The heightmap is 100% back to where it was with tons more detail! I plan on dozing a bunch more roads and trails next, then I will start terrain painting. Red roads in the pic are all drivable. 16.6mile (or 26.7km) loop.
It was completely worth it in my eyes. The roads have so much detail! Hopefully a railway can happen, but for now there is not one. Its on my "possible features" list though.
As long as this is a spiritual successor to Roane county with even more detail, I'll be willing to wait.
I'm not sure about spiritual successor as my map in not based on Roane County in any way, BUT the irl terrain are located very close to each other. My terrain is based off of a MUCH higher resolution heightmap for insane detail.
Perhaps a railway from east to west across the course of the north river with several bridges, it will be very nice to drive along that road forward with a train, it reminds me of Force Horizon.
That is exactly where I would put it if I decided to add train tracks. Its the only place that makes sense at this scale. I will leave some space for one in case I add trains. I really like the idea of a railway, but really there are a few things keeping me from adding train tracks. I am working on this solo. I chose a massive map, so there are already a million things to do. Another more minor reason, Its not super realistic. If I could get this map to a nice point and also if the dev's ever made it optimized enough for a 16k sized map to make sense, I would expand the terrain to the NE. Once you are on up the valley, it gets very steep and twisty. A railway wouldn't be easily possible without unnecessary tunnels and bridges. And I'm not committed to trains that much personally. And also this is a car game, I want to keep the map as vanilla as possible. If the devs added trains and tracks to the world editor, I would 100% do trains.
I have most of my roads, residents, and establishments all blocked out. I'm at 200 house locations! Of course there will be more businesses, roads, and maybe a few more residencies added as the map progresses, but this gives me a slight idea of how much work I truly have to do and how expansive this map really is. There is a route around the map that has a good base layer of decals and the terrain is fixed for an awesome 16mi+ (25km+) driving experience!
Well, got a decal down and the terrain all "flattened" out for this 3.2 mi (5.1km) old gravel road. Half of it is ascending/descending the plateau. Great for some steep, narrow, and rough gravel rally goodness.
Here's a neat hillshade view of the map to show the detail. (See if you can find where the second image is magnified from the first.)
Sprucing up the rivers and landscape with some crazy accurate drainage texturing! This was done procedurally using complex GIS tools and algorithms.
wow, this looks like its gonna be one of the best maps out there if it keeps being developed at this rate
