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

I will have a picture book coming in the next few days folks. I have been busy, since updating the c: drive RAID array (didn't buy anything, just re-arranged drives I kept daisy-chaining to the system so it's more organized, and re-did the medusa of wires growing in the case - SAS-to-Sata expanders really make spaghetti FAST),
So yes you have my full apology on that topic. I am still here... the internet seems to have resolved itself. My ISP stinks, but It kept losing packets anywhere beyond my router... the last problem was in Georgia, where my nearest uplink from the ISP network to the web is. Everything I trace-routed was getting NO RESPONSE past Georgia and sometimes it wouldn't even leave town or contact town at all. So they were obviously doing something in Georgia.

That aside, I have deemed the system stable, things are functioning fine now. I have resumed work on the highway pieces. Once those are done up with good UV mapping that's all connected (75% of the two-lane ones are done), I can go back to adding more buildings. Still have to do the avenues at some point, don't know if those will make the new beta or not though (have to make a mosaic texture for those but that's pretty easy).
I want to add more content to the map this week yet before the week is out. Also coming up in the next week or so is adding the background sounds ambience etc.

I don't have an ETA on a public beta, but there's always the Patreon avenue to get an early alpha showing a few semi-finished areas and plenty of drive-able roads and such and the new highway, and coming up in the next one, revised subway stations & a new parking deck. I will be making large underground parking areas too.

Things should start picking up in October now though. I just wanted to get all the stuff I already made fixed up to snuff so I can get the road kit out there. If anyone is interested in working with the road or rail kit (rail is already available) I want you to get in touch with me via private message.

Lowering draw calls below 4000 has reduced CPU bottlenecking here to 0%. There's no more advantage to lessening draw calls that can be seen, hence no pictures. So I am still watchful for low-FPS spots but I've lessened the drop to the point where it's not intrusive to play.
After tomorrow I should have much more time to model things like buildings. Lots of buildings coming! Big ones little ones, and even ones that look like a feather would demolish it.


EDIT: Looking into parked cars, believe me I have looked it over. I have to find not-so-expensive to display vehicle models though as I'm no car modeler. There will be some as soon as I am reasonably able.
--That's all for now.

 

oh that's awesome
I suggest a art deco building too
like

The El Cortez skyscraper from San Diego

The Mid Continent Tower rom Tulsa

or the 111 Westminster street in providence

 

All good suggestions!
I will use these to inspire work I do (it won't be a direct copy as that's nearly impossible to do 100% properly without a blue-print - I can read blueprints being a former construction worker), and surely, ART-DECO is 100% awesome. Already going to be putting a lot of Modernist and Art-Deco into the map as that's going to represent a lot of the stuff we see every day in big cities. There will also be many 'arts and crafts' style buildings as well.

So yes, you'll surely see lots of Art-Deco (30's~60's) and Modernist/Ultra-modern (60's style, such as the twin homes with white siding I featured very early on) in this map.

Feel free to throw out plenty of building pictures, no harm done in that, for sure, that's 100% what this is about.

--Cheers!

 

Will there be Brutalist-styled buildings in the city for the future, something like the Fall River Government Center?

 

Yes, a full range of styles, I was going to mention Brutalist also, but forgot. I will be using Wikipedia to help me design buildings with proper motifs/style. I am an architecture buff from way back, I used to draw houses as a little kid before computers in homes were common - nice ones too!

 

So to give you an idea of the mundane stuff I am stuck doing at the moment... (see shot below looking 'up' at the bridge beams).
Old beams to the left, new ones to the right. Shows a little aging/water stains coming down. Looks a little less new.
Beams are all perfect dupes so that they can be batched all in one draw call (the texture locations are identical).
Just all those little details. Doing my best here to get the mundane stuff done so I can build buildings again, and not be goofing off playing Rimworld.
--- Post updated ---
Edit: Revised bridge beam / curbing collision. So if you hit this bridge beams while below it, with a truck with freight stacked too high, or you hit it flying erratically around the map as so often happens, you won't get eaten so much. Also, curbing collision is run down through the bridge deck surface, intersecting and going past the actual driving surface, as to widen the curb collisions (doesn't change game-play though, transparent to player), then you won't get flat tires as easily on it. Also to note, the bridge collision on the railings is (and has always been) solid, you cannot fit things 'through' the holes in the bridge railing - to do that would require 10x the CPU power for running the collision model and is not worth the effort/power required.
On the shot below 'say no to munching cars on objects', the solid grey is the collision mesh, what your vehicle collides with. The larger surfaces make for easier processing and don't let vehicles pass into the object only to get stuck, narrow faces don't work well. Anything smaller across than a 4~6 inch curb face, especially long faces, causes a big issue with catching vehicles and making them stuck.
Also, a bit extends out past the end of the bridge deck, as it's tapered, so in-case the map doesn't load 100% perfect or the person mapping doesn't place it 100% perfect, you won't catch on the edge of the object. My Roane County map will eventually receive these bridges in a nice makeover, and objects can shift an inch left or right by the time the map loads, so this prevents issues with that if you ride the walls during a crash. Even if you join pieces perfectly, if you slam the brakes (without anti-lock) or slide over a joint containing 90 degree (or slightly less or more) angles, you will lose the tires. I had an issue with my parking deck where I joined multiple floors together in a few spots (which has been fixed already), that if you were drifting in it (it's a lot of fun and 100% perfect for it now), you'd lose tires. These beveled edges help alleviate this.

Remember, these pieces will be shared with other budding mappers, for the benefit of everyone.
I am shooting for mid-month for the next beta for Patrons, but it could be out a little sooner. The 14th is a safe bet. If you aren't already a Patron on Patreon, please help this project along!
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=12840784
Patreon members who donate to this project get in on the once-or-twice a month betas. Progress will sharply accelerate over the next month as I get most of the pesky mundane stuff out of the way 1st.

 

ok
some condominium towers like

one st Petersburg

liberty place from Philadelphia (not a condo)

one57 from nyc
and maybe some public housing for a rundown part of the city

 

Maybe some Oregonian residental apartments?

 

The rundown public housing complex like Caprini Green from Detroit (IIRC on the location, and some others like Pruit-Igo I think it was called) will definitely make the cut. Those are nice simple square buildings which I already have most of the textures to make.
1st picture - the tall condominium tower, will definitely have some like this or the public housing right next to the highway across from the residential development where there's nothing built yet (near to where there is an intersection, but no lights built yet, at a 45 degree angle under the highway). Medium / high rise buildings will be going in between the highway and the water in a large portion of the map as that land would normally be quite valuable.
The middle two picture suggestions, I already have glass-lined skyscraper graphics in the map, so yes we'll see those too. This is why I've implemented the subway already on the other side of the map, some of these buildings will have an integrated station (like in GTAV and GTASA).

Yes, there will be buildings like you've mentioned also.
Not sure if I will do collision with the balcony railings but there could be collision on the balcony itself (obviously the building would have full collision). It's very difficult to properly create thin balcony railings, without making the car sink right down if you land on top of them (like the center divider in the highways, currently). It deflects off the side fine but don't hit the top while falling. I will try to make it so flying / crashing cars can still fly off the roadways and land 'in' the balcony area though.

Loving the suggestions from both of you tonight here, but yeah, if you're looking for housing projects, there will be a very Detroit-styled area for-sure with beat up roads and all. It will be a Chicago/Detroit/Cleaveland hybrid of your typical run-down rust-belt city in one part, pretty So-Cal style in another area, will have a bit of everything here.

If anyone has additional suggestions, they can and will generally be honored. I have some buildings to start modeling up next week (or possibly sooner), just as soon as I get some of my real-life vehicle (Corolla) maintenance done, before it gets chilly out.

---

Tonight I got the majority of the Chicken Munch building fixed up (It's also used for the Long Dong Silvers, it has no integrated sign by itself, others can use it in the future and slap their own brand on it easily). That thing was dozens of draw-calls. Heck even the lowest LOD was 5 draw calls + any reflections or normal mapping. It's lots less draw-calls now - have a good 20 minutes of work left on it.
I'll have to re-do the Burger World and the gun store models too as they're similar with lots of draw calls. That'll be a few hours, but the lion's share of the draw calls have been brought nicely under control. I'd say if I bring CPU use on draw calls down about 6~7 more percent TOPS, I'll have this thing licked. None of the map is dropping below 50fps with the UI off at this point (I think I may have seen 49.x somewhere for a split second, that's it), so it's slowly but surely getting better (with reflections on as previously posted but not maxed).
This means it's consistently running equal or better to West Coast USA (unless you have a really old video card, then on low/lowest settings you can still get very smooth FPS [55~60 with a 6570 1gb ddr3 Radeon on x58 system] - that's the secret!). Yes, this will run on integrated GFX on intel 4xxx series desktops or newer quite well on lower settings, this is what is taking me so long here.

What are your favorite stores? Would you like them parodied? There will be Blowes, Homo Depot, Sprawl Mart, Awful House, Coma (footwear store, with the dead puma on it), and a few others such as ones seen in Roane County (ones that would parody national chains not local ones).

--Cheers!
Picture: LOD (1st one past full detail), it's not easy lining up all those curbs around corners with UV's. I am getting a knack for it now after enough of them though. Blue lines separating identical textures are good - line colors separating different types of textures don't matter for this sake of argument, but white lines separating identical textures = a separate draw call. They ALL add up. At this point each building I fix up or road chunk (unless it's used a lot) adds <1 more FPS, but, little by little, it's getting closer to perfection.
The only difference between this one and Burger World is colors of trim and stucco, and a single door's placement. It will be a quick swap once I am done with this one (<10 mins).

 

Honestly, your map looks great, I think it will be more successful than all the other Los Angeles/San Andreas inspired maps I've seen on the forum (a hell of a lot, like, it is more than the amount of official vehicles in the game)

 

I would love IHOP/IHOB and Jersey Mike's to be parodied.

 

What is iHOB?

 

iHOB is "International House Of Burgers". Apparently, they recently decided to rename the brand to that, even though they still make pancakes.

 

Hardware store, one you can drive in and inside yard. I mean who would not have some need to have parodies about hardware stores, we all have some experiences with them and you could kinda made it to be auto-x course that looks like an hardware store as some of them cover huge area. Driving between shelves etc. trough doorways, handbrake turns, jumps, gigantic fun.

By using clever lods and reusing materials etc. it should be possible to make performance firendly too, kinda like parking house but different. It will be big job of course and planning needs to be done to make it work, but maybe you can even make reuse of some modular blocks etc.

I have heard there are hardware stores of multiple floors in US, it could be some cool scenarios one could put into such structure too.

Funny show I used to watch, you can see very little of large doors interior areas etc. but it is kinda entertaining show:


Bob has learned lot of new skills, so some challenge like this might be in order, to go even further, but also very much of point is also that such building would be really awesome point of interest on map.


Indoor Go kart track might also be something crazy and fun to have, but always have to mind amount of total materials in scene and sensible LOD usage etc. Naturally such things will also take long time to make, but generally go kart track is only few different kind of objects, which gets reused.

Now cool point is that put some fencing around buildings etc. and you can make nulldetail everything inside for quite close distances without player never seeing such being done and performance impact is quite small.

Sure vram usage is there, but 6GB is most common memory size and on high detail it would be ok to use 4GB or more, I guess as long as there is lower options.

Yeah, my ideas tend to be something else that feet on ground kind, but it helps to evolve, keep building map 6 more months and I'm quite certain you have much bigger budget in terms of hardware performance as software evolves

 

Doing my best here! Trying to make sure I get it running nice and smooth for the majority of folks - within reason, of course. Going to go back to add some more content again shortly. Thanks - always nice to hear nice things. Promise not to disappoint - will do the best I can here.

Never seen a Jersey Mike's but I will look it up surely in a bit.
IHOP or 'International Hell of Pancakes' as it used to be known (well close enough) will be in. Maybe I can switch pancakes with burgers and no one will notice - except those who ordered pancakes. I might just call it 'Dead Lazlo's Diner'...

I can do indoors stuff (well more of it anyways), and certainly plan to do so! They said it 'can't be done on this game engine' - THAT IS TOTAL BULL, it can CERTAINLY be done. Especially now that computer hardware is advancing more than it was before. Certainly we'll have more indoor goodness in future versions. The subway stations and tunnels were just merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg here.

Wait till you all see the abandoned mall you can drive through! That's coming up late this month or next month sometime - no firm date but much of the gfx to it are already in! This is why I need to make the map running well enough already so that I can add all kinds of cool stuff.
Yes, The Bob has learned a lot of new skills, and is doing his best to make sure the map doesn't run like poopoo while still being STUFFED FULL OF CONTENT!
Interiors are not included on LOD's, if they are, they're just the entrance room, but normally, no, the interiors are not visible. You can see this on the subway station if you zoom backwards while looking at it underground. The platform itself will remain, as will the building exterior features (exterior LOD's are better this time around, worked on that some), but the inner station and stairs and even the entrance room of it disappears when you're a half block to a block away, because it's not needed. Now in the new version of the Beta that will come out hopefully within the next 8~10 days sometime, there's also a middle LOD with the entrance rooms in it to the station.
So yeah, throw out all the ideas you want folks, doesn't hurt - and as always that's what this thread is for!

---

As slow-going as re-doing all these meshes is, there's some visible progress. Just the Chicken Munch alone (building is used in two spots) helped noticeably (to me) - about 1.5fps better. Now about 71~74.5FPS here. Doesn't dip into the 60's at all anymore as it used to. Single building used in two spots sucked 1.5fps out of the map. Who would have thought? No visible difference other than a few free FPS!

Yes, it's the same map, the same spot, just slightly higher fps. Same settings, no interface, physics running. If I pause physics it will go about 3~4fps higher, not much of a jump, so it's not CPU bottle-necked much at all. Going to keep at it and keep improving little by little. GPU-limit is the speed when the physics are paused, so if I hit that, I know it's running well enough!

This spot was the slowest spot in the entire map when I put out the 1st beta. For me, it ran about 39~48 FPS through here (rarely dipped into the 30s at all), now it's a whopping 20fps faster, ranging from 58~63FPS at the lowest and up. Most spots are 55FPS and up in the map now, at the BARE MINIMUM. Most of it is better. I am going to try some more experiments with visibility blockers (occluders) in the future (which is why the car shadow sometimes disappears while driving on the raised highway, I will attempt to fix this!). Slowly (not so much anymore!) but surely I am getting there. Sorry for the same old same old but it's progress. Not to mention in this shot it's drawing an entire parking garage and the building blocking it.
Thanks @fufsgfen for helping me out with those draw call tutorials and a few other wild scientific experiments, that not even Captain Bunsen-Burner himself could top. As long as you stop crossing spider and snake DNA, and mailing them to me via neglected class we'll be okay, the post man almost got nibbled.

(that last bit wasn't supposed to make any sense, at all...)

--Bob out!
--- Post updated ---
Editing in here:
For the person who said 'smooth out the highway', well, a portion of that, I agree fully on that!

There's now much less of a rise at this bridge, it should be just enough to clear tractor-trailers (lorries) going onto the raised section of on-ramp there past the bridge. Having such a huge height looked a little weird too, to be honest. So I agreed & lowered it as much as I could for this intersection without creating much, much more work!
Other (raised highway) slopes will be smoothed out a bit and made more natural, when I make the piece in the future for that. However, keep in mind, play some GTA SA a bit (not GTAV), and enjoy flying off the slopes in the roads some, and you'll see what I mean (in BeamNG, they shouldn't be drastic enough to trash the car, but enough to have some fun & catch a little air time).
More pictures in the future, hopefully some new stuff to see!

 

Put tow hitch to that Pessima, attach camper trailer and have a blast!

 

Wtf?
IHOP sounds better tbh

 

IHOB is just a stunt, just in attract people.

 

Hey Bob! im a big fan of your maps.. is it possible to try a beta out?

 

Almost definitely not, because of a magic little thing...
"Patreon backing incentive"

On topic...

Do you have any progress on beat up old roads? Most of your roads that I see are main highways and stuff, what about badly maintained roads in poor neighborhoods?