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

That's the best thing about BeamNG, its potential greatness scales with available computing power. Other games are designed to the hardware capabilities common in their own day, and eventually begin to feel dated. BeamNG is designed so that, depending on how it's used, it could theoretically overwhelm any current or future computer - so every time computers become more powerful, it opens up new possibilities and expands existing ones. I'm still waiting for the day 16x16km becomes the "standard" map size for Beam.

 

Bob be like...


I love the idea of giant maps with photorealistic terrain. And the author of this thread is one of the people who will get us there. Imagine a map of Alaska where you can drive from Anchorage to the foot of Denali, then crawl 20,000 feet to the summit. Or a map of Greece where you can experience all the scenery on a drive from Sparta to Athens. Or a map where you can have drag races on a pair of 4 kilometer runways.

Wait a sec...

I think I might make a map that's nothing more than an airport with a 5 km runway just so I can say I built something bigger than Bob's version.

 

@geobeck The "Bob will still manage to break it." part is legend ... but it's truthful, and I laughed almost to tears reading it because it's 65536% true.
I've been busting game engines and limits of game engines since the original DOOM for Ms-Dos on my AMD-486 dx/2 66 (I still love the first episode of Doom, it has a special place in my heart, having gotten it on a shareware CD in my Sound Blaster 16 media kit with a 2x 'reveal' matsushita CD-ROM drive...which plugged into a proprietary header on the Soundblaster, this was just before Atapi-IDE interface was standard). That was circa 1994~1995 or so, we could only afford a 'used' computer but it was actually pretty good for the time. I think a Pentium 90 or 100mhz was top-dog at the time but they were over two thousand dollars just for a business-class Dell tower with a sound card if you were lucky (Dell's were actually GOOD back then, you were proud to have one). Sound cards weren't even standard back then, you had to request it or buy one and put it in yourself and hope you knew how to set what jumpers for IRQ, DMA, HDMA and such so that it worked with everything else in the computer and didn't lock it up while still being found by games.
Why that long tangent?
Well, it was back then when I wanted to make what I am making now for BeamNG Drive. It's been that long, over 25 years, but it's FINALLY happening. I'm no deity, I just happen to be in the right place, the right time, with the right combination of being stuck in my house physically disabled most of the days (some days I can walk okay as if nothing is wrong, other days when I walk I want to scream so much you'd think my trousers were full of murder hornets).

However, as I get older, I find less fun just playing the games VS making them. It is much more fulfilling to make games... and since Simcity 4 finally started getting a little long in the tooth after all these years, Simcity 2013 was a waste of time I never even bothered trying, and City Skylines road/highway network looks like something out of a cartoon (absolutely NO effort for realism!)... I found myself at a loss for a good city builder.

So I thought one day I could somehow model a puzzle-piece type network into BeamNG, since I liked to map, and in-stead of building some city to LOOK AT, I could build a city I could drive through, explore, and interact with (in the future for that last bit). At the same time I didn't know how to model, but if you want to do something bad enough, you will learn how to do it eventually. If I can understand the internal workings of a four-cycle combustion engine, then I can certainly figure out how to model on the computer. I did eventually learn (5/2018), after at-the-time 2.5 years of beamng map modding, and I haven't looked back one bit since then.

Do you love city builders, do you love CREATING things especially in open-concept sandbox style games? This is the ticket, seriously. It's much more redeeming than just playing a game. Although, that said, I still play some games - usually 2d ones not 3d ones - but only if I've been getting enough done or just plain cannot get anything done. Not much of an FPS gamer here, only the old style ones, such as Ion Fury was good for (that's newer, but on the Duke 3D build engine). I don't want to need a degree to figure out the latest FPS game, I just want something simple; because if I am going to put a lot of effort into something, it best be this map project.
@NGAP NSO Shotgun Chuck The only real limiting thing to this game is really the limits of FPU processing and the fact that a floating point value is exactly that, it floats, does not stay put, and the magnification of such rounding imperfections gets exponentially worse as you go out (Roane County shows this a little bit, but it's tolerable and almost unnoticable unless you stop). For the same reason, that map's railroad tracks aren't always perfectly lined up - that was a mistake having that feature in that map. Eventually one day I might be able to import the map and make a custom railroad track for it but that's far off in the future. However, I left it in as a WIP feature that just didn't pan out as well as I wish it would have - lesson learned - they'd sure come with the pitch forks for me if I took them out. No matter how many times I fix them, they'll move a bit between saving and re-loading the map later. Think of it as like a Lego mat - the base plate things - like many of us 80's or 90's kids had, you can only place things where intended, in a grid-like form. The mat gets bigger - less precise - the further you go out from 0,0,0 in any and all directions. Get 5 miles out from center and you'll see a little wobble, curbs might not line up better than an inch or two (2cm), otherwise it's not too bad. Get 10 miles out and it gets hard to make things line up easily to the point where vehicles might catch edges of jersey barrier and so-forth. Get 15~20 miles out and the shake gets pretty obvious and you can see the shimmer while you drive.
So unless there's a way to get a slightly better more accurate float, we're somewhat limited to roughly a dozen miles at any point from center of 0,0,0. HOWEVER, we're only limited until someone figured out to keep 0,0,0 where the player car always is, and move the world in-stead of the player. There's ALWAYS* a way, ALWAYS; and if anyone thinks differently you may not have sat and pondered deep thought long enough. My brain has always excelled at problem solving skills, and somewhat at problem abatement/avoidance; but that becomes super handy when you're dealing with early access software, especially when you have been modding for 25+ years and have a knack for knowing 'how games do things'. I had a very long time to think out exactly what I wanted to do, even before I finished the old So-Cal rendition of the highways in this map back in 2016~2017 when I was working on it back around game version 0.04 ~ 0.06 (I originally submitted the mesh-road carving idea for the editor). I wanted to build a city, I wanted to build this city, I just didn't know how. I didn't give up, I kept learning, and getting better, putting a lot of time into Roane County to help the developers fine-tune memory footprints and engine streaming when playing super-huge maps with a lot of assets. Roane County is a map that has roughly 4x the square mileage that this map has, but where Roane County lacks in precision and detail and urban environments, this map will come in to fill that void. Roane County will never be this detailed as some spots of this map, but that doesn't mean I am going to leave it languish after I am done with Los Injurus. That said, regardless of what gets done with my maps, you'll still be enjoying the benefits of a better game experience even when you don't have any of these maps, as I have helped ferret out numerous game limitations and bugs by designing my maps, both known and unknown bugs to the very people that code the game.
*Another way around the limits of map design is to just have a tunnel or other pinch-point with a loading zone every 12~15 miles or so to keep things from getting too shaky due to floating point issues. Making roads curve/winding and terrain differ helps get more mileage out of these limits. Loading zones suck, I though we got rid of those when we got GTA SA back in 2004 or 2005; but I might be able to tolerate them if it isn't in the middle of the city. However to go from one map to another, or from one map to a long route through the mountains or along the coast which drops me off at another map, that could be okay provided the player doesn't hit them without warning.
That said, as always, I'm not stopping map development anywhere in the near or perceivable future, so no worries, there will always be a new road you didn't find or a new place to explore or even a new properly-sloped intersection to help you wear the paint off the car's roof.
Oh, and technically, I should have called this the state of Los Injurus, or the county (not country), but I am leaving it at city. It could be expanded in the future if I ever find that filling up the map still leaves me unfulfilled. Hence the road that goes to the end of the terrain and just STOPS, there might be something there one day...one day.

 

It would work if you could build the delay into the gameplay, like maybe have non-playable railways around the edge of a map, with AI trains that would always have a train crossing when the player approaches. Or to mix things up, another edge could have a major intersection with a vehicle collision where you can't proceed until the tow truck has moved the vehicle. Or you get forced over by drug dealers who hassle you until they realize you're not the guy from GTA. Endless possibilities!

All that old computer talk made me nostalgic. The first PC I owned was a Pentium (I remember wondering how I'd ever fill up a 1.7 GB hard drive), but it wasn't my first computer. I learned Windows 3.0/3.1 on my dad's 286, 386, and 486, but my first computer had the best sound chip of its day: the SID chip on the Commodore 64. That was my dad's computer until it became mine when I went away to university. I had several boxes of 5 1/4" floppy disks full of games, including a few in unassembled BASIC, which you could modify easily and play around with the results.

A few of those were the early version of the player-centered model you mention. My favorite was Elite (the inspiration for EVE Online), but the first one I played around with was called Star Wars (not licensed, the only resemblance being the enemy ship looked like |‒O‒| ). There was no 3D model; not on a VIC 20. The environment in front of the player was rebuilt in every frame. It was just a bunch of dots representing a motion starfield, the enemy ship, and two lines connecting the bottom corners of the frame to the center whenever you fired your lasers. My modification consisted of copying the entire code several times to make different levels, with different ships (character graphics) and different colored lasers.

I think Elite had a calculated 3D model, but nothing was 'rendered' unless it was in view. The only rendering was the ships and space stations, which were simple 3D wireframes. You could see the position of ships that weren't in view from the ingenious 3D radar view (the evolution of which made it into EVE). But in that game, the player was always in the center.

Maybe the inspiration for large worlds lies back there in the 1980s. Or maybe it's in Minecraft's chunk system... it suffers from floating point limitations with its deformed farlands, but those are so far away they're hard to reach in normal gameplay without teleporting. Maybe Beam maps could be divided into chunks, where the chunks you can reach are pre-loaded, but each has its own coordinate system.

I'm just spitballing, because that's beyond my programming knowledge. I'll ask my 20-year-old son, who surpassed my programming knowledge when he was in his teens, and has written a 2D Minecraft clone for a TI calculator. He builds operating systems for fun.

 

Computers are tons of fun. I still play TANK WARS which was the first or second PC game I ever played (I didn't count using an 8086 in elementary school circa 1988 to play Oregon Trail - and losing - repeatedly). I have zero issue firing up a copy of Windows 3.1 to play SIM TOWER or YOOT TOWER (same thing, Yoot has a few more features, like a sequel or 'season pass edition' type, not really a whole new game), since Project Highrise is just missing that special something I loved Simtower for. Heck, even MS-DOS 3DFX-supporting WHIPLASH (AKA Fatal Racing) is still installed here.
Everything's always Rosey with Rose-colored nostalgia-spectacles though. The thorns are still there, we just don't get poked by them as often.
A note on why those FLOATING POINT units get less precise as we go out further.
Say you have a system for coordinates, you can do it with the ALU which is a true 'core' by definition, and gives medically precise repeatable results every time - you always get the same number. You could also do it with the FPU which is 10~100x faster depending on your method of coding, and so-forth, but the number might vary just slightly. This number would be capped at 8 digits of precision, be it 1.2345678 or 1234567 or 12345.678, the rest trailing would be cut off. At 0,0,0 this number is very small. The computations (visual only mind you, this bug doesn't affect reliability of physics itself) would only vary by a paper-thickness a few houses down the road; but since we're capped by 8 digits in a value for expediency sake, if we go ten miles down the road this number is exceeding what 8 digits can represent (as the end is cut off on the small end) since it's so far away. So here in-stead of a paper's thickness imprecision three houses down, it might be a telephone book's thickness of imprecision (not quite, maybe half that, but for argument sake I will leave it) between frames, and since you're so far away from 0,0,0 that this will change notably between frames. This gives you the shimmy shimmy shake Roane County is known for (there's a slight bit in this map Los Injurus, but it's not a meaningful amount and shouldn't be an issue). Any truly large map approaching or exceeding 8km x 8km may start to show this depending on where the game world is centered and where you are.
FACT: If anyone has DOOM for the SNES, the SNES Super FX chip (code named Mario Chip) such as was used in Star Fox is an FPU that is clocked at 4~12 mhz or around there (not precisely). It has the ability to do rapid though imprecise math to quickly render polygonal surfaces to the screen. A custom engine was actually written for SNES Doom and therefor it has many features stripped out. However, it does have one quirk that the PC version did not have - if you go up to the outside corner of a wall, and rotate your view left or right, you'll see the textures on the polygons moving just a little bit left and right leading to 2~3 pixels of imperfection in the texture's edges. This is the same imprecision that affects games to this day but most games hide this rather well since they do not do physics 2000 times a second. The PC version's similar quirk was killed early on with the fix of the LWE (Long Wall Error) fix around 1.2 or so within the first year of release, which had caused long walls to jump around a bit as the number got too large for the FPU to process precisely and instead was divided up by the game internally. While doom wasn't true 3d (it had no care for Z height unless it was to do with being 56 pixels high to fit the player, or just a floor to ceiling differentiation, all objects block infinitely high unless playing source ports), it really made us feel like we were there - even if we had to forgo room over room until there was a complete rewrite of the engine code in Windows years later.
Where am I going with this?
It's all perspective. We must take the good with the bad. There are still some things modern computers are not fast enough for, but there's so much fun stuff we CAN do that we still will never find time to do it all.

You can also do chunks of terrain by converting them to mesh. Terrain chunks themselves can't have collision on more than one terrain at a time per-map. This won't be addressed until post 1.0, unfortunately, as per the developers. Current maps use mesh skybox surrounding a higher-detailed real terrain. That said, I will be satisfied and sit over with the have's, and not the have-not's on this discussion. As far as maps are concerned, we have so many must-have features now when designing a city VS just 3 years ago when I officially started Los Injurus development.
I hope this explanation helps.
Nota Bene:
Early games used BSP (Binary Source Partition) to render ray-casts which allowed the game engine to render only what was needed from furthest to closest, with the closest things overwriting the furthest things for proper illusion of depth. This way the game only had to render what absolutely was needed, referencing player position with that of the reject (discard) block map which was built (on all known BSP games) before run-time in the level editor finalization process.
While I used DOOM as an example for disregarding z-height, even when toying with the AI in GTA IV (not V, but IV), I noticed that the GTA AI vehicles and characters absolutely have zero regard for verticallity between nodes. They do not care nor notice if you stick a few half-pipe ramps in the middle of the highway and sit back idly by watching the cars drop to explodey death when they shoot up and off them at highway speeds none-the-wiser.
You only need to process enough to keep the illusion / immersion going. The rest we can disregard what's not needed, and focus that time and effort (both ours and the PC's time) on things we can and will notice that improve the gameplay. Short of logical reasons, this is why there's AI paths almost everywhere, tons of ramps, unlevel intersections, a monster sized airport (we boast the largest, most complex airport in this game to date), but I have sidelined extra detail on buildings, some texture perfection, tunnel 'zones' for specific light levels (there were some but it broke), a sound stage and so-forth.

---

To that end, I will let everyone know I am working on the subway currently. Once I have it textured to bliss, I will be then integrating it into the existing subway station building, and possibly replacing the building itself. Once it is in, I will make variation buildings also to get more mileage out of this asset and it's textures. I have considered a modular subway station, but it's not useful enough nor will it be beneficial in any way to off-set any raise in draw calls (CPU rendering overhead) that this would cost us.
Trying to convert these texture assignments over is almost as difficult as bathing an angry cat WITHOUT wearing any armor.
Textures used are for example only at this point and may or may not change in the future (that said there will be subway stations with different wall textures, etc, some of which I've made already).
Regardless of the above texture mapping torture for me, know well that at-least no matter how long it takes me (and I DO take my time with it), it's not going to require you to purchase a DLC pack to get the subways in the map when they're done once it's released! Patreon support (while appreciated) is completely optional, and only allows users to try things out before they go mainstream. That said, one person supporting this map for one month CAN buy an asset like this if you wait and catch it on sale (otherwise, it takes on average of 2~5 donations in one month to purchase an asset). I think that's worth it, considering how polarized this map is from the majority of maps out there for this game.
Remember, supporting Los Injurus City Map is not only building an awesome feature-packed AAA-game sized map for BeamNG, it's also giving right back full circle a complete infrastructure kit so that anyone who's smart enough (bored enough?) to make their own city, can use these things and put out more high-quality content at a faster pace. EVERYTHING in this map is completely modular and intended to be used as puzzle pieces to make whatever city a user desires. Don't like something I did? You can change it in a few minutes with the editor! You're only limited by time and your own knowledge or ability to learn said knowledge. Everything is right in the forest brush at your fingertips just waiting to be placed and added into the scene. This is a boon for people who do Youtube crash videos but even to users who think 'hey, I want a road or path here, I think I will add my own' requiring only very little knowledge to personalize your copy of the map to your heart's content. For those who do decide to use the content packs in the MRK folder to make a city map of their own and can't find something they need or otherwise feel something is missing, DO request it as often it sometimes isn't in only because I haven't converted it out of my modeling program yet due to time constraints. Nothing is set in stone that isn't already in-game, and even what is, is totally modular and can be customized in almost limitless ways. Need a jump? Add it!, House in your way or fence blocking your progress? Remove it or move it. Need an immersive RP environment? Take a little time and dress up the scene! Want a short-cut road and have some free time? You can make this happen just as good as I can, as all the required tools are right in the editor or map itself.
--I wish everyone only the best, healthiest, and most fun times using Los Injurus City map. If you have even half the fun playing it as I do/did making it, I will find this quite fulfilling. If not, I want to hear from YOU!

 

Perhaps I am not understanding this as well as I should be, but wouldn't there likely be a way to make some sort of switch with more or less visual precision that you could adjust to accommodate a faster or slower CPU? My understanding is that a faster or higher cored CPU like a Threadripper might actually have the processing power to use the ALU without having to rely on the FPU. This would get at least a few more digits of accuracy while retaining compatibility with slower PCs, and make much larger worlds possible for those with better PCs.

Spoiler: Note

To anyone who says that I must be someone with amazing specs who doesn't understand normal specs, read my signature. I have a processor almost solely designed for business class work, and while it does have six whole cores, they aren't that fast and it shows when it counts. This suggestion is only to get the most out of the game so that when time passes, and everyone has 8+ core CPUs, we can all enjoy a better experience that was developed now, rather than going "wen relez" at devs who are doing their best to move as fast as possible.

 

I'm not sure if modders can do much to precision aspect, I would think it is choice that developers have to make.

If person wants more fps in pretty much any DX11 game, fast GPU gets only so far, then one needs really fast single core performance and in case of BeamNG still many of those cores.

With Vulkan this changes a bit so that more cores becomes higher preference over fast single core of CPU, well in theory, in BeamNG there still is LUA part of the game which partly is relying on single CPU core.

BeamNG has come long way since some years back though, but I'm not sure if shaking issues will vanish as precision issues can be from using floats or doubles instead of more accurate data types like decimal, thing is that floats are fast to compute, whole sourcecode needs to be changed if wanting to use something that offers more precision, 32 bit parts might need to be get rid of completely too to support bigger accurate numbers, it is somewhat unlikely change to happen I guess, but you never know of course.

There is something about this accuracy thing if someone is interested to explore further:
https://softwareengineering.stackex...63/what-causes-floating-point-rounding-errors

Now switching to decimal might bump up need for fast single core performance too, so having lot of cores might not actually help as much there, threading is somewhat troublesome to make happen and it can be that switch to decimals or more probably their 64bit versions that would probably be needed to store enough big precise numbers, might then end up bringing huge need for single core performance, also I don't know much about latency, but that is one thing developers have to worry about too.

American Truck Simulator does not have shaking, but I have though it might move road instead of truck, which would keep truck close to 0 and less precision issues of course then. I'm not alone with the thought, but also I don't think anyone knows for certain if they move road or truck.
Pretty much any other game is giving a shake when traveling far enough.
When CPU's can do 64bit decimals really really fast and no old CPU's are needed to be supported, I guess then we start to see gigantic worlds with good physics without much of shaking, but I'm not sure if we are getting anyway near of that anytime soon.
I think that Core 2 Duo support has started to disappear, there is quite many CPU generations made after that and if we could just start to see CPUs becoming enough good to support more precise datatypes on realtime gaming, then it is going to be more than 10 years, probably even 20 years until we have such games, I hope I'm wrong though

 

We're still a long way off from the average desktop or laptop consumer being able to run 2000hz on hundreds/thousand+ nodes and beams yet, even with all cores. FPU is just so much faster and (I believe less hops through the CPU and) also better luck with the path prediction inside the CPU itself like Ryzen has between cycles. You can do ALU stuff on a game like GTA as it's only 20hz on 1/20th the nodes or around that. Even 100 vehicles on GTAV is barely able to match 1 vehicle in BeamNG Drive. ALU has the precision for game environments, but doing this for all the nodes we have here at 2000 times a second is bonkers unless as you mentioned someone has a Threadripper. I think that'll have to wait for BeamNG Drive 2 ... or 5... can't predict the future. Of-course, this likely isn't news to you either as you have some experience in the field also.
That said, thankfully you helped a bunch when it came to diagnosing what slows down the game (DX11) back in 2018 so I could make a better city for everyone here - which I appreciate to this day.

When it comes to core 2 performance... Well, if the application you're running doesn't take into account the new instructions that processors now have, or use the excessive amounts of threads that we have today, it's really NOT that bad. However, when you get into H.264/265, SSE 4.2 (Core 2 has 4.1 IIRC), AVX / AVX2 / AVX512 (512 is on newest 11000 series intel chips and last few HEDT gens on x299 ONLY), heavy multi-threading, branch prediction, better multi-tasking and larger on-chip caches (Such as the 72mb of Cache on this 3950x), there can be a MAMMOTH / exponential difference in processing power. Just look at Cinebench R.20 or R.23 scores for a core 2 duo Conroe family e6600 we all pined for at the end of 2006 VS a 5700x Ryzen or 11700k intel chip... it's night and day difference... and then see even that result get absolutely hamburgered by the 64-core, 128-thread Threadripper* 3995WX with 8-channel memory insanity. Insanity should be a fairly fitting word here! I really would *LOVE* to have a Threadripper system, to see how BeamNG Drive would run on Vulkan with it; though I know in my heart Vulkan renderer is not nearly ready for that type of parallel processing of draw calls yet as I can barely use more than 80% of my CPU here on anything - PLUS the fact that to be honest, this 3950x really does do everything I need in a better-than-timely manner (I highly recommend it actually even for x299 users!). Honestly that money could be much better served expanding drive space or buying more memory, or purchasing an upgrade to my world machine license to use more cores.
Again, of-course, I am not telling you anything you don't already know, but yes we've still come a long way even if not much changed between 2012 up to around 2017 or whenever Ryzen landed when intel was stagnant. I am ever-so-thankful for competition - so maybe those dream-world open-world games won't be dreams for very long if this competition stays heated for a few more years. Look at FUEL or THE CREW 2, which I believe use procedural generated map decorations over a pre-rendered static terrain for a HUGE environment. Being able to cruise for dozens of miles is great - provided you have a destination worth going to of-course, but I am sure we'll get there one day that's not as far away as we might think.
*For those with the money, please don't buy a Threadripper to run BeamNG Drive currently, we're not there yet. Wait for the renderer to be improved over the next several months and then contact someone who already has one to get some performance figures to see if it's really worth the investment. Until the Vulkan renderer appeared out of nowhere recently, I couldn't even get more than 70~75% use on my Ryzen 3950x, so going above a 3900x/5900x isn't worth the cost of entry for a BeamNG Traffic-making Machine. I just wanted to list this to save folks pain. A 3700x/5700g/5800x is about as high as you'll wish to go on a decent budget while still being able to run a bunch of traffic decently, and also I wish to mention that there is a good jump (15~20%) in per-thread performance from a 3000 to 5000 series Ryzen processor due to cache and memory latency improvements which benefits physics and encoding big-time. If you already have an 8700k/8086k (6c 12t) processor or better, or x299 HEDT system similarly equipped, it's not worth it to upgrade yet and you should consider getting at-least another two years out of your system unless you REALLY have an upgrade itch and can locate your desired parts without much ado.
That said, this 3950x / 2070 Super / x570 chipset PC with complete all-air cooling (thanks Noctua!) is near dead silent unless I'm running 3d graphics in which the video board makes just a little noise. This is absolutely a dream to work at compared to my intel Haswell (4000 series from 2014) PC from many years ago that roared with just a stock-clocked quad-core. I cannot stress enough for those who work at their PC especially late at night when it's quiet hours, to have a whisper-quiet computer if only for sanity's sake. I can hear my cat snoring 8~10 feet away louder than this thing right next to me on the desk.
I hope some of this (disorganized heap of) info is helpful for folks.

In other news: Got a back injection today, already feel a bit better. Hope this panacea is not just the anesthetic local to my back but hoping that it stays that way. It will take two weeks for full effect, but I was really at wit's end with it prior to this. Keeping finger's crossed! I should be able to return to modeling/mapping by tomorrow (reasons for which I am not doing so now should be obvious). I have really been in a hurt locker the last few months especially this month and with hurricanes coming ashore it's absolutely murder for pain sufferers.
--That's all for right now.

Keep those building and map addition suggestions coming so I have some inspiration of what to build (or buy) next after I am done with my subway station. The subway station is taking a little more time through the optimization phase, as I found some dis-joined or improperly stretched UV's that I wished to clean up - even if it's much more than likely I would ever be the only person to know there's a difference. This keeps performance up, and visual quality up, too. Example: If I spend an extra day cleaning up UV's and lower draw calls by doing so (VS raise them with ludicrous detail which won't benefit map immersion, flow, or playstyle!) I can usually fit an extra building or two on that block / scene and still have better performance. This is why Los Injurus performance is 'surprisingly good' (to quote reviewers), for as many city blocks as there are in many scenes. It boils down to TIME spent VS PERFORMANCE desired - the more time I spend the better the FPS and the more immersion and detail I can pack in.

 

This is with weak intel chip, if it would have more cores they indeed would do nothing at all:


Overhead and latency are part of it too I guess, if tiny waits are added here and there, you have then situation where CPU and GPU are just waiting, even single core could be less than 100%, for example in Cities Skylines that has been a thing as drawcalls got higher.

With gaming monitors, people then want 120fps or more, these overheads and delays add each frame, same way as drawcalls add up each frame and you can do only that much for each second.

One D15 is over 700 nodes, then beams and all stress calculations, so 16 of them is well over 10 000 nodes being processed at 2000Hz, game still runs at 60fps as long as weak as intel (i7-8086k) power limited uselessness is actually managing to keep it's clock speed.

R9-5900X certainly is keeping it's clock speed, but funny things happen if I add 8 more cars to this 24 cars, fps drops to ridiculously low, while technically it should do twice the cars of that intel, indeed it does not work out as single core limitation happens, despite 5900X having huge improvements even over 3950X in single core performance.

Of course this is not comparision of CPUs as because of weak ass GPU currently on Ryzen rig can't use same graphics setting and can't be bothered to change settings, but just to show how in DX11 version of game there indeed is such limits still, but so there are with all of the games I play.

It is quite huge number of nodes that any of these CPUs currently can do with fast floating point operations, that is FPU, but slow calculations would just suck as even with Threadripper you would still be seriously limited how many vehicles you can do.

Best way to deal with shaking is getting old, when you get enough old, you won't even notice that shaking as you get bit slower and have AA applied by your eyes naturally, all the shaking of your own just harmonically dampens any shaking on screen, I can play 30km by 30km map in BeamNG just fine when not using semi as whatever shaking there is I can't even notice when driving

 

Yeah 100% with you on those DX11 draw call limitation bottleneck issues. That's why I mentioned to give a pass on the 16-core models on AM4 and go with a 12-core max, otherwise you only really get to run another 2~4 vehicles or so before it's down to the same speed comparing 12 and 16 cores. It doesn't stack well until you get a well-designed (low draw call!) scene and use VULKAN or DX12.
MS Flight Sim 2020 and Fallout 4's downtown Boston (especially with scrap mods which turn off pre-combining of geometry) exhibit the same DX11 issues.
To that end I'm trying to be super-efficient with draw calls. I can usually create a large-lot building such as a big-box store and the building itself is easily less than 20 - often less than a dozen draw calls. This keeps the scene budget very open so you can run a LOT of traffic. I figure I can give an extra detail pass if I am not happy with the realism of the scene in specific places *IF* we have the scene budget left over WITH TRAFFIC considered. I don't want to make the city as real as humanly possible with tech today and have it chug at 20fps as soon as you add a few cars. As the engine gets better, so will this map. I already have quite a few models (as it may sometimes have looked like I was not doing much) that have higher detail but higher draw calls, which I won't be adding in until later on in the project. The current subway is an example. It's very very plain, it doesn't even have it's own brightness zones (which it should, and will get later). However, I'm working on a better subway. It'll be a tiny bit more performance intensive, however, it'll also be a lot nicer to look at too, if you manage to wedge a vehicle down there to look at it anyways.
TL-DR, I am doing my best to keep the city immersive, fun, but above all GOOD FPS so that you can add traffic in and enjoy what this game can really be. It's only so much fun to go at it alone. I will improve areas that are complete or near complete as time goes on and slowly bring the requirements up a little bit for the map, hopefully not much faster than computing can keep up with it. I'm simplifying the fancy aged tunnels over by the airport just a little bit (guide-rails removed, for example, and lanes widened) to help with the issue on max detail with 8gb cards getting overwhelmed. It was just a little too much too soon but I'll still hang onto the old models in the event I wish to put it back later on in the project if we all end up with 16gb+ video cards.

You call your 8086k weak. It's not weak, not if it's properly cooled anyway and on a board with solid enough VRM to keep the juice flowing! It's not cutting edge anymore, but it's still quite a good chip and fine for gaming - even if it can't run the most BeamNG cars. I would be quite thrilled with it, if it was all I had, and still be able to test traffic 'okay' (you really have to get 16+ vehicles in a scene to see if traffic screws up bad or not, if you use less than 10 or so, you won't catch all the issues or at-least not as quickly).
However, you're totally spot-on with the 5900x and draw calls crippling it (along with any other chip) with DX11. I am so glad we got Vulkan. It's a dream come true honestly, because with the direction processors are going, it's pretty much the only solution. A 5000 series processor has an exact IPC gain over 3000 series including cache improvements of 19%. I do not think they included the GHZ speed increase in performance figures, so that'll throw an additional sum of improvement on the FPS also. This 3950x seems to sit happily around 4.25ghz most of the time on all cores, so to me it's not worth throwing money at it until AM5 comes around and even then I'm not jumping ship until 2nd gen AM5 stuff lands with faster DDR5 modules out in the wild and a-plenty.
*Note, for those of you with an OEM system or otherwise have a 4000-series processor, these have the cohesive L3 cache improvements of the 5000 series, but not the IPC gain (instructions-per-clock) of the 5000 series, so it's usually 3~5% faster in mixed work-loads over 3000 series chips. They're still plenty good though, as a friend bought a 430$ HP with the video card pulled, a 256gb SSD, 4600G cpu, 8gb of dual channel 3200mhz memory and an optical drive just a few months ago. She absolutely loves the performance and shockingly with a little added system memory and adding some external HDD's, the iGPU is competent and it is quite good at 720p and sometimes 1080p gaming with medium or low detail. Just thought I'd throw this out there as she quite well enjoys the thing and it has a half-decent 450w power supply to add a dGPU in later. It originally shipped with a 1070 Ti or 2070 GPU (forget!) but the original buyer pulled it to resale and re-sold the system without the dGPU for an absolute steal. There's a silver lining to everything.
Here's hoping that I don't blow the computer up again, BeamNG Driving it to death.

Map bug I just noticed: Yield signs are all roughly 2 meters too low in Z height. I will fix this via text editor (for consistency sake otherwise I'll NEVER find them all) shortly after I verify that this is indeed a bug and not just a game-cache model issue locally.
DERP OOPS. fixed it here. Forget if this affects the patreon preview version, let me know if it does and take a picture. I'll go ahead and speed up the next release window if so (more bugs found = sooner releases as I'd rather not have buggy rubbish for a map!).

 

Problem with computer upgrades is that one gets adjusted and then what once was decent is too slow, even realistically even older system would be just fine

8086K might not be slow indeed, it just has some annoying issues, like when you run it at stock clocks, when playing beam it tends to have just 4.3 to 4.4Ghz, it is way turbo boost is setup with that chip, any tiny amount of load on any of real or hyperthread core counts as usage and your 1 to 2 core only boost never happens.

With Ryzen on other hand, 1 to 2 core usage boost happens all the time with same OS and same gaming situation, so it is 4.8 to 4.95Ghz most of the time, when needed add that 20% or bit more IPC gain on top of that clock difference and intel just appears weak.

Overclocking intel chip to steady 4.8Ghz all the time or even up to 5Ghz of course then gives performance that chip is actually capable of, but default designed operation is what I refer weak, they could of easily made it perform 4.8Ghz all cores as stock, but chose not to and I guess in my mind that is kinda weak.


Oh and your drawcall optimizations are indeed noted and well received, you have learned so much of how to extract every ounce of performance from game engine, that is what makes this map really fun to play in as there is so much and so well performing gameplay to be had.

It is one thing to build a screenshot generator and completely different level of challenge to build fun gameworld that works and performs for the purpose, after all games are build to be played, not just to be screenshot generators!
Well, that is at least my and some other peoples point of view.

Arma3 is probably one of the worst games in regards of optimization that I have played (Cities skylines being another, but there is does not matter so much), Arma3 gets good boost with 5900X however towns still get like 30fps or less and I doubt no GPU or CPU on this planet will help with that, only way is to run really low draw distance with that

Most fun games that I play probably would run even with a potato, it is the content and gameplay, pretty graphics do make sales and certainly do some with the immersion, but gameworld that works is a lot.

BeamNG runs really well with weak hardware if one is willing to sacrifice shadows and reflections, but with high graphics it can be bit heavy compared to other games in GPU and CPU wise.

Now I should actually play bit more of your map as then I could give perhaps some suggestions as you requested earlier

 

@bob.blunderton For some more building ideas I suggest you check out this website. It is basically dedicated to Mid century architecture. https://roadarch.com/roadside.html

Also we need a trailer park. Probably on the beach of the lake someplace. Not quite as run down as Bombay beach, but rough.

 

Trailer park for sure. It would add some character to the lakeshore, maybe around the far end from the city, by the bix box store near the dirt track.


Could also do a homeless camp by the abandoned towers near the derelict mall. Build the contrast between the rich and poor areas of the city.

 

Spot on just about, where that trailer park goes is just under your camera position @geobeck.
@silvermanblu There won't be just one, I've got about 3~4 (forget) different mobile home models, mostly ready, though might not make the next beta.
There will be several trailer courts, in various different wealth levels (nicer, better kept & managed parks, and the poorer more derelict anything-goes parks where we'd all rather NOT live).
Actually, on that note, for young adults in the USA, I wholly recommend finding a *NICE* trailer court and buying a 3~6 year old mobile home to live in for a few years. If you can find one slightly older that needs a little work - and you are the handy type - they're a great starter home. Just keep in mind unless it's on real estate that you own, the loan IS like a car loan if it's not on owned land (e.g. if you rent the lot, it's a vehicle title loan you get, not eligible for first-time home-buyer subsidy from the USA govt), it can be harder to get these loans as the collateral is more volatile.
That said, I bought my first home - in a mobile home park - a 4 or 5 year old 1900 sq/ft Fleetwood double-wide with a completely open concept (it was downright CAVERNOUS, and was the biggest lot in the whole park, car-port, central AC w/perimeter vents, real wood cabinets, deluxe everything) and I absolutely LOVED it. I was so sad to sell it four years later when I saw the market about to crash (2006), though that said I did sell it for about 150% what I paid for it and walked away with pockets full and all loans paid.
As long as (if it's in a park) you can deal with the management's rules, and you don't end up in a dump or with a home that's leaking and falling apart, it can be a great cheap home without a whole lot to worry about (again, provided it's not 10 years old or more, they can start to really fall apart if not kept up at that age - mine was still like-new when I sold it).
Homes in mobile home parks wont generally appreciate in value unless you get it for a steal or if the market is totally in the dumps (opposite of what it is right now). The mobile homes on owned property on a proper foundation will generally hold their value if kept up, and can appreciate slightly.
The market right now for homes is so tight that the homes that were going to be demolished for the new state highway to go through are now being split into parts and carted away where I live. It's good they're saving them, though, as they're solid homes from what I can see (mostly stuff from the ranch-home boom of the 1950's~1960's). You can often secure these homes for 500~20,000$ provided you can set them up to get them moved out on short order otherwise you lose out... but it's super-duper cheap and having a home moved can cost 10,000$ easily depending on how far it has to go so it's not always worth it... but if you have the land...

---

More detailing on the newly redone highway has been done (it got all it's edging and I'm now blending the ramps to the surface road, doing striping, etc).
I made a few new pieces for the MRK SWO (Sidewalk only) kit:
Full length curb-cut (driveway apron), Patch / short piece (sorely needed!), 105 degree corner with ADA ramp, 120 degree corner with ADA ramp.
These pieces were sorely needed & will prove helpful and will be in the next beta in the MRK folder (and in the map).
Might make a few more until this is said and done.

 

Keep up the fantastic work Really impressed with the work you put into this!

 

Just so you know the map is still alive despite not having much in the way of progress pictures, there have been many little things I've been doing - such as finishing up this block. It still needs A LOT of work, but it's starting to take shape.

Last two shots are REALLY rough and very early, but in the very last shot you can see the roadway under the camera (that also accesses the lot to the police precinct / court house) will align with that really big set of stairs. Well we also know stairs = ramps in this map, so we see where this is going. There will be a small clearing between some buildings that will allow you to gain some speed on that side-road under the camera, and nail those stairs.

When things are done hopefully you'll see the grass & map itself is much greener, and that there will be plenty of things to go flying off of around here too.

Can't forget the primary mission objective in a car crash game can we? Sure there's plenty to be had just from driving around, but really, how long did you all wait to floor it when you saw those unlevel intersections, hills that suddenly start or stop, rocks turned jumps, or all the other things you can go flying off of (which are deliberately EVERYWHERE by design & I actually scrap/re-design things if there aren't enough launch points).
There's other little changes here and there around the map but they are not completed enough to show yet.
--That is all for right now.
EDIT:
So you CAN fly over the building! Will make sure that stays attainable for-sure. Have to hit it at 160+ though.

Will try and make the jump launch slightly smoother if possible, may or may not be.

 

Not a map progress post.
FOLKS NEAR LOUISIANA SHORE LINE IN USA NEED TO EVACUATE *NOW*, DO NOT HOLD OUT, DO NOT WAIT.
You may find good inexpensive lodging in central Tennessee where it should be safer for you.
A category 4 hurricane is expected to make landfall SUNDAY.

Just posted because I care, don't want to lose anybody.

 

This ugly mess will be getting worked on - not the nice concrete stuff, but where the black asphalt is.
The highway will be re-routed and will be more realistic in a few days when I have completed this area.

The texture upgrade to 0.23 version PBR materials* has been postponed until after the next supporter release, so that I can put the supporter / contributor beta out in the 1st week of September, in-stead of the third week of September. Don't need more of an excuse to hold up release.
The next beta update *SHOULD* be out on the 6th or 7th or so of September. Please make sure any bug reports make it to me no later than Wednesday so that I have ample time to fix (and remember to fix) them all as best as possible.
Part of the reason I am postponing the use of newer textures is because it's going to take TWO TO THREE WEEKS just to fix textures and get everything in order and perfected. I am talking about a COMPLETE texture overhaul, and while it won't be a night and day difference, the textures should definitely be improved. This *SHOULD* also in theory lower VRAM use, lower space on disk / download size, but no promises there as these new texture formats are new to me also. It has to be done sooner or later, and the longer I wait, the more there will be to do & longer the upgrade will take.
*This postponed texture update means the map should still work with 0.20 and above, but technically from here out I am only supporting game versions 0.23 and newer. Time has come that I update the editing version soon to take advantage of newer features, and raise FPS by using newer better & faster rendering texture formats and lower the CPU draw call load which in-turn also raises FPS a bit. This is separate from optimizing some of the single story ranch homes and two-story homes near the default spawn which will also (hopefully as time permits) be optimized when the texture upgrade happens.
--Stay tuned for map update progress pictures in the very near future.

Roadmap for the map project this year and possibly into 2022 as-needed:
The above-mentioned texture upgrades to bring this map asset list current with the game, new texture index format too. Will likely fix the lack-of-tire-marks issues with some road / concrete textures when I am working on the textures as this toggle is in the texture indexes/indices.
Of course build more city & incorporate more commercial models and textures into the map (ongoing*)
Of course build more roads, it's a driving game after-all (ongoing)
Add an asphalt race track, due to demand
Upgrade the older sections of highway that date back to 2016 from the original So-Cal map (like the dark paved section pictured above) (ongoing)
Add more spawn points
Release another public version of the map around September-October of this year, and then one at year end.
Supporter betas are currently monthly, though when the fiber internet lines come in the late spring 2022, I will be able to upload them more often
Add the 11-foot-8 and it's improved 11-foot-8-plus-8 bridges into the map, because every map should have very hungry a can-opener bridge.
Add in the ruined / derelict / abandoned section of town, which is over behind and in-front of the abandoned mall, some is already built. (ongoing)
Use my purchased commercial city builder to make some areas by the docks and some city sections. This will fill in quite a bit of space.
Try and get something done with the military base, it's looking rather MIA at the moment. Includes on and off-base housing & historic lighthouse landmark / shoreline park.
Get started on the very hilly shore-side part of town, because speeding down / jumping off super hilly roadways is always fun and we don't have enough of them. Think GTA-SA fun we had years back, that kind of stuff.
Upgrade the subway, it's still got it's proof-of-concept models except the sunken (not underground/roofed) station which is already mostly complete.
Rebuild the original concept area of town not far from the stunt park (ramp stuff near the highway on the other side of the lake from the default spawn, I think it has it's own 'car stunt park' spawn point). The stunt park will also get upgraded, or more will be built (I have not set this in stone, but use grid map's stunt areas for inspiration on what may be).
Add more highway signs, so people can actually end up somewhere in-stead of... lost! (ongoing)
Add more interiors where the frame-rate budget allows this. They won't be rendered when more than a half-block or block away so it shouldn't be an obvious drop in FPS or otherwise hurt performance. They will only be as detailed as absolutely necessary, and are NOT high priority.
Fix the tunnel models by the airport that lag users with 8gb or smaller VRAM on their video cards when using high detail textures. These tunnel models eat some 500mb of VRAM and I think I can get it down to 1/3rd of that or such.
Add more city and airport props (ongoing)
Beg the developers with longing puppy-dog eyes for more features that I need but might otherwise not deserve. (ongoing)
*ongoing = I am currently working on this, and/or it takes a while, and/or will continue to improve/progress in the coming months.

Some/many of these things are already in progress and/or ongoing. This list is merely a suggestion and a lot more than this goes on in the project, such as me spending hours this morning just fetching models and getting things together (some of which I can't add until the texture upgrade is done). This list is subject to change without prior notice, though I will try to be as transparent as possible with things; some changes may be due to game engine limitations or features added/removed. Congrats for reading all of this nonsense. This map could be 10~20gb by the time it's done, but I am heavily limited by VRAM right now as the engine cannot UNLOAD assets that are out of sight or far away while running the map.

 

Hello I am not sure why but for some reason the AI control menu is horribly laggy and makes the game unuseable on your map. Have you had any sucess using it? I have a 5950x, 3090, 64gb of ram and the game on an m.2 drive so if there is any addtional optimization to help the ui not lag I would be very appreciated if you could let me know. The game itself is very responsive even with lots of traffic it is just the ai control menu in particular that lags the game. And really only on this map which is a shame because it is such a large and beautiful map it would be fun to set up some chases.

 

It's not my map doing it, it's the early access game engine UI having an issue trying to display too many roads. Turn off your HUD mini-map (the map background isn't finished yet anyways). Use the in-car map device that sits on or in the dash-board, that one doesn't lag for some reason. This map and Roane County will lag pretty hard core in some spots (not in others) when you use the mini-map. The issue comes and goes, I don't have too much issue here with it. You can also just go into the APP setup and check 'not in cockpit' for it, so that it doesn't lag out.
Also, using too many UI APPS can cause lag, it ends up lagging out the UI script engine that runs it, and it keeps burying itself and it's limited to a single core for the UI currently.
Again, not a map bug, just fun with early access game engine. I can't fix the UI issue as it's a direct consequence of the AI paths (what the mini map is based on reading) that are FAR too complicated and custom to go and simplify - that's why the AI works as well as it does in my map. It also reads through any other 'decal roads' (these are road stickers on the terrain) in the area, even ones that might be used for terrain blending, trimming (better looking road edges) and even road striping (the lines). So yes, lots of lag. They will eventually fix the UI app, but in the mean-time just use the in-car GPS.

A friend of mine (Crash Boom Punk) has your same GPU / CPU / RAM setup, and runs it just fine. He loves the performance he gets and it completely makes his old 7980xe + OC look like old news. Even he was shocked at the upgrade around a year or so ago (or something like that) when the 5950x was out for a month or so. I just flatly said 'Why do you think I love this Ryzen so much, you just can't slow these things down unless you run it out of RAM'.
My 3950x + 2070 Super + 32gb 2xR RAM runs it fine unless I exceed the stupidly-low-for-what-it-cost 8gb of VRAM on the GPU (Grrrr, but speed-wise it's fine so I'll have it another year or two yet).
Hopefully I can keep the CPU+RAM and other goodies until BeamNG Drive 2 comes out in years and years.
You should get great performance, no issues here except the aforementioned High texture detail + 8gb VRAM issue (that will be alleviated partially soon, but may be only temporary as the map develops).

---

Progress on the area of map I showed before. I think you folks will really like this when it's done. Development (homes, businesses) will slowly thin out as the highway winds up the mountain. This highway will have an appearance similar to another nice mountain-hugging highway over near the huge civilian airport (miles and miles away from here). The black pavement (distance, center of 1st shot half-way between the bridge and where the road goes out of view) will be removed soon. A tunnel will be where the purple mark is on the 1st shot.

Please pardon the in editor shots, general mess and unfinished things, highway textures unfinished, but it'll give you a hint of what's to come. The screen-caps are much less than flattering. This terrain needs a LOT of working yet including adding small streams and more realistic hill sloping.
Features include a large man-made lake with a pair of dams (can't really see them from here, pieces don't render this far out, that will be fixed soon), and a completely re-aligned highway and also lots of new suburban/rural areas with plenty of room for lots and lots of winding roads.
Flat spot left of center in the 2nd shot is just a staging area for pieces (it helps to have a level surface to throw a few pieces together more quickly/accurately), it won't be staying there. The 2nd shot shows the two dams, which lead from the man-made lake (reservoir) to the flood control canals. Other small streams will feed into this from nearby, and also an up-welling (water forced up by geological features such as a body of magma within the crust from a dormant volcano).
Yes, there will be a very ancient, easy to miss somewhat-half-extinct looking stubby volcano cone barely visible as you drive by. Not a huge mountain like you think of in Japan, just basically not much more than a bit of a hill and some craters - these exist in California in a few spots - in-fact there's a super-volcano that is believed-extinct or otherwise not a threat, called the Long-Valley Caldera in the state. There's even one under New Mexico or very near there also (NOT Jellystone Yellowstone park! That's a different one entirely). Magma presence in the crust is very common near fault-lines especially between large crustal tectonic plates, especially so where plates subduct and also where plates diverge.
So entirely, I will make sure it's fun to drive on - much better than the old stuff, and roughly the same length (+/- 0.25mi per 2~4 miles of highway worked) as the old highway.

Hopefully it stops raining here in Tennessee, but I think we got a whole month's of rain in just the last 24 hours. Sheesh.
--That is all for right now.