We need bigger maps!

When will we finally get a large European map with narrow, winding, challenging roads and a road infrastructure that makes sense, featuring realistic cities and villages? I'm tired of driving a straight line on the West Coast of the USA and driving around Italy. The overall quality of the game, including the variety of vehicles, is ruined by these small, unrealistic maps. It's simply not enjoyable to drive the same route for the thousandth time on a map that you can memorize. It can't be that difficult to implement a decent rendering system that hides unused parts of the map to save performance. I'm sorry, but a mobile toilet on wheels doesn't make the game more interesting. We need large maps with exciting cities, villages, and landscapes. I understand that creating high-quality maps requires a lot of work, but otherwise, the game just won't become more interesting.

 

^^

 

The way numbers are handled needs to change first. FP64 would not be suitable for larger maps.

 

The max would be 8 by 8km, (which is definitely enough)

 

@simsimw Mods with bigger maps already exist.

 

Obviously, but those become not very precise as you enter the edges. (The further you go, the less decimals you have to caluculate the location. I’d suggest taking a look at this video by Bio :

 

I figure that larger maps are on the long term wishlist of the devs. However it is just that, a long term aspiration. Right now, the devs have other priorities, those mainly being career mode, new vehicles, remasters, new features, etc. Plus, larger maps require more processing power, and beamng is already hard on our systems as is. Right now, I just don’t think the game is ready for huge maps of dev quality yet. However, there has been some speculation about wcusa being expanded, as there are some large areas of empty map lying beyond the forest, highway, and certain off-ramps. But more notably, the island where the bridge leads. I wonder when or if the Devs will do anything with that one day. Who knows, we may be able to get two cities within wcusa one of these days.

 

yeah, my dream would be a long highway at least 100km (not realistic, but better for gameplay) long where you have to drive from east coast to west coast, in a forest. this map could have 2 exits to utah, and industrial site.
i'd say something that could be easier is a 50ish km highway from west coast to johnson valley, which are located pretty close irl

 

Doesn't the game load the entire map into memory? If so then that would severely limit the reasonable maximum size a map could be, especially on lower-end systems. Ideally the game would use chunk based loading (if it doesn't already).

 

Yes, BeamNG loads all the map at once. ETS2-style tiling would be difficult given parts of a vehicle might span non-neighboring tiles.

 

Makes sense, but could they just not keep any removed parts loaded in empty space and locked into position, then have the map reload in around it when the car is within range?