursory look over the files, it didn't look like every road would be in the finished product. Besides, I was fearing getting the colors wrong.

 

Thanks a lot for the map and explanation on how to do it ourselves. You just answered a question that has been nagging in the back of my mind for the last two years. I salute you, good sir.