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

Did some more optimization. There's about ~30 or so pieces done. All in all many of them will be optimized, but not ALL of them, as some are only one or two textures.

Yes it's the same Chicken Munch, nothing's changed except the LOD's are mosaic-textured now and the FPS has increased, low FPS areas are helped nicely.
The now-famous or just plain over-used screenshot here above, is now up to 72.4FPS~65.7FPS (mostly 70~71fps) after watching the counter for a minute or two noting the min-max FPS. This area was averaging 63~65FPS before with occasional dips into the 50-fps range (down to 53, yuck!).
This is improved from Friday's beta version pretty well another 5~10 FPS (pretty much map-wide increase, some spots more than others) solely by reducing draw calls only in said 30 pieces. Obviously these are the most common ones for the larger roads (well most of the common straight or sloping bits are done anyways, but none of the turns yet).
Textures for the LOD mosaics are now colored properly. I will have to test out the collision for any buggyness but so far so good.
Pausing physics is only giving about a 4 FPS difference now. So that shows that I am very close to reducing the CPU single-threaded bottleneck here. Before this part of the optimization began, I was observing a 10~15 FPS difference with physics being paused (because that takes load off the CPU, including the core that does your draw calls which are sent by the CPU to the graphics card). Now this difference is still with reflections ON.
So there's still much more optimization to do, though it might not be as obvious for each piece optimized, it all will add up after a few more days/week.
Draw calls are now dropping below 4000 now here (it's hovering right around that, with the car in view). The idea is to keep it below 4000 throughout the entire map, but I don't know if I could promise that. Doing the best I can though!

I am also addressing the issue of the terrain appearing through the road surface, by minimizing the color difference between the terrain under the roads (concrete and asphalt) VS the color of the objects themselves. The terrain must be close as the invisible AI paths that are under the roads have to be near to the surface (less than a foot away) otherwise the AI stops in it's tracks, or brakes without reason. Using a similar-textured decal road underneath is a solution, but not one I am going to use all that much as they also will cost FPS when there's enough of them, and there's already *LOTS* of decal roads in this map. I chose to make custom terrain layers for underneath the roadways, this way when you back out with the camera or fly over the city, it's not so drastic when pieces disappear. You'll still see the dirt near the edges (so the underlay texture does not bleed out of the side of the road, turning dirt and grass grey) but it won't be night & day or so distracting / immersion breaking if you fly over the map (in preparation for the AIRPORT/AIRPORTS going in).

AIRPORT topic: Lots of you have asked!
~Civilian airport runways spec is around 13,000 feet for large 'Air Bus' style commercial airliners; military or smaller aircraft would be around 6,000 feet of runway length. I am going to use national (US) specs for making the runway when it comes down to it, which will be terrain, not mesh based. The building will be mesh though, as will any other decorations. The way it's looking, it will be on the coast, not within the heavily populated city itself, as the city seems mostly ringed by mountains or very tall hills. It would be a difficult flight path if I put it in the central area of the map.
Considering making the secondary airport in this map from a joint Army/Air Force base or something similar. There will be some military base. Why not put a small landing strip in? We all tried to hard to get into the ones in GTA series, why not put one here? Now I want a tank though... *sigh*.

Sound! Where's the sound?
I have found a suitable sound kit I am considering buying for this map. It's ambient sounds and will provide a much needed ambient background for the city and country-side. It's a complete kit and has everything but the underground subway sound (unless it has it not included in the preview). It's fairly reasonable in price and I hope to have it in the map within the next month or so.
To those folks who joined in on the Patreon page this weekend, I thank you highly. You folks and the rest of the folks here, are highly appreciated, and it motivates me highly (especially seeing as many days I spend upwards of 6~14 hours on this, depending on my health, the weather, and other things possibly needing to be done).

Progress? You're showing me the same @#$% picture! *muttley muttering*
Oh, it's there, but this is ALL behind the scenes stuff. I must optimize before I can build more stuff. This takes time - days/weeks.
When it get it under control, I can release an improved and polished version of the map to beta testers via Patreon page, and then add more things into it, hopefully not undoing all the hard work I just did. Regardless, if I add more now, it will be a slow, unoptimized mess that no one can enjoy with reflections/shadows still enabled. Again, performance above is *WITH* basic reflections on, and shadows enabled.


Yes, those reflections and shadows are *ON*. The user interface isn't, though, because it eats 10~12FPS here. The developers are working on this though.
Using the in-car view with no interface, gives the best performance by a few extra FPS.


This area has seen on average a 16FPS minimum gain up to 54~59.x FPS, again, all due to draw-calls reduction, and I haven't even touched the narrow surface streets yet with the mosaic textures for LOD's (that reduce draw calls by half on LOD's as they only use two textures, they aren't that intensive though but it will also reduce some poly surfaces on the LOD's). If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it will give 1~3 extra FPS tops, but it's still worth doing.

The strip mall parking lot on the other side of the map has seen on average a 5~6fps gain average FPS. That's the lot with the Burger World and subway tunnel bordering it. There's not much out there beyond the subway, lots of roads/highway, the 8 strip mall buildings of 4 stores each, and the Burger world.

So I don't entirely promise I'll get the whole map to 60FPS with reflections still enabled, but I am darn well going to try, or at-least make sure it's quite consistent. I can also thin out some areas, maybe add a car dealership, park, or other thing such as a noise-polluting industrial zone, that doesn't pack in as much detail or draw calls as houses crowded together would have done. The nice thing is, if I don't like performance, I can just take the time to select the things I want to move, pick it up and plop it down somewhere else - because with this MRK kit, and the way this is designed, YOU CAN!

Also considering grouping trees so that I can call 2 drawcalls for a group of 3~5 or so of them, versus 2 draw calls for each (trunk texture, leaf texture, x3 because of specular and normal map textures). Going to see if this helps any, as I've heard sometimes this game batches things, but I am not seeing much evidence that it does yet (if it did, this would not have been an issue in the first place).

--That is all for now.

If you folks have requests, please get them in! I would love to hear from you out there, if you have any ideas. Remember, this is a complete city from scratch, so give some ideas. For those who's houses you sent pictures of, to me, to build, I still have the pictures, the requests are pending. I will do them, I just have to get my map into ship-shape first. They will be built!

 

can u try to make a starbucks or crackerbarel

 

There you go https://www.beamng.com/threads/simple-tank.51425/

 

I do plan on making similar stores, though I can't use trademarked or otherwise patented name, as that's mis-use of intellectual property (IP) by a non-licensed or non-franchised person (me). So I can give it my own name.

Thanks! I will have to check it out. Those pianos are going to regret "piano-ing" near me. I should be model editing/optimizing though, not murdering pianos.


Oh, stupid me, forgot something I thought of last night.

A good name for the city!

LOS INJURUS!

 

Will there be a prebuilt subway/rail system already there? Or will we have to build it ourselves?

 

There are already some tracks and Bob will be building more

 

Is there going to be a California-inspired Pub 99-based store in the city?

(Google Pub 99 if you don't know about it, but I already have been there multiple times)

 

What is the file size?

 

A port would be pretty cool. And this added to the Drainage

 

How many subway lines will there be? Will you make an easy way to get trains on the track? Looks awesome btw, Im so excited!

 

Yes something like that is in the works eventually, you won't be disappointed. I will be using it where the canal ends at the bridge carrying the highway over (it's in a picture somewhere). It's definitely going to be good fun to jump over - both directions surely - will make sure of it, but will make sure there is some way to go over in at-least one - possibly both directions, relatively unharmed. It may be another month before I get it built though, very busy optimizing pieces right now.

It's a pair of subway lines. I don't know if there will be more than one pair of lines routing the city, but there may be other forms of mass transportation not yet seen in BeamNG, too. Not all the cards are on the table yet as far as that goes, but I will be doing the best I can with what I can do.
The city is being developed to be *HUGE*, bigger than anything BeamNG has seen in it's lifetime. Bigger then West Coast by far, and hopefully not running worse (I've improved things 15% avg in the last few days since Friday alone), bigger than Generic City - by quite a bit - with still plenty of roads on other portions of the map in a rural area, like GTA San Andreas - my favorite of that series. If we get TILED TERRAIN at some point, the detail and map size can increase, at-least until it dives performance too hard. I doubt it'll ever eclipse Roane County in size, but it'll certainly beat it in detail sooner or later (though some models will be ported over in due time).
So do expect that possibly I may expand on the subway feature some more as time goes on. What is in right now is just two stations below ground (they're identical for right now, to help test the concept early in development), and one 'sunken' station that's hand-made at this point. In the future there will be other lengths of subway track in other developed sections of the city, that meet up with the above-ground portions. In less-dense portions of the town, obviously it does not pay to have a subway, but through the more dense portions of the city, it certainly does. So don't worry, it won't be just a small section of subway.

You can more easily put subway / train cars on the tracks at the level road crossings, especially if you use the map editor's f1 object editor mode.
The road sections are raised about 3~4 inches (4~5 CM) above the tracks themselves to make it safe (though bumpy) for sliding/skidding vehicles to cross them. It's quite bumpy for the car at slow speeds, but it keeps the tires from being eaten by rails especially when you have an injured car. The trains that I've tested recently *JUST* clear it by at-least 1 CM / inch, normally 2~4 CM/inches.

For what it's worth, while I was going to build a super-updated Generic City that ran better, but still offered the same experience. I offered to one-up this by building a whole new kit for the city, build all new buildings proper, and everything be able to be used in the forest brush. So this will work out much better, and the community will still get a MRK set that they can use to build any city layout they want, within reason of-course. So not only does this make the project itself way better (as this is what I've been doing for hundreds of hours before I even started this thread), it also will in the long run help any accomplished mapper here on BeamNG build the city of his/her dreams - that means MORE good maps for EVERYONE. Of course I'll use it in the future, too.

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@fufsgfen Yes bud, that's right, I will be building at-least 5x more of those tracks in due time. No question about that. More above-ground tracks, and more subway! What is in now is just enough to test my concept and that the tracks 'work', which they do. I wouldn't take some of those hard corners above-ground very fast though, as they're not for old steam or diesel locomotives, they're for modern metro trains like the kind found in big cities. So what you mentioned to @foxvnop45 is correct.

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I wasn't at my computer until around 9pm or so today, so I didn't get anything done until the last 4~5 hours or so. Much of that was spent optimizing the 'collector standard bridge' file, to cut down 150 or so surfaces from the main object and the first LOD, while applying an LOD texture to the lowest level of detail. These LOD textures are usually mosaics (unless a single texture of reduced resolution is enough to look good), that don't have specular or normal maps that would require 3x the draw calls of a texture lacking them. So 6 draw calls per unit becomes 1. It's not used that heavily in the map. Maybe 15 sections of it, and I dunno if you can even see them all at once, but it adds up over time. I will be doing the same for the highway pieces in due time. So while this isn't much, it's part of the whole pie, as are a few other pieces I did like a set of 6 'half pieces' (half the width of the road, goes from curb to road center, contains either just regular curbing, a residential driveway apron, or a wide commercial/residential driveway apron, 3 are delineated, 3 are not delineated). These come in handy when you just can't find the right piece for the setup you wish, and I've used them in a few spots, and also the plain one is a good filler near intersections that have different road types/sizes to the left and right.

Tomorrow will be busy with stuff around my home, too. No pictures tonight, but I have some more things I may do before I sleep. I just have to get this place done up nice before that stupid HURRICANE comes ashore in NC/SC. It won't damage the property here (besides drop some dead wood I can't reach to cut, out of the trees, harmlessly into the yard), but I don't want my lawn to be 3 feet tall by the time it dries out the end of next week :x Not fun. Our riding mower is good but not THAT good. It better not rain for another day. With my luck I'll get poo'ed on by one of the Teradactyls or whatever those big birds are that fly around here in TN. I dunno what they are. I call them Teradactyls & am done with it. Guess the text messages have to get sent somehow down here in the sticks (boonies).
I will try to get some news posted tomorrow too. Will start keeping a closer eye on who's donated so I don't miss anyone. Sorry for those who waited ~2 days or so over the weekend, my bad. Just trying to make this map run better for everyone (ok, ok, confession: I did play some FF VI).

--Cheers, and if you're in DC, VIRGINIA, North Carolina, South Carolina USA, GET OUT, EVACUATE, this is NOT a Hurricane to toy with.
LOTS of flooding coming! Those in low-lying areas in NC/SC/Virginia coast/river valleys, the time to act is now, do not wait until you are stranded or the roads are jammed. Plan for up to a week to be away, possibly more if it stalls out a bit. This is a serious once-in-30 year or more storm.
Pay attention to your local weather forecast, and news more than normal. P.S. Take your PC with you. It doesn't deserve to die.
(I live at elevation 1900 feet here in TN, on a huge plateau of Sandstone, so no worries about me, but it might get pretty windy and rainy up here for a few days, it's tornadoes spawned from the Hurricane that would concern me if anything).

 

how about all of md

 

All of Maryland state USA? I am flattered that one has THAT MUCH faith in me, but I wouldn't be able to live long enough to do all of that, even if I lived several times longer than I am expected to.

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FPS is now 67~74.4 FPS (it's never been that high even when I first built it, before stuff in the other side of the map was built) at the chicken munch, that's daily progress, another 2 FPS on both (min/max) numbers. So if I gain 2FPS a day, that's 60FPS a month (though, again, diminishing returns here). I won't repeat the same screenshots again here (this is a new one, just the same place, with a slightly improved frame rate). That's a 2.3% increase in one day - a pittance by itself; but over several days, it's becomes something you could notice without being told. Again, no visual changes.

Thanks to the folks kindly handing in feedback on the map. Here is some of it below:
The good:
Folks enjoy the detail on the road kit, which I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours making, and then mapping in BeamNG.
Subways are a new thing to BeamNG - train tracks and subways make for more variety of play.
It's a CITY MAP, BeamNG needs more of these!
It doesn't need 4~5GB+ FREE RAM to load, too.
They enjoy countless opportunities to send the car *very* airborne including the realistic cross-slope that will bounce cars around going too fast (45+ mph) through intersections.
The nice highways - driving fast in a computer game or simulation is fun, but even more-so if it looks good.
It can run on pretty much anything, even a 1st generation i7 9xx series (or equal XEON series) CPU. Yes, even if that 1st generation i7 has a 1GB DDR3 equipped 6750 video card - it will run well on *LOW* (30~35 fps) or *LOWEST* (55~60fps).

The not so good / fairly bad:
The LOD's ARE OBVIOUS! ACK! What is this, The 90's / Early 2000's ?
I'm sorry if some of the LOD's are obvious on the homes specifically, I will try to work on that a bit, but I will say right now that I won't be able to cure that 100%. You will notice if you look right at the homes, but I have an obligation to keep FPS high even for integrated graphics, and the draw calls down - a very fine line to walk indeed.
Those canals have (dos) DOOM resolution textures, what DOS game did you smuggle them from?
The canal textures must (and will) be improved, they're a bit too low resolution / plain.
Why is this so @#$% slow?
Some users are having performance difficulty in specific configurations where the map should run better but doesn't. Future performance improvements will help significantly or at-least marginally for folks who are borderline able to run this.

If anyone has other questions, give a shout! It's only performance optimization over the next few days, though I will be here with answers in the evenings.

 

Stay away from computer during the storm, keep it unplugged completely, net and electricity, because I have seen some really weird electricity during storms, can go trough DSL and fry up whole computer trough that

I did test F7 train on those tracks and it was fine, except it was wobbling from side to side, but I have also old version of that train, old Roane County tracks produce less wobbling, I think that tracks are taller, maybe unrealistically tall in those old tracks, like Sultan Peak and Roane County?


About map tiling, currently terrain is kinda tiled, you can enable option that sets shadows for current split only, it is kinda tiles which then are not rendered if Occlusion Volume blocks it (Or Zone if camera is inside the zone).

It still is only one terrain possible for that, in theory I guess one could make more terrains, maybe export them and import to map as 3d objects, kinda like surrounding terrain is done in west coast and in Automation map, it would be only few objects I guess, even if one splits terrain mesh in Maya, then puts in game as TSStatic and uses Occlusion volumes to block rendering of them as well as LOD, it might allow quite huge drivable land area, but it would not allow editing of terrain mesh in game editor for those extra areas, one would have to build everything in Maya etc. Which would be kinda challenging for object placement as placing forest items on such would require shaping of 'ground' in Maya, then placing object in World editor, quite bit of work.

I have 5 terrain on one map, editing of them all works actually as well as placing objects, but of course collision works only for one.

DX11 has this on interesting feature though, which is such that it uses part of huge texture map, uses very little vram, but one can have something like 16K texture with same performance and video memory usage of 2K texture, it is called tiled resources, but I don't know if Beam is able to use that and none has been able to answer that question, so would need to examine bit more about that, just think about how much drawcalls one could reduce with such, it would allow much more variety too.

There are surprisingly lot of ways with this engine, figuring them out is bit of work and also some tricks are quite a bore to do, takes lot of time and kinda boring tasks, but amount of performance one can squeeze out of the engine is quite bit more than we have seen so far, those optimizations Bob is doing are giving quite impressive performance boosting already, being able to more and bigger, that is really awesome!

Then even BeamNG is going to be better running in future, probably, so all that is going to allow quite different map that have been seen so far in game.

Now how could we combine that FF VI and BeamNG though? I think there actually is a way...


Update: Oh yes Bob, I think I saw around 80fps at that Chicken munch test spot, stock clocks, so you might be hitting GPU limits there already!

 

FPS is still improving with decreasing draw calls yet, daily. GPU 50~75 % gpu usage at this spot is non-optimal! FPS max is 75.1fps here at this spot tonight (not max of 74.x, it bounces around a bit). Basically, if both CPU and GPU aren't maxed, and Vsync is OFF, then it's often a draw call issue, oddly (the cpu does not have to be maxed out for it to be draw calls holding things back).

 

any release date yet

 

Yeah, that is kinda funny how CPU load that comes from those is kinda spiky, it is so fast hitting 100% that nothing really shows it, but you can tell GPU is not getting full load, then it is CPU holding back.

I did test with Pessima, outside view and dynamic reflections on, I got around 71fps, but then again my CPU is bit faster, even when it is pathetically slow at stock speed (turbo is hugely a fake in 8086k, it never gets high turbo clocks because so many cores and there is always something making them active, easily sorted though by settings).

Beamcom van incar view gives 80fps though. What is surprising for me is that Beamcom van is easier to run than old Pessima as van gives more fps.

Without dynamic reflections incar Pessima gives pretty much 60fps or more everywhere, one spot where it drops to 57 for a second, but your version is already much more optimized so my CPU would run it bit faster than what you are getting.

However when CPU limited, so much effects the fps, running browser can take already many fps, it is like if threading scheduler thing in Windows would need good kick where it feels good, does so terrible job at times, with 12 threads, browser should not have much impact on my FPS, but no, it is same thread. Browser does use DirectX though, maybe affects drawcalls too and their overhead is on CPU single thread in DX11 afaik.

DX12 would then have threaded drawcall overhead thing, which is why it gets so huge boost in amount of drawcalls in that 3Dmark test, probably 8th gen i7 and Ryzen are ones that would benefit even more from DX12, if GPU just is beefy enough.

Old test from time DX12 was new are not showing benefit above 4 threads, but perhaps their GPUs were limiting factor there, so our belowed pre win 10 operating systems are going to have bit of short rope I'm afraid.


Anyways, take a Beamcom van, drive from that spot at Chicken munch along the road at 55-60mph, at top of one hill there is intersection, you get huge jump with the van as springs bottom out and you hit bump stops, it is like pogo stick, van launches up to air, had more than 15 minutes of fun with that, you must try it, it is quite funny as you would not except to be launched up to air at that speed, bump is not that big, but it is the van that has bit strong bumpstop springs

I would post a screenshot, but I'm not sure if you want that, so I don't, but that is spot to make some fun videos for sure!

 

WAIT

 

im not saying I want it now I just wanted to know if there is a realese date or not u don't have to get hostile

 

I prefer he doesn't set a release date so he can finish it without having to be pressured with a deadline.