WIP Beta released Black Hills A desert world 1.2.3 1.0

Re: Black Hills A desert world

Thank you for that awesome map

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

Here's another small update

I now have a low poly barrel. It still needs a little work.



Since I found a rusted out barrel in my back yard, I decided that it would be an easy item to make.

Also, I finished up this building.



And, here's a short video that shows some other things. The voice-over on this one is much clearer.


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edit

Glowy dirt, begone
I jut wanted to type begone


The default dirt color is now being non-destructively overridden in the levels folder. In others words, none of the default art files had to be adjusted for this.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

Wouldn't be Nevada without at least one crater.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

I like this idea. Within the next week or so, I'll add one of these in. My version will have a bit more finesse, though. It'll probably have a unique sand material, a viewing area that acts like a ramp, a little story, and some scummy water.

Also, here are some adjustments to the night lighting. While the really dark nights look neat, they aren't really playable because of beamng's weak headlights.



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more changes to sky
everything's dark but still visible

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

Thanks for letting me assault this awesome map with a bit of grade school level finesse.

After countless hours of driving this thing a question arises: What was your geological reference for the landscape?...google earth?, USGS?, family photos? Not to sound like a broken record but every corner
reeks of perfectly plausible and believable terrain to the point it's difficult to think something like this is just out of one's imagination. No offense my friend but I think you know exactly what I'm getting at.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

Looks fantastic, can't wait to try it out!

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

I can't get the download to work ;/

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

I tried it just a second ago and it wouldn't show me the capcha to authorize the download. Mediafire's probably just being touchy right now. If you can give me a day or two, I'll have an updated version of Blackhills up. This time I'll upload it to multiple websites.

Well, I can't say I exactly know what you're getting. However, I try my best to answer your questions.

This map has a lot of references. The main idea for it came from a mountain off to one side of crater lake. It also pulls from the desert battlefield 3 map with the black smoke. Also, some of its inspiration is drawn from nfs hot pursuit(2010). Alongside these references, I also have a bunch of pictures that I've collected from the internet. Yay, internet!

Experience is playing a part here as well. For instance, this is the fourth desert world that I've tried making.

Also, World machine is a wonderful tool for creating realistic landscapes.

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I've got a new road texture. While it's not as sharp, it looks flatter, less tiled, and much wider.
pics


what do you all think? better/worse/no different

 

Re: Black Cliff A desert world

How about a surrounding scenery mesh? A couple of km of low poly terrain around the map would make it look bigger and more immersive, especially when flying. I guess it wouldn't show much from the valleys unless you put taller mountains there. Texture should be easy to make in World Machine, mesh could be either a heavily optimized heightmap mesh or modeled by hand.

Runway is long enough for my biplane, just dangerous to land on with the fences around it and with bumpy surface + no suspension.

Time of day scale is way too quick IMO. I think 1000 dayLength means ~17 minutes.

Do you have any plans for the dead end roads? Makes you want to avoid driving there again if you have to turn around and drive the same way back.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

wait nevermind i got it to work

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world

This map as 3 buildings and 0 trees. Yet it is the laggiest thing I have ever encountered in my life.

Such a shame because its such a beautiful map.

 

Re: Black Cliff A desert world

This is something that I've been thinking about making. Two weeks ago I tried to create this effect with a skybox like mesh, but it came out poorly. After this failure, I decided that something 3d was needed.

I'll fix this.

I'll up the time to about 50 minutes on the next release. When I stuck that number in there I was thinking about the very rapid time-flow of sims.

Earlier today, I didn't have any plans, but your question made me consider some ideas. After thinking about these ideas, I came up with a plan. This is how i think. My current plan is to create a very large figure eight layout by tunneling through two of the mountains. I've already started on one of these tunnels. This image shows the planned location for one of these two new roads.


Sorry about the spelling of tunel

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This seems to be a problem for quite a few people. The strange thing is that i get ~50 fps on dry rock and ~85 fps on blackhills with the same settings. Of course, I've done a lot of optimizing since the most updated version on here.

Could you download this updated version and tell me how the fps are on it?

link

new link

https://www.dropbox.com/s/usmoblu0yk52v54/blackhills1.2.1.zip

It would be appreciated if others also downloaded this version and mentioned their fps.

Let's get this world running better

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

Downloading now. Love the tunnel idea......

EDIT: okay Mediafire sucks. Downloaded twice and getting resource failure errors both times. I even copied old level to stick and deleted level from beam just in case. I know you've been thinking about a different
download scheme because mediafire sucks.

EDIT: 2 Downloaded a third time for S&G and still getting failure to create resource.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

If you have any more troubles, you might just want to wait until tomorrow. Since my upload speed is .4 mb, I'm uploading 1.2 to both google drive and dropbox while I sleep.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

No problem. Appreciate the effort and am excited to see the changes. Btw....is this map the largest it can be in Torque?

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

Yeah Im getting an error when I try to enter that map too

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

As the text file in the zip said, you can ignore the resource error.

I get about 27 fps just outside the barn, same as the last version. I think I found the reason why it's so slow.. Set parallax scale to 0 in the ground materials, or delete the line in levels/blackhills/art/terrains/materials.cs. 43 fps after changing just that. Parallax doesn't work well anyway and it has a huge effect on frame rate if it's used.

Another feature that would help with frame rates slightly is distanceFade for decal roads, added in the latest versions. It's 0 0 or disabled by default. Try something like 300 50 and the road starts fading out at 300 meter distance and disappears 50 m after that.

The road decals sometimes flicker and show bits of the terrain under them. It happens on large maps. You can fix it by increasing decalBias slightly for the roads, but it's a compromise since larger numbers make the tires look like they sink in the road.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

Really, really cool map. No issues for me (apart from downloading it which was a pain in the arse but worth it)
I'm getting about 45 fps which is better than Dry Rock Island on my machine.
Thanks!

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

I am unable to "ignore" the error. How do I do that and have the level load normally? I acknowledged each and every error notification and then it locks up on an endless loading screen.

 

Re: Black Hills A desert world 1.2

It loads normally when I press OK after the first error ("levels/Perryville/tunnelbasis5.dae"), just takes a minute to load due to the big heightmap. Try opening blackhills.mis in a text editor and remove the last TSStatic entry.

Or maybe you didn't install the map correctly. There's a folder in the zip with another folder and a readme file in it. Put only the second folder ("blackhills") in Levels. Easy to miss, since most maps have just the level folder.

To your earlier question about map size, much bigger maps can be made but this is near the practical limit. Then you run into compromises and bugs that get worse with larger size.