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

Oh that reminds me, I have a heck ton of pictures I took of the terminal exteriors at TSAIA and then never bothered to send you.

 

I believe the word 'Gangway' has more origins in the marines environment, like those stairs connecting ships
with the quayside.

 

That is correct. If you look up the word on a search engine, that's what you'll see exactly - as I did also. I had to do some digging to get the more common names and the commercial name of those.
Thank-you for the info there.

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I think I will be using metal panels* on the side of the concourse buildings, as many airports do. I believe Atlanta uses formed sheet steel, common on pole-barns/commercial buildings (they're often called 'pole barns' too by construction guys for some reason). You'll see a picture of what I speak of in the example picture on the post about Jet Ways that I made yesterday.
I don't have a texture for this but I can make it with ease using a grid + steel texture. Will also overlay some wear textures on the building where appropriate so it's not so new and fresh (same for the terminal after I get the concourses done).
Then I must do the taxi/runways and then I will push out a beta. No sense sending the airport beta out half-done with no runways, what good will it be (the parking lot will have rough roads done and be plotted out but may not get finished until after the beta).
I will also be putting fuel tanks, hangars (might use Italy's hangars for right now as a place-holder?), service out-buildings etc, but not sure if that'll be pre-beta or post-beta (the next beta that is).
*If I don't like my metal tile / panels texture, I'll go with sheet steel. It's not that much different. It's cheap and fairly low-maintenance either way and that's what airport exteriors need to be. Generally terminal buildings have a nicer facade then concourses.

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Also, I put another ATX power supply in the computer for now, it's the one I swiped out of the AMD machine. It'll do the trick until I get this other one sent in. Sure enough my 3.3v rail is now 3.3v and not 3.1~2.9v (which is why I had some issues here).
*I checked my 0.16.x game version, still doesn't run right. Will keep using 15.x until the developers fix it. The map runs regardless if you use 15.x or 16.x.

 

Just thought I'd show a very early concept of what the concourse buildings will look like. I found a texture on the ETK map, that with minimal modification (some, but only 10~15 minutes worth of modification) I was able to make it just what I needed. This is the metal tiles texture for the exterior of the building.
So while it's very simple yet & it still needs it's jet-bridge things, and many many other props; I will be working hard to make this it's own slice of awesome. Trying to keep the same style/theme of the terminal building for cohesiveness and consistency (and also immersion).
I asked one of the resident flyers on this website to see if he can source me a large commercial jet for scale on here, so I can get the jet bridges some semblance of the correct height. I'd also like to add some for props, too.
Beta will ship out as soon as I get the runways / taxi-ways in enough to use (as an airport without runways is useless, and the concourses will be in where the existing runways are already).

 

What takes so long to make this city?
Making it RIGHT, and to the specifications I can find.
For example, Jet Bridges / Passenger Boarding Bridges (PBB's)...
https://www.adelte.com/downloads/passenger-boarding-bridges-adelte.pdf
(link above is for specs on PBB's from one manufacturer, it is safe-for-work)
Sure I could just import a container and re-texture it and make the end-part round a bit for the rotunda. It's not like that though, it's not that easy. I have to find the specs, and make it THE RIGHT WAY. I do a lot of this - especially when it comes to infrastructure (roads/bridges/ports), buildings, and so-forth.

It's all in the details, all those stinkin' details, even down to the road reflectors themselves on the one highway kit.
I will be quite busy on the concourses tonight, so do expect some pictures in the next few days. Maybe I'll finally have this place looking like an Airport soon.
Don't worry though, there will be PLENTY OF JUMPS for those who just want to drive around the Airport grounds and/or can't fly to save their hide (like me!).

 

I wonder if the entire interstate highway system will look like this,

or will you make something like this in some specific locations?

 

I can't speak for Bob but I can say that in terms of pure personal preference I would prefer as much of the freeway to have outright hard dividers as possible.

 

Your Ireland road example is close but with the solid white / solid yellow lines swapped.
Most all of the highways are done complete in custom-made textures (except the Jersey Barrier texture, and one style of blank asphalt).
Some of the highway has Jersey barrier, some has 30-foot dirt/stone median with no divider. Some is new & buttery-smooth, some is old worn and a tad uneven (the left lane is always smoother than the right due to truck weight damage shifting & cracking slabs).
The highways style in the first picture even has 3d reflectors built in, for all lane-lines and also the bridge barriers.
Highways have a wide variety of textures, width / lane amount, and a complete assortment of interchanges from Cloverleafs to Diamond to Jug-handle, Texas-U-Turn with separate distributor/collector alignments, and even an all-way Flyover near the new airport (most complicated one every built by myself). Some junctions are so complicated that I don't even know what you'd call them anymore besides 'AHHHH! GET ME OUTTA HERE!'...
For the regulars in this thread, THESE ARE NOT 'NEW' PICTURES, these existed in the last beta or two, but are here for highway examples to demonstrate the highway variety.

There are about or slightly over 50 miles of highway (limited-access high-speed routes with no cross-traffic or stop lights) here, not counting either side separately (a 1-mile long bidirectional highway counts as ONE mile NOT TWO). With over 50 unique miles of highway, you will find yourself quite at home, with little to want beyond signage and a good map.
Please pardon the unfinished look of some of the map, as obviously it's still a work-in-progress.
I will have to pipe some of these over to the 1st post, as it's quite out-of-date - will get to that this week once I get the airport together more.

--That is all!

EDIT: Stupid Hurricane Barry - the hurricane may have died down a bit, but we're sure going to get one heck of a deluge here in Tennessee. Glad I live at 1900 feet above sea-level!

 

So in other news, I've been working on my Concourse building for the civilian airport - gotten it to where I need it. It will be *HUGE*. Keep in mind there will be several concourse buildings, all roughly similar (only the closest LOD's will be textured a bit different when you're up close, this way they might batch better, then no FPS hit more than one would generally do at mid-distance). Planning about 5~6 concourse buildings here. Yes, really, this thing is going to be *huge*. That's what's taking me so long. That and Maya running out of 8GB of video memory, when I've only used 100~200MB in textures MAX (with only about 60MB worth in the scene including the scene objects). Derp. That makes me have to shut it down and reboot it every half hour, mashing CTRL+S while dismissing the never-ending constantly recurring dialog box that says '8GB of video memory isn't enough because WE SUCK!' (but support will tell you it's your fault). Grrrr...
So I managed to find something I *NEEDED* for the airport, an actual AIR PLANE so ya'know I can make sure this whole thing isn't for naught after-all.
Too bad it's a FIVE THOUSAND DRAW CALL plane - that's more than just about anywhere in the middle (or the edge) of my city, and about what 'Downtown Harriman' in Roane County is (and why it was always slow there). That's also roughly what West Coast USA is in the worst of spots hovering in free-cam over the town (and why it goes slow unless you have a 5ghz CPU).
So I shall be spending the evening sorting this aircraft. Thank the guy who makes the air-worthy aircraft on here for me, for telling me where to find one. It comes via the DUNSFOLD map. I will completely re-do texturing on the model so it's better suited toward this game. I will make sure that before this hits servers that the aircraft is legit and good to go as-per permissions.
As-per draw calls, my entire airport TERMINAL building MIGHT be a few dozen draw calls - though I'd be surprised if it's over 25~30 - and the concourse building is <10 draw calls currently without the Passenger Boarding Bridges yet or other like-props including even things like air handlers (those will be 1~2 total draw calls for all of them).
Included a shot of the concourse building (again without it's passenger boarding bridges, as I needed the aircraft to make sure they're spaced right) with all of it's UV's (texture surfaces) lined up nice & pretty - yes that took a good half day or more just to line everything up just so. The metal tile texture common to fancy commercial buildings is very similar to what is on the ETK Driver's Training map buildings in spots - that's where the texture comes from and has had minimal modification. I *WAS* going to use the roll-up door textures from there, too, but they're only 256x256 resolution - what is this - Quake? C'mon even original DOOM had 128x256 resolution (Though, to be fair, original Doom / Doom II was limited to textures 128 pixels tall) :x Sheesh... I've got better ones any-who.
I likely will be up all night doing this stuff, so who knows, maybe some in-game shots within a few days should be in order... time will tell, schedule is kind-of random right now.
*Edit: That's a 747 by the way, from best of my knowledge.

 

Aaaargh! Clearly I've missed the memo (for like a year now!?) that you were working on a new map. There's been 36 pages worth of catch-up reading to do, but now I feel ready to wade in and yell pointless suggestions at you.

I find that verisimilitude of video game cities is always broken by how they are too often portrayed as a sanitized, blemish free environment. I for one hope that you add things like abandoned buildings, potholes, road construction, abandoned highway extension projects, broken and damaged street furniture, maybe even a house taped up with police tape? Keep on bashing on, you glorious bastard.

edit: I think I messaged you about highway signs and the lot before. I'm still willing to do those if you need any, also I'm able to make vehicle skins for the map (check out my modlist, hint hint nudge nudge).

 

Worry not! There's already:
An abandoned mall you can drive right inside of, with two floors, debris piles everywhere, and a few decent jumps inside.
The abandoned packard plant, from Detroit, modeled similarly to the real thing but not a perfect 1:1.
Old worn highways with reflectors and an uneven road surface as 25~40 year old concrete would get.
There will be the Frank Douglas homes from Brewster-Douglas famous run-down (now demolished) housing project. The 'occupied' model of the towers is already done, but there will be an abandoned one later on down the line, along with a whole neighborhood that's depressed/semi-abandoned.
There's 2/10ths of a mile of broken bridge that looks like the Lake Ponchartrain bridge after Katrina.
Worry not, not everything in the city is new and perfect.

 

The Bob finally replaced the computer (though I'm still typing from the old one, currently, which also still has all it's parts)...
After last month's debacle with the power supply, I said, "You know what, sooner or later, this thing is going to fail, it's going on 5 years old, time to go buy parts I guess"
Reluctantly, I amassed some money and drive to ATLANTA (a four hour's drive) and bought about a grand in parts to build a new system. Not a penny of that was Patreon funds - this all came from fixing family member's vehicles that were broken or wrecked AND broken (that's also partially what slowed progress just a bit). TRAFFIC, ARGH, Don't miss the city much right now

I bought a budget ASRock board, 32gb of ram, Ryzen 3700X, house-brand 1TB NVME drive, got a 50$ used full-tower off Ebay, and hooked it to a SeaSonic power supply. I had a spare video card of decent power to hook to it in the mean time while I wait for the AIB (custom) models of the Radeon 5700 to come out. It's been five years and I've waited a very long time to update this machine, hopefully this one will outlast my previous machine (the one I'm typing from). I will keep this old intel machine as a backup in-case I explode the new one though, just so that nothing else slows progress.
If anyone has doubts about how quick the new Ryzen 3xxx processors are, let's just say, they're snappy, especially with an NVME drive. Don't buy one if you're still on a hard drive for your OS, though, go SSD first. A budget X570 board (the cheapest ATX form-factor board I could find, actually) was due to the fact, well, if I spent 300$ instead of what I spent, then I'd only be buying a 6-core processor. A good motherboard VS a super-fancy one doesn't make much of a difference until you overclock - and you can't really overclock better than the automatic overclocking of the Ryzen chips that's built-in. So really, a super-fancy (think: Asus X570 WS Ace Pro - 370~400$) isn't going to make the machine ANY FASTER, maybe you could OC the memory or processor a little bit more. With the discount on buying a new processor, I scored that main-stream gaming motherboard for 99$!!! I even used the stock cooler this time - because compared to intel's stock cooler, it's a monster. I was actually entirely in shock by just how darn big a Ryzen cooler is. I got a bit of a discount on the power supply, too, and the 3000mhz CL15 ram (2x16gb sticks) was on sale, to boot. The house-brand (Inland) NVME SSD was half the price of a Samsung EVO, so that was also a clear winner for the budget I gave myself.
I couldn't say no at this point. But wait, why though?
Well the real reason, besides the inevitable failure of this machine (which would have stopped modeling/editing for a while), really comes down to just TOO MANY good deals in one town at one time - even if it's four hours drive ONE WAY (44MPG Corolla for the win!).
This is a big one here - Now I can test TWICE as much traffic at once in the map, or any map, for that matter. This is a big thing and will let me QC the traffic AI twice as quickly, as they will be able to get stuck in more spots at once. Surely the 3900X would have been even better yet - however - that was another 200$ and hence, not in the budget.
Another big one - 0.16 version of BeamNG doesn't even run right on my intel system. I literally can't play the game at all or edit within the map editor on 0.16 BeamNG. 0.15.x runs fine though.

I really got a great chance to look at infrastructure, too, while I was down there (those highways are HUGE - but wait, they're still jammed up, too). I will be able to use a lot of the data / experience down in Atlanta to make better highways in the future. Never-mind the fact that most of my airport inspiration from what I am building, is taking design / layout cues from Atlanta airport, with subtle exterior finish cues from the Boulder, Colorado airport (if I remember correctly).
Speaking of which - yes I am still working on the airport...
I've got most of the UV's done on the airplane prop for the airport, I need a few more props to go with the airport grounds and such to make it more immersive (moveable stairs, baggage haulers and carts, etc), and to finish up working on the runways and taxiways for the airport. I will make LOD's for the airplane prop super-simple so that it doesn't hit draw calls something severe when you're more than a quarter-mile away from it.
Just thought I'd be transparent with all this. More testing will be done over this coming weekend on the new machine, so I can be sure the new machine is fully ready for production, and get any kinks worked out before-hand.
Again for those of you doubting the Ryzen 3xxx series, Don't. It's fairly well on par with the intel 9xxx series (it wins some, loses some), and definitely better than anything previous to Kaby Lake / Coffee Lake.
Update comes out on the 1st of August - that's Thursday. There will be no more postponing it, either (otherwise no one will believe my release date schedule in the future).

And No, I don't like driving through nightmare-difficulty traffic, I'd much rather 'I'm too young to die!' traffic like out here, but 'eh, can't win them all...

...and the Woodpecker ate my deck again GRRRRR, serves me right for buying computer parts in-stead of missle-launcher parts.

Oh yes, the intel computer after Maya did something stupid again...
Don't worry, no data is lost.

 

Personally, I'd just buy a shotgun and some birdshot for the woodpecker.

Also, Bob uses Windows 98...? More importantly, you can run both Beam and Maya on Windows 98? Even more importantly, Bob plays Rimworld?

This screenshot was like Christmas, albeit a shitty Christmas where the only present you get is from your crackhead uncle, but still Christmas nonetheless.

 

That attachment got me like "oof"!

 

That's about what it is. It's been acting peculiar lately. At almost 5 years of age, I'd say it's time to say goodbye and well, good thing the new PC is under tests for stability right next to it.
I think this one could be jealous, too. I wouldn't put it past the tech to do that these days.

Yes, RimWorld is a great game. I love the heck out of that game, and I do play it when my brain is not together enough to do any meaningful editing or modeling.
It's technically NOT Windows 98 (it's Windows 7 Pro x64), it's just setup to have the complete look and feel of Windows 98. This way, the graphical stuff doesn't get in my way, and doesn't take more resources then needed. It's often that I have a bunch of different stuff open and so the 'old fashioned' task bar look works extremely well for work-flow. It's super-familiar, it lends itself well to speed/ease of use/ I am extremely used-to it. I don't need the OS to get in the way of what I am doing, or break my train of thought when I say to myself 'now where's the [expletive] My Computer icon'.
I don't need stuff popping up to annoy me and again interrupt me, that makes me angry not to mention the loss of productivity. I would likely shoot the computer before I'd go along with something like "Microsoft Windows needs to update, you need to stop what you're doing and restart the machine so we can fix our unreliable product we sold you." Or worse, it shuts down my stuff while I am away without saving any of what's open (as Windows 10 likes to do when you walk away from it). I don't need fancy this or spiffy-looking that, I just want it to be reliable and be the same way I left it when I come back to it (of-course, barring random sporadic power outages).
I liked Windows 98 and Windows 2000 the best, they were perfect... so yes, entirely, when it's working, it looks like this:
(Maya work-in-progress screenshot is not necessarily the look of the finished product)

 

Well it's a good thing I'm in the process of transferring my data over to the new machine. It's completely built and has a 90-day eval of Windows 10 on it (Well, I won't commit to Windows 10 if I don't like it, but I am giving it a chance).
One of the drive controller chips in this machine has failed today in the system that's nearing 5 years of age. I had a feeling there was a reason it's acting funky, and well this might have been it. There may be more reasons, not sure. But the new machine is pretty snappy with the NVME drive in it, so loading directories in the OS, and textures in Maya should be a breeze.
To be clear, no data is 'lost', I am just having more hurdles getting it over to the new machine. There's more than one way to move it, however.

 

Fixed, deleted post.

 

Finally fixed the lag on Radeon cards.
To fix, copy the cubemap files from the skybox in west coast over to this map (just the skybox_1 through skybox_6 DDS files in the 'skies/cubemap' folder), and get rid of the PNG ones.

Also, my BeamNG content has been moved over to the new computer. It really, really runs fantastically better on the new Ryzen. I am actually completely shocked at how much better the game (now, either 0.15 or 0.16) runs on the Ryzen compared to the venerable-and-still-quite-good (when it's not throwing a hissy-fit) 4790k.
This 4790k machine has served me well, but alas, this will be the final send-off of messages from it. My next post will come tonight or tomorrow, when I start showing some of the new things to come in the update, as soon as things are far enough along.

That said, for those on a 4790k, or a 6700k, and are running 4.6ghz or less, or anything older for that matter:
If you're on the fence about buying a new system and have the itch to upgrade (and some cash saved up), snag yourself any x570 motherboard (or any x470/b450 board with the 'Ryzen 3000 series ready' sticker on it!), 32gb (or 16gb if you're cheap) of 3000mhz CL15/3200mhz CL16 (whatever is cheaper) RAM, and an NVME 500gb or 1tb drive and prepare to be AMAZED.
Benchmarks showed me at every website how little difference there may be. Boy were they wrong.
@synsol you folks need to get this game into bench-marking sites, like Guru3d, Tom's Hardware, Gamer's Nexus, Linus Tech Tips. There's nothing close to it, and it's good publicity.

 

Getting loose ends tied to release the Airport Beta at the end of the week for Los Injurus. There really aren't a lot of other changes (aside of fixing the *LAG*), but the airport should prove fun (if a bit bare) for pilots who enjoy BeamNG. Maybe a few new places to smash up cars while you're at it.
Ignore the translucency error if you see it on the end of the Jet Bridge, it's only within Maya it does that. It'll be solid in-game. Even the bottom of it is detailed decently.
Collision should be quite quick to do, as I've made the models with that in mind. The ground-layer concrete I have in the scene doesn't render 100% perfect. I will likely use terrain + decal roads for concrete in the scene at the concourses as much as possible. The rest that overhangs the map edge (some will) will be mesh objects (not mesh roads!), and will include runways and taxi-ways.
There will be several concourses, so there will be plenty of places to pull up to if you're a pilot. Many will be filled with planes though. In a later beta, I will include numbered gates on the ground so that you know what gate and concourse you're arriving at. So all in all, if you want Sim Flying, I will do my best in time to please everyone. If you can't fly any better than me (good thing I don't have wings, I absolutely stink and should never leave the ground) then you can still drive around it. As time and the betas progress, there will be more things to stunt off of.
Not sure if the parking-lot will be done by the beta time, but I'll do my best to make a half decent road loop so you can arrive and depart from the airport easily. Regardless, it will be by large and far the largest airport in BeamNG!

 

OK don't hate me I just had to. Terminal's pretty much done, so getting the airplane prop ready. We needed an airline name, and you're likely going to wish we didn't. But I did!
I couldn't resist That's okay, that's nothing compared to what the car rental companies will be called, heh.