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

Thank-you, seriously.
Yes, I do keep an eye out for these "new open-box" models provided the manufacturer's warranty is still in effect (it usually is, unless it's 'used' or 'refurbished'). Most manufacturers do not have an issue in regards to providing warranty for open-box items if it's from a major website like Amazon, Newegg, Best-Buy, or similar.
I will likely have to wait until after the holiday season. They just want TOO MUCH currently & I'm just not down for that.

 

A little mapping got done today, spent some hours finishing up a few blocks worth of curbing here by the bridge.
A half-block to one block of main-road curbing needs to be done for the 7-lane roadway that eventually does go to the bridge, but then that area will be finished. Hopefully I won't have to change it up too terribly much between now and when the building lots are done.
One of the roads makes a 45 degree angle turn as it hits the roadway, but if you speed down it with a decent vehicle (anything with a turbo pretty much), you'll clear the curbing and land in the main 7-lane route without an issue unless you bottom out on landing. This helps map flow and makes it fun even if you end up on a side street - almost as if it was designed to funnel you to the fun parts / through-streets (because, in-fact, I did design it that way on purpose) so you can continue exploring.
This area will be a lot of industrial/factories etc bordering between habitable portions of town and more-or-less abandoned/depressed areas of town (such as over by the mall).
Remember, the bridge will get re-done so that it's more enjoyable, with a nice crest in the center - or maybe I'll just make it like the "viaduct bridge" that got torn down and replaced in Los Angeles California recently. I liked that old bridge, quite a bit, sorry they took it down but the sand in the concrete was dredged from the shore-line and contained salt, so it corroded from the inside and the outside.

 

It has been 8 days since I last posted.
First up, not a whole lot was done on the map (I did do a little with models though).
I did mostly finish (aside of a few little touch-ups) staining my deck, the very very last day of warm weather, and cleaned the gutter.
Unfortunately I just about crippled myself doing so, having worked the entire day on it... pushing many hours after my body already threw up the white flag to surrender.
Now that many (but not all) of my home-repair projects outside are done (let's not talk about the leaves yet, my yard is just... gone), I will have much more time to work on the map.
Still have to:
*Do *SOMETHING* about the garage... that's almost as bad as the yard... because yeah the yard too.
*Build myself a desk so I can sit here longer with more comfort and get more done with more monitors in-front of me (I already have the monitors, be it only 1360x768 resolution, but at 32" I can SEE what they say on them). Already have all the materials.
*Fix the wall where the new house addition (from 10 years ago, so not new anymore) meets the old house, it never was finished.
*Fix the generator, because a prowler came by and deliberately messed with it, and now the starter/battery circuit is out.
*Fix the lawn-mower belt. Any decent resistance stops the blades from spinning with the old worn-out belt. ??Tensioner good??
*Fix my front door, the wind blows through it even when it's closed. That's not good. I think a blind drunk put the frame in posthumously to put it lightly.
*All that before the end of the year. Yeah fun! What fun! I'm physically disabled and I have to do all that with pretty much no help if I want to continue to live inside a house and not in the middle of an abandoned collapsed one.
Also, on here I have to:
*Work on the map (in the editor)!
*Model, texture, and add sound-stage. Script in textures, too.
*Reduce VRAM footprint while expanding the map. Oh my. Sorcery may or may not be req'd/involved.
*Still haven't got all those pesty AI bugs out. Sorry. I suck at being a good human sometimes.
*Set up my website. Shame on me. It's been what, 3 months now? *moan* Next map download will be on my own web server and it will be FAST. Will move from 25,000 downloads / month to 100,000 downloads / month in service if and when needed, and it might just be. I will try to keep an eye on it when I do deploy the download. It should serve you miles better than this or Mega, and it's free to those who signed up for Patreon or contributed, and whenever I release a public version, it'll be on there too.
*Computer hardware is up-to-task, but I'm running low on space and a GPU update is all but required. Still, no way I'm touching another nVidia card. They are well beyond rip-off into scam territory on prices. No thanks! Will get one when it's affordable, and not until.
*Feed cats when I get smothered while editing, because yeah FEED US STUPID HUMAN! This is here, because this is when I get smothered. "Cat uses SMOTHER! It's Super-Effective!"
*Will be working with many previously purchased models, but may have to get a few more to compliment what I have now (I have raised rail tracks, like the Chicago EL, but I need a station for it, which is 10~15$ or something trivial like that).
Please know I am doing my very best over here, but my body and my arch nemesis - time - are working against me. No pity needed what-so-ever nor is it hinted upon, but I'm no miracle worker. I am just a mapper, a modeler, and a disabled guy with some time to burn, who likes to bring joy in entertainment to others.
Thank-you for those who contribute and even those who can only lend support in the form of kind words / suggestions, it all helps.
Together, we can keep the dream alive.
Work on Los Injurus has resumed full-time and in earnest. Expect progress shots over the next few days some-time.
There will be 1 private release before Christmas by a week to ten days, and one public release before the devs go on a week-long Christmas holiday. I will make sure this works out over on my end.
What will be center stage in the next release? The areas around the 11-foot-8 and it's sister bridge, and also the derelict / run-down areas, which will be pretty much wall-to-wall rubble / jumps / bad roads and a whole lot of RUST.

 

thank you so much for your works
this map one of the best Beamng Drive map mods

 

Hi Bob,
It’s so great what you are doing despite all the the troubles you have.

I am working on a deployment tool for BeamNG maps. The idea is that the tool deletes all the unnecessary orphaned files out of a copy of the map project before deployment. You as a developer can leave all your copied over assets and test colladas and other files in your project and shrink it before deployment.

It shows you all the files found before deletion so you can uncheck files you know they are needed.

the beta is out and I would be happy if you could test it. see my thread here: https://www.beamng.com/threads/beamng-tool-for-map-creators.89058/

never run it against your development folder. Always use a copy because it’s meant to delete things.

On your actual zip from the repository it shrinks out about 2 gigabyte of uncompressed data.
There is only one material missing with your map so far because the material is not mentioned in a material.json or material.cs

Please contact me if you want to test the tool and have questions.
All the best to you!
Alex

 

Okay, GREAT! I love stuff like this. Thank-you so kindly. It's people like you (and of-course let's not forget our gracious project supporters with a truck of patience) that give me hope for society.
I will double-check the unmentioned material; the game will auto-map missing materials as-needed or if they're in objects - this can make it really easy to miss things that'd otherwise go poof.
If you can take a picture of the broken material - or give me the name - please do! It will save me some time over here if you've already produced an error on your end with the tool.
Regardless of you having time to do such pesty bug finding as it's not required, I'm super thankful you made that tool. It'll help folks a lot, including me and this rotten slow awful *internet that I have.

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*My internet = poo, however...
The fiber lines are run to the house. The main new trunk line is hooked up where the highway is run but for some reason there's not ability to hook it up yet. *sad string interlude* Hopefully it's only a few months away at most (I don't really see it being longer, but it IS out of my control entirely, so it's whenever). The new highway they're putting in is making things a disaster when going to town and coming back, however, eventually it will be completed and the outmoded dangerous winding two-lane dual-direction road with a foot or less of shoulder to either side, will be completely replaced with a 4 (or 5) lane 45~55mph highway with two lanes per side, a 30 foot median, and center turn lanes where needed. It'll be nice when it's done - or so I keep telling myself. Maybe they'll even give us a treat of paving the road out front here as IT IS BAD.
I'm not holding my breath, however, as I've got much too much on my plate so-to-speak right now with the map and other things.

In other news, editing the map at 10~15 fps isn't fun. It can be difficult to get things lined up right when you have a larger delay between input and output (such as lining up the infinite amounts of curbing in this map). Attached image shows what happens, and I'm only using medium or low texture settings (I really think it's on low but it could have flipped back to medium on it's own) here, hopefully GPU prices come down sooner than later. nVidia certainly is not helping things, though likely I will not be buying an nVidia GPU for many many many years after the stunts they've pulled and the prices they demand. I always said 'they can burn it for that price, I could care less' however I didn't think they'd take me seriously with the 4090 fire issues.

If I look this way, the FPS goes up as everything in view fits into VRAM - but it also shows some of the work I have done recently with getting the infrastructure/things ready to put lots of dilapidated buildings in. This is very time-consuming but I hand-work the roadways so that it is very immersive to drive them in this simulator, especially when the buildings are actually in.
I have to port a ton of assets into format for the game and put them in, it's coming soon time for another round of them, as they're mostly done in the modeling / optimization phase for now. I think the newer buildings will be a huge improvement over what we already have in the map, as these are much more worn down and indicative of what you'd see in the environment I'm trying to make here.
Downtown Detroit, Gary Indiana, and parts of Ohio/Pennsylvania; basically, rust belt down-trodden economically depressed towns. The good part of that is collapsed buildings and rubble piles make great opportunities for hidden places and TONS of jumps - there WILL be tons and tons of jumps everywhere in this part of town - anywhere I can fit them in.
That's all for right now as the editor crashed (I saved recently, so no biggie) immediately after taking this one and only screenshot. I guess I have to remind the team of that bug again.

 

When the game loads theses materials I have to respect it of course. I just added the convention to my code that doesn't touch materialfiles which have the same name as the material in the dae file and resides in the same folder as the dae file. Just tested it and it works for your materials. I will deploy an update to my github.

I used your repo map
(City of) Los Injurus 2021-06-21
for testing not the new one.

The material was "PlasterDirty0324_grey" from /levels/TSH/ART/shapes/Buildings/MetroCity/FranklinDouglasTower15flr_var2.dae

Now your level works without any missing textures.
Your zip file went down in size from 3.7GB to 3 GB!

Slow internet can be really annoying, especially when working with big files. VRAM optimization will give me hard times too for sure I have 24 Gigabyte in my card but others don't. How do you check how much VRAM is used by your map?

Best!
Alex

 

After waiting 6 hours for the Mega-Download to finish, haha, I tested your new map version against my tool. I have to catch some of your level specials because some textures are missing but I'm pretty optimistic that we get your deployment file to 4 GB Enough for today I come back to you the next days in a direct conversation.

 

4GB bug has been fixed internally as-per the team, and will likely be fixed in the next release when we get a major BeamNG Drive version update. I asked them to look-see if there was 32-bit file handler code in there... and there certainly was, it was an oversight.
I will make sure I get the plaster texture from the Douglass towers in-order and that it's not missing from the indices. Thanks for finding that one, it'd have eluded me for sure. It's really tough getting everything working and especially keeping it all working, never-mind game-version updates just pieing me in the face randomly without warning *SPLAT!* .
Or maybe the next game update will be in the shape of a giant piano-shaped shadow forming around me, along with the sound of something heavy plummeting at a high rate of speed a'la Looney Toones. Who knows. My point being, this project has gotten so big, that it's very very hard to keep it all on the up-and-up and still get things done like my website or home repairs.
I appreciate your help. I will continue correspondence in direct message (maybe this response is more for my reminder and so I know I don't have an open issue on here, than it is for you).
You can use directX SDK or things like Afterburner to check VRAM use. Afterburner and similar software may only show requested VRAM and not actually required amounts which may be indeed lower. DirectX SDK will allow you to see more inside of what is being requested/used by directX, and I believe Vulkan's SDK is it's own set of tools much alike to DirectX's setup. Medium texture detail is using around 8gb after some time with light to medium traffic (or more), as it can get slow after a bit as it wants to go over 8gb of VRAM use if anything else is open. Some people got away with 6gb/high textures on the 2021 version but it may not be possible soon. People know who to scream at if it isn't good enough performance-wise though, and that's me.
Again, thanks so much for your hard work with this tool!

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OTHER THINGS, to all:
Was feeling under the weather yesterday (yes I was the sole reason bathroom tissue supplier stocks went up), and had to do some cleaning today in the common rooms of the house b/c it looked quite frankly almost-abandoned around here, and I had neglected to do so all week since I was still trashed from over-working on the deck last week.
Have you folks had a flu shot? Get one if you haven't. The stomach bug going around isn't fun either, and I can attest to that (and also attest to the fact that porcelain is very strong). Wash hands lots, or keep sanitizer with you, it beats having the nether regions of one's self mimicking a NASA space rocket launch, possible latent explosion and all - it's a bad one this year!
For folks on a budget, buy HAM instead of turkey this year for Thanksgiving. It should save you enough to buy all the trimmings and the ham for less than the turkey would have cost alone. Seriously, you'd think they fed them gold.

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BUG BUG BUG
A bug is noted: Some of the sharper turns on the 5-lane road don't match the newer pieces with the reflectors built-in. I will possibly replace them later-on, to fix this change. For now some might be a shade different on the asphalt and grass than one another, it shouldn't be too jarring. The curve pieces that don't 100% match were made between when the original updated pieces were 'lost' and when they were re-integrated to the map data again from backup. Mostly the grass planting strip is where you see it - so do know this is known but not super-high-priority as they'll get updated with time or replaced with something even better.
NOT BUGS, but plans:
*Expect new warehouse buildings, dilapidated structures for all types and sizes, and misc rubble debris to be added into the map along with the elevated railway pieces. I DO plan to get models for the project on November's sales for starters, vs something for myself. I will be picking up a copy of Substance Painter at some point with the map funds (unless someone wants to gift it via Steam, get in-touch if you do, but be warned IT IS EXPENSIVE and I would never directly ask for it), it's rather pricey yes but it really does beautiful work on models with baking textures and making things 'look real'.
We need YOU!
I'd like to hear from folks how the map could "flow" better. Where is your favorite spot in the map? Is it too hard to get there? Too far from a highway or interchange? Is the road leading to it boring, hard to stay on or follow, or should a new road be installed nearby to alleviate having to drive so far out of the way to get where you need/want to be?
There are still many more (dozens of) miles of road planned, as much as there are older unimproved routes from 2016~2017 or so that need a face-lift and corner banking along with signs and detailing etc. Surely there's some severed links also, which will be restored once progress is further along again, plus the highway will be improved further from the city in sections - almost like real highway work. Hopefully it doesn't take me longer to improve a virtual highway than it does to improve a real one.
That is all for right now.

 

New idea, it would be interesting to see it in the game0

 

Hi Bob!
I really learned a lot about BeamNG mapmaking history with your project because you have all iterations included
But good news from my side. After doing some code overhaul I get your 2022 BOB_CITY_MAP_ALPHA_PATREON_PREVIEW.zip to 3.4 GB without mentionable errors in the log.
The log errors are even lesser which I really don't understand. Can that be?
Perhaps I cut away half the map in such an elegant way that no errors occur, haha! I deployed a new version of the shrink tool to my Github.
I generate a missing materialfile log during the processing. It's worth investigating.
Best!
Alex

 

No idea if I posted that already, my brain has holes as well, but going from the military airport straight to the hilltop apartments is really a struggle since there is a road link missing here, it forces you to go into downtown all the way and then back out again
the road that you have to take currently in red, possible places for exits in orange or green, you probably don't need the ramps leading on the highway towards the city since there already is a parallel road, only the ones towards the airport are really needed, or you come up with a completely different connection
that whole area not having acess to the highway or any of the bridges makes it a whole pain to navigate overall

 

Found a small error

 

Seeing that track error above reminded me of something, I'm not sure if these are actually better or not but they're supposed to be derail resistant tracks.
https://www.beamng.com/threads/derailment-resistant-rail-tracks-fix-for-some-maps-pbr.86632/

 

what about such a solution?

 

So I've been sitting here for about 6 straight hours without getting up, maybe 7 hours, I lost track really... just plain mapping and detailing things up good. Went over the following area and now it has much of it's final detail for what is in already.

Above, the central block is done. The 11-foot-8 is just behind the building toward the center back of the shot.
Below, more detail is shown on one of the roads out-of-view in the 1st shot, here in the 2nd shot / 3rd shot. Many rocks are jumps.

So entirely, YES to more detailing, this sorely, SORELY desperately needs to be done in a lot of places, and as such the map looks a whole lot better and is much more immersive/enjoyable when it IS done like above/below.

Last shot above, we now have MILLED pavement, or scabbled pavement as it's also called. The last shot is vastly unfinished but this used to be the road with the dark pavement down the center of it that goes under the bridge nearby here (the other end of it is in the 1st shot barely, at the bottom). I will see what I can do to add the milled pavement sound (I think I can do it when I put the open-grate bridge sound in as well by using a lower more muffled/filtered version), and there will *eventually* be raised manhole covers and storm sewer inlets to complete the immersion. Yes, we will have slippery open-grate bridges as well, one day. Just on back roads & hence likely not in the city. One of the new / redone maps has surface sounds so surely that should be easy to do.
Some AI was added to the general vicinity as well. I try to do it as I work over areas to a decent bit, as otherwise like most other things I will forget about it. Will give it a really good test.
I have to look up how to add markers for parked cars. That will be time-consuming, but surely Copypaste Man will save my day.
BUG: One of the mall textures, it's used only in a very small space, is blue-ish because of a bad specular map that's well out-dated by 2+ years and is in DX3 format - hence the blue tinge. It's just some horizontal brick-work on abandoned planters at one of the entrances. Just noticed it - though it took two years - at-least it's not in the finished product. Don't know when I'll fix it, it's not high-priority and no one noticed thus far...
--That's all for right now. I haven't eaten in 7~8 hours, so I need to do that before I lose the rest of my HP.

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@Bauer33333 That area is mostly residential and hence I didn't want to route highway interchange traffic directly through it, so it's intentionally not directly linked. Maybe I can put a dirt service road near there like the kind the DOT use, with 'GATED' road status so the AI won't use it but the Police AI will to chase you if needed. That's not to say I'll never add another interchange there, I could add one between the bridge that does not have one, and the following interchange toward the left of your shot.
Diverging diamond interchanges break my brain in real-life, I don't want to know what happens if I make one in the map. No plans to add one right now but this as-anything goes, could change. I am getting a migraine just thinking about one.

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Derp. That's entirely me moving the bridge over & forgetting I did so before I replaced it with other stuff. Totally my bad. If you can move your camera under it, or near the bottom side of it where you won't select the walls there (the brick walls are all one unit with that station platform), you might be able to select it and delete it in forest mode. It's a forest object, it's a section of straight track bridge, but I forgot to remove it when I outmoded it. I will make sure it's removed before the night is out. THANKS!
It's two pieces, just checked. Bug fixed. Thank-you again for reporting it.
Also, a month or two ago when you reported a tunnel was blocked not far from the default spawn, that was fixed recently too. Just so you (and everyone) can know that it won't be broken next time.

I am aware these exist, I have not yet had time to look at them. I might have time in a few days to pull them up in the modeler and see what's different about them vs mine. I already have tapered collision on all or almost all of the train tracks at the end so that the train wheels do not glitch into the track model itself due to floating-point positioning (slight imperfections, noticeable on Roane County quite well), which leaves pieces sometimes imperfectly jointed. Basically, I pinched the leading and trailing ends of each track off to a point so that provided the model isn't off more than half the distance of the steel track width, it'll just jog the train over a bit and the train will continue on it's way. That was something I did from the get-go. The subway tracks/stations have it too, along with bridges, same for road crossings (which may be fixed up at some point soon to be slightly less bumpy and more compatible with low-clearance train undercarriage components).
I will still have a look and see if it's worth switching over to these or if it's best I just touch up most/all the track pieces in the map now. Thank-you for the 411 though! It's appreciated.

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If I forgot anyone, just smack me with something and I'll show up sooner or later.

 

I love that you have been adding more tunnels. But the oval portals are getting a little played out. I remember ages ago I suggested a road sort of like Lower Wacker drive in chicago. For clarification it is a multi layer road. It wouldn't be too difficult to bring into the map relatively speaking. You could do a raised squared off hill. Have the upper deck go around the perimeter of the hill, Then have the lower portion go under that deck. A couple of cross tunnels and maybe even closed tunnels could be added under ground. Maybe even have a closed drainage tunnel that leads out to the flood control ditch. There could also be under ground parking areas and loading docks. Just spitballing ideas.

 

This sounds hella cool. Makes me think of a Springfield underground type area


Something else interesting I just found out while looking up those images, pictured below is a type of elevator used to get semis into some underground loading facitlities in the most crowded and densest built cities, BY NO MEANS DO I EXPECT YOU TO MAKE THIS but I just wanted to mention it since this is cool and I had no idea such a thing existed


Here is a more traditional entrance to an underground loading facility looks like

 

I am very familiar with the 3-level Wacker drive. Upper Wacker is street level, Lower wacker is basically a bypass, and lower lower wacker is the city impound + some other stuff like crazy car meets. It's due to the city raising itself up to put in the typical gravity-fed sanitary sewers, and so it didn't flood as easily every time the river rose 3 feet.
The good news is THIS (Wacker Drive) IS PLANNED. It's why there's a dead-end for a tunnel in one of the central areas of the city on a highway. I have to interface with it so that I can properly guide traffic as it needs to be while having several levels and it all has to be functional. This is not easy, and it's going to take a good one to two weeks just on the model.
IF anyone knows of a pre-existing 3D model of it (there was one uploaded here a while back but the guy was banned), let me know (I likely still have that map somewhere, on one of the old spinners used as backup drives). Sketchup models are usually only good for tracing the outlines of such a thing, but any other format model (like FBX, 3DS, OBJ, or MA/MB/MLT format) is usually a good thing.
The screenshot below shows the dead-end on the bottom left and the road along the right-side will be roughly where it's going.

Obligatory 'hey I can see my house from here' statement...
This is going to be fairly in the same theme of the design, but it will NOT be a carbon copy. I don't have areas for bridges here, except the one in the distance (you can see the pillars as it crosses the big wide concrete flood control canal) will link up with it and have a choice to go above or below. I am not 100% sure the exact layout but I'll likely make this into a few separate pieces if it gets too big. Big models that are all one piece eat a LOT of VRAM, and that's the single biggest problem with this game engine, in that it cannot drop no-longer-needed models out of VRAM to fit nearby ones in if it runs out. I've been pesting the devs about this, but it's of little help thus far. Maybe they will see the light at the end of the tunnel if I make this map good enough.
Basically, the highway to the bottom left will T-off and let you go either way, to drop you onto the lower route. That's why the exit ramps partially pictured can go straight - that's surface level access there. It's not 1:1 but the portion with the recreation will be more out of the right side of the picture than it will be in-front of it. I have to see just how much room I have and how I can route things realistically before I 100% commit to a final design. It requires more planning than I have yet to do, basically. It'll get there though, you can be sure of it.
And yes, I hear you on the oval tunnel portals, but they were fast and cheap on draw-calls (means more FPS), and did the trick. This is why I had a more square distressed older looking design that I've used for several tunnels and the majority of the drainage ditches. The newest highway tunnel (on the same highway that dead-ends here) if you go up the mountain is a split square tunnel design typical of 1950's~1970's, and offers some relief from the same-old same-old. Rest assured there will be some differences to be had as development continues and I find more space in VRAM to fit things like that. Suggestions all valid and in-line with what I want in the final design. Good good!
But now we do know why that highway has been a dead-end for the greater part of the last year.
@Blue Bird Gaming All good suggestions! I will keep a note of this and jot down the page number here with them so I can come back to it later as I work in more design ideas. Thank-you.
--That's all for right now

 

It's such an obscure place I doubt there are accurate models of it. Getting the traffic to work will be a chore. To keep it simple it should just be 90 degree corners, even though the real wacker drive is far from that on the river side. So probably do two types of intersections, one that has the parallel ramps that head to the surface and traditional 4 way intersections underground. The straight tunnel sections should probably be 2 lanes in each direction and periodically have ramps to return to the surface.

Imagine racing down the tunnel, and jerking to the left rising quickly to street level. Then getting mild air as you clear the intersection and plunge back down on to the lower level.