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

If you ever wanted to know how bad Hughes Net internet service (satellite) is, this is how bad it is. This is what video was looking like - and sometimes it had to buffer a while too.
130$ a month before taxes. If it wasn't for this project I'd have gone back to dialup.

 

LORD have mercy

 

Could you change the default license plate from california to just a blank one?

 

When is the next update going to release for the public?

 

Public release, in about 21~25 days.
Supporter release, around a week if I can get everything together, but you can bet it's at-least 14~15 days before the public release.
I have some more textures to put in the map for the models I made, and some touching up to do (one day worth) on the parking garage / condo model.
I had more apartment models but some are 70mb so those won't be added in this release (one will, but not too many at once or the VRAM requirements go through the roof).
I also have a bunch of bugs to fix. The conversion to 0.24 game version was extremely painful for this map project, requiring A LOT of support from the staff. EVERYTHING that could go wrong, did. Murphy's law eat your heart out. I won't release something less than perfect. I want people to be able to fire up the map, and not have to worry about things, other than setting the texture detail settings properly before-hand.
REMEMBER, THIS MAP PIGS VRAM (video memory, on the video card, not system ram), so do not forget to knock texture settings down a peg or two if things get slow.
I DID fix a bug in the runway texture, which caused some of the slowdown near the airport/tunnel, it wasn't solely the tunnel. I was an idiot and stuck in a non-power-of-2 texture in one of the layers. Derp. It was an 8k texture, too. Ouch. That said this version will still require a little more VRAM.
Worry not, I want to crash trucks into the 11-foot-8 bridge as bad as y'all do.

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I DID spend an hour or so fixing the stupid ramp texture issue. I'll fix the other ramp in a moment, shouldn't take as long (I hope?) .
Please show me any stupid AI issues before the next release day, if anything's amiss.
It *IS* known that sometimes when two lanes in the same direction going down to one lane can cause 'issues'. This is a trouble spot for the AI in the game-engine.
I will mostly be checking that textures are in place for the models and the correct format over the next day or two. My entire terrain folder is in PNG to get it to work at all, I have to fix this and put the appropriate PBR textures in, but if that doesn't work I'll replace them with DDS textures even if the normal/specular doesn't get in due to bugs until I can get PBR to work. Otherwise the terrain is black.
I have overhauled a lot of textures, but not all are in place. Basically, I made a wreck of the map resources and am fixing it. I didn't start this overhaul off on the right foot due to the map being started off on the wrong one. I not only have to update for new version textures and texture indices, but hope the models have all their required new textures too. It's a handful, more than that. I wish there were 10 of me. However, if I get enough stuff right to make it work, it's going to be a totally wonderful thing to behold & enjoy - or so I intend it to be.
The 11-foot-8 spawn point is moved to the new bridge location. Please be aware of this change. There will be multiple low bridges eventually but there should be two in this update.
*Edit: Other ramp model is fixed now, too. Will have pictures the next time I open up the editor/game.

 

All window and door textures are ported into the map (150 textures, +/- 10, estimate).
While some may think this is drag-and-drop, it's not that simple. It never is that simple, of-course.
Convert to valid power-of-2 size, convert to proper format, add normals/specular or PBR layers if needed (I haven't added other layers to most of the door textures for right now, unless I use them a lot).
Also added in a new asphalt 'patch' texture (for road repairs) and created normal/specular maps for that.
Created a new 3-floor apartment building that looks a whole lot like the 5-floor apartment building from two weeks (or more?) ago... because it does share a lot of the same stuff.
Got some more people added to the credits file, because they should be, but it's still no-where near complete, it's not even 20% done (it'll get done whenever as I have time when the internet works decent enough, people deserve credit if something they made is used).
Heavily edited the 'video store' door texture so it doesn't break the censor guidelines. The video store isn't in the map yet, but it's ready for when it's needed (since I was doing window/door textures).
Got some awful sunburn that I will be paying for, for many days, but I sure got A LOT of yard work done today. The sunburn only hurts when you forget about it, it itches, and you give it a nice hearty scratch and YEEEEAAAAOOOOWWWCH! Now this place doesn't look so abandoned anymore.
Sadly, the sunburn is not solely simulated in BeamNG Drive. I could really use a respawn right about now. For those who get sun-burn now and then, before it sets in, take a cool (or luke-warm) shower quickly before it really flares up, as if you wait, it will be painful more than it has to be (both the sunburn and the shower). Just don't take a hot shower, that's a big no-no with sunburn. Just trying to save someone some pain, as I'm sure many (but not all) people know these things!
So all in all, was a good productive day, but will have plenty of time to work on this tomorrow, and almost the entire rest of the week & weekend. I would still like to release this and have it on for Patreon members no later than middle to end of week next week if at all possible. So far so good!
Converting 150 door/window textures manually (due to different sizes of source files) was really, really NOT fun. It'll be worth it though when they add a lot of variety and detail to the map. This was the amount AFTER I weeded out the ones I didn't want to add (or didn't have license for). They shouldn't make the VRAM situation more dire by too much, as most of them are 256x512 up to 1024x1024 in a few rare cases, and that doesn't take much room at all.
There's still at-least 200 other textures to convert, with maybe half of them scripted in already. These textures are new asphalt layers (will see to removing some older textures and replacing them with these), building materials such as the concrete block, stairs, and (numerous) concrete surface textures in the parking garage and it's adjoining stairwell, and all kinds of everything-else that's in a city. About half these new textures have PBR options already, so maybe those should be pretty straight-forward to port in. I sure hope so. Will keep folks posted on how THAT goes.
EDIT: Procured asphalt scabbling textures, which is what happens when they mill-down the road surface usually before repaving it. Yes, you will find a road with raised manholes, raised catch-basins, and slightly taller curbing because it's being worked on (but is open to traffic in the mean-time). To my knowledge, I am not sure if any other 'game' or simulator has something like this yet? Will have normal asphalt traction.
EDIT: Just FYI my internet has been a dumpster fire of epic proportions lately, so do know that if trying to get in touch with me or asking questions on here. If this does not miraculously fix itself and causes issues uploading the map, I will figure another way to get the map uploaded.

 

This is going to be huge. I can not wait

 

Hey Bob, I just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading through your updates here from the last month or so. Thank you for being so transparent with your process. I've never made a map before, but I'm taking notes, because I'm learning so much from this thread. Appreciated.

Sorry you've had this trouble with your internet. I saw your screenshot in that post included a link to the file, so I tried it myself and the download went through smoothly, thus I suspect the issue is with your broadband
You're not the first person I've heard complain about US broadband. $130/mo sounds extortionate considering it's not even fibre, ergo not fast or reliable.
Here in the UK one might pay about $55 after taxes for 1 Gbps symmetric full fibre, or half that amount for 100 Mbps.

I just flew around the public repo map version, finding tunnels and driving through them, including subway entrances. I did not have this issue on 0.24

 

Yes our internet is a real sham. I'm about done with it. It's going to cost me some cash but I think I might be getting around that soon.
Thank-you for letting me know the tunnels aren't broken on your end. That gives me some relief here. It's a bug on the conversion process. I'll just have to take a few hours and go around and touch them up. It's not too difficult, but it's a time-consuming process when you have 50+ of them to do and have to make sure to FIND them all. Our fiber here will be almost twice as much, but there's almost no competition. Will get 1gb/s though the day it's available.

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Just about finished on the full-detail model of this hotel. We needed a hotel. It's the YEAOU hotel.
I named it after my sunburn.
Commercial model purchased and then brought down to a few dozen draw-calls. That took one to two days of time to do, circa 7~10 hours (I did not keep track, that's an estimate). Needs another hour or two of work and it's done. It should be in the next update.
EDIT
Added picture #4 (front lobby entrance WITHOUT the bus) to show the completed hotel, adjusted, with a little more detail and the correct door texture. Doors SHOULD be the correct size, but if not, I'll get on that right quick. The full-detail model is done. There will be one basic LOD that should be quick.
The bus will be it's own model. It's super simple, and if someone doesn't like it they can go in the forest editor and delete it (or delete the corresponding model file or forest object index for said bus, and there will never be a static-model bus anywhere in the map to bother you again, unless you spawn a dynamic in-game one in). I try to keep things modular - not just for folks to re-use the infrastructure models here, and many of the buildings and other things, but also to keep things so that if you don't like some aspect of the map - you can change / move / delete things if you so choose to do that, modifying the map to your heart's content. That's what the strength of this is (it also makes it 10gb not 100gb uncompressed, by keeping things modular and duplicate models such as curbs, street lamps, apartment buildings, rubble piles, bushes trees and all the greenery from being saved over and over and over again piling up on the drive and in VRAM when you only need one of each model). If this wasn't modular, it'd look like Stunt Race FX / Virtua Racing because I'd have no room for textures - not even DOOM textures.
There's also a parking-lot tender booth (get your ticket, pay to park, lot attendant etc) I might get into the next beta, no clue. I'm not in a hurry on that one, but it IS needed sooner or later because we DO already have plenty of parking lots.

 

I want to put the word out, that over the course of the last two+ months or so, the admin of textures.com has gone above and beyond required to help assist me in my daily duties when problems arose or I had a question (Textures dot com is a commercial texture site I've purchased 100+ $ of textures from over the last few years). I wanted to give a big shout-out and a huge thank-you to the site admin/staff/owner as it really helped me out when I needed it most. Normally places you do business with on the internet are heartless corporations. This is not the case here. I wanted to give a big thanks to them and give them a well-deserved shout-out for not only helping me out, but for having an almost limitless selection of textures to help me bring immersion and genuine character to this project, helping it by long and far to begin to feel like a real city. Without that, I'd not only be stuck with stock game textures, but I wouldn't have had the high-res eye-candy textures for roads that we all enjoy (ranging from whole-piece road textures with striping already in place from highways to city streets to rural routes for quick implementation, to more involved detailing such as road patches, individual manhole covers and storm-water inlets, road striping, pot-holes and all the like).
So seriously, I encourage map-modders and those who enjoy making buildings to have a look. You can even download many low and some medium resolution textures for free with daily credits. This is my way of saying thank-you to the staff there, which definitely went above and beyond what was required.
Site link; safe-for-work: https://www.textures.com/library
I hope everyone has a happy and safe rest-of-your-day / weekend. I will be working on the project for most of the day. Maybe I'll even get to can-opener some trucks shortly. Speaking of which, the bridge will be available in TWO locations, as I'm trying to make an 11-foot-8 version and a 12-foot-4 (11-foot-8 + 8 lifted) version. Will try to get the texture coloring in by release day but no promises. It works the same either way.
Now to go figure out why my fixed on-ramps are doing the NO_TEXTURE dance again. No clue on that, but I'll fix it. Something is always broken.

EDIT:
Speaking of textures, I've dressed up and imported a few new ones and also made some derivative patch textures that again should help the city look more real. After-all, it's a driving simulator / racing game / crashing game. We spend a lot of time driving on (then flying off of) the roads, they should look NOTHING LESS than top-notch. Will try to have some pictures of these up soon.

 

EEEEW! YECH! BLECH! Pee colored concrete! This has GOT TO GO!

THIS HAS *DEFINITELY* GOT TO GO! Expect this changed very very soon. I didn't realize how BAD that looked. Why didn't anyone else complain about this? I worked on fixing up that patch there for 5 minutes (getting rid of asphalt made with noise pattern textures), before I even noticed it.

So this is FINALLY working. Only took what.... FOUR YEARS!? Aside of that, yeah it's not broken anymore.

So entirely, that took too long.

Other than that I got about 200 normal maps converted over to BC5 texture format (give or take 30 or so, I lost track). I can't seem to find any more 'oddly dark' broken textures right now, so that's a plus.
Added a bunch of new textures / replaced some old ones like this one below:

I've also scripted in another bunch of textures for asphalt, now that I've finished touching-up and isolating some of the new sources I wanted to add. I have a bunch of patch/repair textures that have to go in, too, some of which will make the next update. Trying to get rid of most/all of the old 'Nevada' style textures this map inherited when it was first made, as those are quite '2015/2016' compared to the stuff I've got access to now. Some older roads still use asphalt derived from a 'noise pattern', sheesh, time for that to GO.
Will try to finish adding in a lot of the traffic lights, too.
Lost half a day due to being out of town with a doctor appointment and then doing the church food-bank donation run (hey, it was for a good cause, it feeds the absolutely most-needy folks in town). So didn't get done everything I wanted to, but it's a step in the right direction. I should be able to finish the update this week and get things shipped out not too many days from now, the way things are going.
Hopefully it stays that way. Will have more new texture and new development shots tomorrow.

 

This map looks so good... I've never tried it because i had a craptop but now that i have an actual PC i really should.

 

If you ever need any models for the map as well as textures, this site https://thebasemesh.com/ seems promising, it's a collection of completely free original 3d models made with game dev in mind, no credit needed.

 

Testing out the new bridge. Colors on the bridge support beams aren't right and the color of the crash bar SHOULD be yellow (but isn't?). IT WORKS THOUGH! I don't have more than two or three truck lengths of running room yet, but will soon. You can be sure it'll be appearing better and better over the next few days as I have time (and success) to get it working. Pre-release game engine + Pre-release mod map = bug bug BUUUUUUUGS! This map is literally infested and I have to fix most all of them before this goes out. I've fixed a lot already though.

CRUNCH!
The Durham NC 11-foot-8 and 11-foot-8 + 8 is coming!

This area is super not-finished, and where I will be concentrating most of my work for the next few days while I get this release tidied up and finished properly so it can be actually played without crashing into bad collision models, random floating curbs or rail-road track, etc.
Lots and lots and lots of texture glitches to sort out on the new model texture references, too. This will take a day in itself as I've already been doing this for hours and might need a break soon.
EDIT: I found a low-res traffic light cycle texture in one of the directories that was over-riding the higher resolution one - the one that works with 'low' graphics settings. So this means I think I fixed that stupid bug for real this time. Well, I hope so anyways. Guess we'll find out.

 

Having some issues over here that are holding me up. Maybe someone knows the answer.
1.) Added textures via a text editor, to put on roads; the texture shows up in the material editor in the map editor, but won't let me use the texture (or even find it) in the decal road editor. WTF?
2.) Some textures refuse to read in-game and come up as no_texture even though they're fine to open with every other program and it's the same software and file-format that I've done with all the other graphics that work. There's NO reason why this shouldn't be working.
3.) The materials CS files (old texture indices) need to be converted over to the new format (main materials json) so that the map doesn't break when the game updates and it's no longer supported.
I've literally spent the last DAY trying to solve the 1st two. This is the kind of rubbish that slows development to an absolute crawl or even turns it into a stand-still rate of progress.
The 3rd one... well let's hope there's some automated process, because redoing all the texture entries (hundreds) by hand is a fool's errand and NOT something I'm going to do when a computer can do it quickly and easily. If not for that time-consuming part, doing things by hand causes A LOT of errors, even if you try to be perfect, and I'm not about to introduce more bugs into the map.
Will keep folks posted. Just when I thought I was making some headway.

 

1) Every decal road material needs to have a materialTag "RoadAndPath" in the materials.json.
2) Typos or wrong paths in jsons? Duplicate materials?
3) Car_Killer's converter is excellent, but a heavy map like yours needs several runs to convert all the material files.
https://www.beamng.com/threads/modding-tools-v1-1-1-for-beamng-0-23.71167/

 

Thanks, appreciate the info, because if this doesn't fix it, this project is hosed due to editor 2.0.
Not even my new building textures will show up, paths have been checked time and time again, especially because I copy old entries and just change the file name itself, not the path, and anything else like color or tags. Even clearing cache didn't work. I can't release a map with orange buildings and missing road textures. That's also why there's few/no screenshots.
I knew it was a bad idea to upgrade my worked-just-fine editor 1.0.
IF I truly shared my feelings about that editor, I'd be perma-banned.
Just trying to import and use forest objects is a complete chore. It used to be so easy in 1.0.
Why in the [CENSORED] would they restrict it to ROADANDPATH when the old one worked just fine the old way? This new mode isn't faster/better if it's so picky almost nothing will show up.
This is not an upgrade, it's a janky mess and frankly it's just about stopped development with how it is until I can get things resolved. In all my years, I've never used such a [OMITTED], it's disgraceful.
Here's hoping for the best. I am really at whits end with this disaster, it's long-since affected my sanity to the point where I had to step away from it for a bit (while I waited for some responses from staff and on here, thanks to those who responded).
This editor 2.0 is in no way shape or form good enough to mod with let alone use for production.
RIP editor 1.0, I loved you and you are sorely missed.

EDIT: Added or updated all tags for road texture from road or roads to ROADANDPATH, did NOT work. Made zero difference.
Building textures still do not work.
Will try converting the legacy materials files to the new format tomorrow.

 

Yeah!!! Now you can get your roof torn up and your car jacked!! Go Durham! In all seriousness, Durham isn't that bad, it's just that it's not great when compared to Raleigh, Cary, etc around it.

 

That's why it's in the rough part of town. It's between the nicer portion that's not abandoned, and the area that's quite derelict. It's not too far from the mall, a city block or two maybe. There's two of them, one is supposed to be 11-foot-8 or about that, one is 11-foot-8 PLUS 8. This way you can try out both of them (they're both on one ways, about a block apart, facing opposite directions on the same track).
Currently the only thing off with them is they are single-track bridges, my tracks are double tracks, so one track will end at the bridge and then continue later on. When I have a chance I will make single-track models (just a few). This is provided I can get my textures working, I am really angry with editor 2.0 and version 0.24 game version right now. I'm surprised all my hair isn't burned off yet from how hot-headed I'm getting at this stupid technology.
Keep your fingers cross over there.

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The crash beam yellow is working now. I added a new texture in. Hey look, that one actually WORKED, why the EXPLETIVE don't the rest of the textures on the other new buildings work???
Maybe I can get it to work converting the materials to the new sloppy hard-to-proof-read easy-to-screw-up format. I would hope. But then why does this texture work and the others do not (this was a texture I REPLACED the files for)? Replacing existing textures is ok, but adding a new one is not?????
Maybe something will decide to show up in the log for once to actually TELL ME what is going on. Somewhere around 0.18 the log stopped logging all the important stuff and has maybe 25% of the errors listed. One step forward, two steps back! Who does that???

Sorry to rant. I'm fuming with this editor 2.0 and 0.24 game version. Some new features are very nice. But when nothing works, those new features mean nothing. If this game is this hard to mod now that even I can't figure it out after weeks, yes WEEKS, then who the hell is going to show up & be able to mod this without a college degree (and then they will go get a job in it, not do it for free while fighting this monstrosity). Great game/idea/concept; but if you try to mod it, may Lord have mercy on your soul.
STUPID TECHNOLOGY!

 

It's a shame that you're working on your own. I'm sure it would help if you had more eyes on the project. The map has gotten so massive I am sure it is maddening to track down every missing texture. Or material error for that matter. I'll hope that the next beam update fixes the editor. Until then I will be waiting. Thanks Bob