WIP Beta released The Tennessee USA Roane County 0.71 Beta Discussion/Suggestion/feedback Thread 19.3.1

@Eastham , yes I am aware the this update broke *LOTS* of things, including transparency and a lot of 'normal' (bump-mapping) textures (which is when you see a black no texture overlayed on a too-dark asphalt texture). I will do my best to fix this in the second half of this month, and push some updates for other things in the map all the while.

 

Hey Bob, do you think you will be possibly add some more houses to the map? To be Specific a huge mansion with a big driveway

 

Will 1.0 have more quality overall? Not to insult your work, which i think its amazing, but i think that this map falls under the cateogory opposite to WCU. A giantic space to do anything you want, but it seems like the rest isn't quite there to get me (at least me) playing much more.

I did do a flyover with planes and found a lot of roads and the few cities and so on, but it still seems like if the core concept of the map was to have a bunch of mostly straight roads across the map, put a few buildings for decorations and that's it. Not that i assume you are done with the map, but i think that so much space is mostly just empty roads or forest that if you had to pick between extending the map even larger or not doing it at all, i would rather you go for the latter. The map feels very empty, you can dot buildings everywhere, you can make suburban neighberhoods in many more spots but the overall map still will feel like just an empty stretch of route on a forest biome.

Not to mention, at this size you will obviously see stuff like the interior of a few vehicles shake due to the inaccuracy of the map distance. Not something you can fix, but a side effect of what i think the issue of making a map much larger for its own good is.

I dont know if its within your capabilities to increase the quality of the forest or the grass to make everything feel a little bit more alive, but i think the map is pretty "big enough" as-is, and you should see what you can do to make the map more fun to drive.

 

It's still a WIP and I believe there's a lot more in the works, but Bob's taking a little well deserved break from this map to work on another. Creating a map of this scale is an absolute massive undertaking, and to see how far it's come from where he started is amazing in its own right.

 

Do you like lag at towns? Do you want that everywhere on the map?

While things can be improved a lot, there still is limits within current game engine and hardware.

Some straight roads, few buildings, forest, looks like that I think?


Surely as Bob's skills are constantly evolving, he will put them to use in this map too, but I would think it might be good to see what possibilities future updates to game might offer as then improving map to higher level would be much more possible than what it is now.

 

I am not judging the real life comparision. Im saying that i wanted to know if his focus was gonna be on a single area of the map specifically. If he had to reduce its size to improve performance and work easier on the individual detail im down for it, for example.

 

Reducing size would not really help that much, to improve performance UV map optimizations and reducing amount of textures should help, but probably only to a point.

Building larger areas would not really be so great when idea is to replicate real location which has vast emptiness between settlements etc.

Since making this map Bob has learned new tricks and my understanding is that at some point he will utilize those on this map too.

 

I understand. Then i guess i should only focus my hate towards government infrastructure of the area.

Still, it is of notice that the interiors of most cars shake due to the inaccuracy of the car position relative to the absolute zero.

 

That would tdev who you need to write about, maybe he adds floating point precision so we get more accurate positioning of nodes in gigantic scale, however that might have some drawbacks so he might not get exactly excited about it.

But maybe it already is on the list, who knows.

 

i would love that to be the case. Im just saying that i think that the map is pointlessly large.

 

Then... drive around a small portion of it, or use another map entirely? Nobody is forcing you to download this mod, and it has been in the works for long enough that you are a bit late in the game to be offering criticism about its size. What you are suggesting would be an entirely new project.

The entire world is pointlessly large - go for a drive in it sometime! This map is (reasonably) accurately based off of a real world location, and is (as far as I know) still the largest map in the game. The topographic detail is pretty much at the maximum it can be at, due to the immense scale of the map and the game engine's maximum resolution for terrain data. Without major optimizations to game engine, there is also an upper limit on object detail unless he wants to slow every computer to a crawl.

I personally find this map to be a joy to drive and have logged over a thousand miles driven and flown within Roane County limits.

Throw on some tunes and get lost. Put the sun near or below the horizon and rely on your headlights to find your way. Take every turn you have not taken before. There are plenty of backstreets, and many of them have been known to curve from time to time. Pursue the AI set to 'Flee.' Flee the AI set to 'Pursue.'

If you want a map with a lot of topographic detail and no straight roads, I would recommend trying Bob's replication of the Tail of the Dragon.

Respect the artist and appreciate the hard work they have put in. If you are still dissatisfied, go on google maps, pick out your favorite 144 square mile section of the earth, and attempt to recreate it in the game's editor. You will find it is not quite so easy.

 

I am not criticising the map due to the effort that was put into it, i just think that if there had to be a sacrifice in size to allow for a more detailed version i would be all for it.

 

Well, to each his own....there are plenty of other maps that would better cater to your taste out there. Why you complain about the one that doesn't is interesting.
The design choices are plain to see in the first post of this thread so why even bother if you don't like the approach?

And in case you haven't noticed, its STILL IN BETA!

 

Does "still in development" means "no feedback required"?

 

I guess Bob himself can answer when he is not busy with other things, but whole map was done because he wanted to see how big it is possible for map to be in this game, that is if my memory is not lying to me very badly.

So making it smaller would not really be an option when trying to make biggest, that would kinda defy the purpose.

Next map that Bob will release might be perhaps bit more interesting for you as coming city map is similar in way that there are road system etc. but then there are lot more built areas and much less empty areas.

Less shaking

 

Exactly this. The entire purpose of the map was to be a reasonable replication of as large of an area as possible, within the confines of the game. It had to be a relatively sparse, reasonably smooth area to work without looking like a map from the era of Rigs of Rods. In this way, Roane County was a perfect candidate for the experiment.

I for one am eagerly waiting for the chance to try Bob's next project out.

I've done nap-of-the-earth flight in Roane County, but I can't wait to pursue a vehicle with a military ultra light helicopter at <75 meters off the ground in an actual city trying to line up shots, all while being mindful of backdrop and the strict policy of not firing on non-cleared infrastructure, like bridges, overpasses, tunnels, and buildings. That and taking the Custom Sport Bike as fast as it can go along the freeways and any suitable surfaces I can find. And just getting lost driving around, as I look for a vehicle I let get away, with the sole goal of finding it with no tools except my eyes and ears. And racing cars... and crashing them. And just cruising at a hair above (or far below) the speed limit as I blast my favorite music and sing along.

What I love about Roane county is that by being so much larger than anything else, it provided the space to do anything, so long as your goal wasn't rock climbing or watching the tires bounce over an incredibly detailed ground model. You could drive until the tank was empty without retreading the same streets a dozen times - hell you could do it without touching the same road twice if you tried hard enough. It is an amazing feat that I am deeply thankful Mr. Blunderton took the time to bring into a reality, because I can honestly say the vast majority of the 567 hours have spent in BeamNG have been between Roane's county lines.

In short, I can't wait for his next map to effectively divide the time I spend in BeamNG between it and Roane County, with a small slice of the pie left over Lightrunner and other maps, when I get the whim.

 

Well, there are subway tunnels to fly, there is abandoned mall where you can fit that said helicopter just barely, less than 10cm to spare, lot less, lots of bridges, elevated highways, tunnels etc. you can fly in tight spots and suburbs, those are quite bit of fun, especially if you have watched those tv shows where they chase a car with a helicopter

Oh and canal system too, which you can drive or fly.

I have just gamepad for flying, so it gets tricky when 1mm is a lot of effect, but I have gotten quite far in Tail of the dragon, flying 3ft or so above the road surface, it just is bit difficult to keep required level of focus for such long time.

I haven't tested if my flying wing mod could take a missile, if it does not cause instability, then spawning flock of those and defending the city from attackers might be fun, as those flying wings pretty much glide by themselves (I did set up jato there so they can even slowly climb with that enabled) and you can spawn tens of them (I have had 100 of them running 60fps), it would add again variety, even to Roane County!

 

That sounds like everything I have dreamed of and more. I literally stared off into blank space and daydreamed for a minute after reading your post. Especially the invasion part - I imagine you might have to make the flying wings bigger though, as at their present size you would have to be Luke Skywalker to take many out of the sky without a minigun or flak ammunition.

I highly recommend you get a Steam controller if you can, as it's gyro control and configurable buttons and touch pads are a perfect substitute for a flight stick when wired and latency free.

Clumsily slapped together video of it in use:


As much as I wanted to buy a flight stick, I never did because honestly the Steam Controller does a lot more with even finer precision [*at the price point], all without taking up desk space or being useful for only one task.

I use the gyro control and the pedals from my Logitech G920 to operate the motorcycle, because it is infinitely more natural feeling to simply tilt the controller to the angle I want to in order tilt the bike than trying to estimate it with the joystick and 17 steps of input at most. While this may sound complex, it is a process that almost becomes second nature after a few hours, because you can configure the gyro input to max out at the exact angle the output does, giving you near 1:1 motion control what happens in the game. This makes it very useful for emulating F1 or other low range steering vehicles without re-configuring your wheel as well.

 

OK, this crept up overnight...
I have been playing some other games to quell the mapping insanity that sets in after a while of doing nothing but modeling and mapping. The Bob needed a bit of time away, and to play some other games - not to make much mention of ALL the other things in life that needed to be done, like opening the door to my house and not ending up in a 2~3 foot tall pile of leaves (yes they're all gone as of Tuesday~Wednesday I raked down my entire driveway, and then obliterated everything with the mower). It was like 60~65F outside and one of the last nice genuinely fine days to be outside and so I took complete advantage of that.
So excuses aside (well technically I don't have more than security footage of me moaning in pain raking the driveway down and limping for several days, but the footage of me chasing a very aggressive stray 80lbs dog out of the yard with a construction hammer would have been good fodder, it found out who was at the top of the food chain in short order, but it's un-harmed so no calls to PETA will be necessary)... I will be getting to this map. I took a drive through this map the other evening and SHEESH IT'S AWFUL. HOW DO YOU GUYS PUT UP WITH THAT?
Totally my bad, I will shape this map up this month and see what else I can't throw in while I am at it, like some new bridges or something. I don't want to spite the wonderful crew of Patreon subscribers too much and not having something to show for a release in a week for my city map, so I will do something with this mapping disaster starting in a little over a week or so. I've already replaced a few bridges thus far in it, but will do more in due time later this month.

To answer questions:
YES, it's still the largest map in the game, from the best of my knowledge, being 13.x by 13.x miles or something close to that, whatever makes 175 sq/miles of space! That means it's larger than even large maps like 'American Road' (which is similar in size to my city map if not a little larger, the city map is 1/4th the size of this, roughly half it's width and length), and larger than 'Desert Highway', by only about ~10% total on square mileage. It still has, to my best knowledge, the most road mileage of any map, coming in just under 200 miles, if you DO NOT count divided roadways separately - which is the proper way to count.

Why is it still not done?
Current computer specifications when I designed this map, didn't exactly allow people to run it well enough to enjoy it more times than not. It still gets murdered by draw calls especially in Harriman and the few other very-developed areas. I can't do too much about that right now at the moment, but when the city map is much further along, I will back-port a lot of buildings to help with this problem. It's not sheer amounts of surfaces that kill performance, it's draw calls, which is a command from the CPU to the GPU to render one connected set of textures on one object. Lots of different disconnected texture UV's (faces of textures) shoot the draw call count up through the roof quickly.
There's also sheer time aspect. I sunk a little shy of 3000 hours into this map. Seriously. It's monstrous. It was made by one person, with help from others on the modeling end, since I couldn't model to save my hide until the last 6 months now.
If I add more things to it, it will just crank up the RAM requirement, while dropping performance. This game-engine wasn't really made to handle something this large as the map currently is. Even back to version 0.7 ~ 0.8 of this game, it was lagging and hitching badly in some spots even with an SSD and 16GB of RAM back then, something the game-engine has come a LONG way with. I obviously couldn't crank up the RAM requirement, until systems progressed and advanced a little more, and now that many folks have 16GB (or a few who have MORE, I myself upgraded to 32GB this past July or so for content-creation purposes), it allows me to put more things into the world-space.

So many miles of roads with *NOTHING* there...
Yes, that's Tennessee, welcome to rural Tennessee, where there's miles of nothing, absolutely nothing, sans random houses here and there, derelict buildings here and there and the random trailer park every so many miles - and LOTS of farm land/wilderness. Now and then you'll bumble upon civilization but you can drive for 20 miles and not hit a town without even trying in this map - but again, it's based on a REAL area of Roane County TN. A very fun to drive area of TN I may add - which is why I chose it - I don't even live in it - but I chose it. I even have a few fans of this map that live within Roane county itself!

Would you have sacrificed size for pure detail?
Well then play so many other maps out there, so many other games, so many other things out there that do exactly that.
The reason this was a huge bunch of NOTHING without even a single house for the first 6 months of it's initial release, was because the only reason this map was made - it's whole reason for being - and all it was ever intended to be - was a 'large map/open world test' concept for the game engine. It's solely a proof-of-concept for the developers and modders to see how the game handled a large environment, and how to test improvements, when improving game-engine asset / world-space streaming.

But your large mega-map makes my car shake with fear! ... or just shake!
THAT size issue is also why it causes the car to shake when you get to the north-east and north-west (or north-end) of the map, due to floating-point only having so many decimals, and the further you go from the 'map center', the more gets rounded, the rounding is seen as visible 'shimmy' in the vehicle chassis while at a standstill (or while in motion). A float number is the exact opposite of integer math, which is 100% precise, where float is 'close enough' but also very very fast as there's dedicated FPU's (floating point units) to process this. Yes, the same thing that made 3d games smooth and full-motion in MS-DOS 25 years ago, is what your BeamNG physics uses. Even DOOM on the SNES used floating point, which is why if you walk up to a wall corner, you can see the textures on the wall are displayed via floating point processes, as they move about a bit, the same way your vehicle shakes a little bit when you get far out. Welcome to the limits of modern computing, and the idiots (me) who decided to completely dis-regard this altogether, just to say 'because I can'. Ah yes, but the because I can guy made a fun map for just cruising, provided the road isn't a flicker-fest anyways, or game isn't going <20fps.

Performance = POO in your map...
Yes, it does, I had little to no knowledge of modern 3d game modding (I had mostly stuck to BSP-based ID-tech stuff over many years or non-3d stuff) when it came to super-modern 3d engines. This map wasn't even supposed to have any cities in it, at all, let alone 3 small towns. So draw-calls as mentioned above are through the roof, though this doesn't preclude development in other areas, though.
Turn off Reflections to help reduce draw-calls and load on the GPU and CPU, this is the biggest help.
Turn off SSAO if that helps your video board get FPS up.
Turn off Shadows if your CPU can't keep up.
Use LOW settings, even if it looks like trash, or Lowest, if you use integrated GPU from intel, it can run at 720p just fine all day long at this.
If you only have 8gb of RAM use medium details or less, and use NO AI VEHICLES, as those eat RAM for breakfast.
You need 4GB or more Video-RAM to use highest quality textures, only more than 4GB when more than 1~2 vehicle(s) is/are used.
Keep in mind folks with a GTX 970 video board should use Medium detail to avoid getting into the 3+ GB (and especially 3.5+ GB) range of VRAM usage as the partitioned area past those gets progressively slower, reducing by 12% above 3GB usage, and reducing speed by a further 80% above 3.5GB, figured not exact, but close enough for the sake of argument.
Buying a better GPU won't necessarily help this map run better unless you have a 960/950 or older video card (or older than AMD 7850 2gb) aside of texture detail Video RAM usage. Buying a better CPU with high GHZ speed will, however, help it process draw calls much better in lots of modded maps for this game, especially large maps like mine and American Road. Trees are done with BATCHED draw calls, so these hit the GPU more than the CPU, so if it's improving performance in the forest where no-one can hear it when it falls, GPU upgrade is in order. In towns, it's CPU performance that limits folks.
An Intel CPU that hits 5ghz on 4 or more cores, will run this better than a Ryzen with 8 cores at 4ghz, due to Draw Calls on a DX11 title being single-threaded, so you're limited to your fastest core, under the conditions that this game uses ALL cores to spread the PHYSICS work-load, so you won't see your single-core turbo speeds at their max when using this BeamNG program even with but one vehicle in play. Manually overclocking can help here, but not if it makes your system unstable or over-heats it and causes FIRE. FIRE is bad kiddies.

The city map...
Los Injurus, my next map, one that I currently spend then Lion's share of time on, is in the works, and already well under-way with a large road network inherited from the now-defunct So-Cal Interstate map, is going to be BeamNG's next large-city map. Hopefully, the performance won't stink everywhere.
Along with this map, when it comes out, will come a nice modular city road kit complete with sidewalks and everything else needed to build the road-network of your city dreams. So there's lots of behind the scenes optimization work being done to help it run decently, and certainly no-where nearly as bad as Roane County runs.

YES, this map will have work continued on it, just because it hasn't had an update in +6 months or whatever it's been, doesn't mean I don't have one coming, because I DO have an update coming.
--If I didn't answer a question, please holler accordingly. Criticism is always welcome, provided it's constructive. No one's going to get banned short of swearing in the forums here, I don't get mad easily. This map isn't for everyone, but if you don't mind the low-quality of the rural areas, there's plenty of driving time to be had here.

--Cheers & hope I got everyone's questions here answered well enough. Thanks for the feedback, criticism, and other comments on what you like or don't like about the map. Just cut down the settings a bit for this one, okay?

 

K.

Fair enough