The first time loading can take close to half an hour, so let it do its thing if it seems stuck. Here's the century old Race To The Clouds, all 12.4 miles and 4300 feet of it. Every detail possible was added including; guard rails, all big bolders and logs along the side of the road, tree placement and scaling, road signs and markers, and even the drainage gutters. Features include: Time Trial Mode; the full hill climb course and a shorter GT2 style one, both are reversible. 2 separate versions of the map, one is paved and the other is the "classic" gravel. Fully optimized graphics, for smooth frames and maxed out details. View attachment 445177 View attachment 445208 View attachment 445176 View attachment 445209 View attachment 445179 View attachment 445178 Neilogical goes hill climbing and reenacts an infamous crash. Watch Jimmy Broadbent go up in flames in his attempt at an all out hillclimb. The terrain was generated using a combination of LIDAR for surfaces close to the road and DEM for the vast expanses out to the edge of the map. I used google street view to create very accurate details all along the track. Technically speaking, this is a huge 8192 pixel map, and is an officially unsupported size due to it requiring a system with 8GB of RAM and it's loading process taking several minutes. I had to really push the terrain system's limits to make such a big and tall map, so the road surface isn't smooth enough to be comfortable for sports cars and race cars (yet) and they will occasionally stutter over the bumps. This version supersedes the old pikes peak, so remove that one from your mods folder or it will be overwritten or cause visual bugs. Here's the Pikes Peak forum tread for this track. Please use this resource or PM me about issues and bugs rather than the review page, or they get buried and forgotten quickly. Pro-tip: I use Resource Monitor while loading the map to keep tabs on its progress. When the BeamNG process reaches approximately 7.5Gb and drops down to 5.5Gb, its loaded. This should only take 2-6 minutes. If it doesn't spawn shortly after the memory drop, (after the first time it loads) the game froze due to the spawn bug. Other known bugs: Roads are slightly bumpy. Some jagged edges in hairpins. The guard rail heights are uneven in places. This is purely cosmetic and their hit boxes will always work perfect. Thanks to: Ian @ The Colorado GIS Coordination and Development Program: For acquiring LIDAR elevation data for the whole mountain. Google Street View Car: Drove all the way to the summit and even back behind the train station. BeamNG: For all vanilla assets I used, which is about 90%. fufsgfen: For encouraging me to keep at it, and finally release the level. Next up: Making this version compatible with the old one, so they can load independently. Detailing the areas above Glen Cove Developing a work around for the road bumpiness. The decal roads will be deleted in favor of a road mesh. My Initial prototype works great with no hopping or flatting when transitioning off/on the road. In addition to being smooth, it will also be far more accurate and allow me to model in many details close to the track easily. Modeling proper buildings and working on more of the offshoot dirt roads and trail system The first time loading can take close to half an hour, so let it do its thing if it seems stuck. Please go here and get the new LIDAR version https://www.beamng.com/resources/pikes-peak-lidar-edition.4986/ The zip file below is the old version from Dirt Rally (inaccurate mesh based terrain).
Moving right along. I got the LIDAR map into Max; it weighs in at 2 million polys just for the twisty section. Here's a quick and dirty comparison of LIDAR: in black and white + textured, verses the current map :in green, verses my old 2003 track: in purple. Whoa, Ive been modding for 15 years Conclusion: The current map looks down-right fictional next to LIDAR. I was suspicious they had been using my 3D assets, until I saw how "different" it was. Its alright for driving; has a decent mesh density; and the rock formations are cool, but the inaccuracy is dizzying and some of the hairpins have a strange hump at the apexes.
This map, with Group B cars, would be the best thing ever (the Renault and Audi are done, but, both are outdated )
Plan to make the mixed-surface version at some point? I believe this hillclimb had both road surfaces for quite a long period of time
Yeah! We need more of the classic cars working. I would love to re-enact Climb Dance and the Eskudu Pike's Peak. Luckily we will always have a few good selections since the Sunburst, SBR4 and Pessima have hill climb and "group beam" versions. No problem with that. The track was made at the same time that the mixed course was being raced and the mesh still has separate material IDs for the different terrains. All I have to do is make a small patch to change those sections from all road to gravel. From the recent Failrace rallys, a mixed course could be quite exciting. Blue and red are the gravel mesh.
Looking really nice ! The gravel part caught me off-guard when driving with the Hillclimb sunburst which has slick tires, I guess I'll have to modify an hillclimb beam car for gravel to be able to control my turns on the gravel part ! The main problem with this map is it's length, I guess you can't make the terrain more precise with the size of the map right ? Would it be possible to keep the original low-def terrain and put meshes with the LIDAR data over just the road area ? Anyway, I'm eager to see this map done ! Good luck
Oops, didn't plan on releasing any dirt yet. That's a test mesh just for my rally mod. It works for the short run up Devils Playground, but not setup right for the full hill climb Redoing the whole the map would probably be unrealistic right now, technically speaking and impractical time wise. Maybe the limits will be expanded in the future. Id like a way to delete terrain that's not used and patch a crude mesh over it; like with the terrain delete tool. That method doesn't save any FPS memory or CPU time though. I was pegged at 48% CPU, 40 FPS and 900 MB for 3 tests of the stock map vs a map with 75% of the terrain deleted. For LIDAR, I might request the top and bottom halves later, if I decide to model them from scratch. I would like to get back to multi-sim releases and going all-mesh is best for that.
A couple sneak peaks at "Pikes Peak LIDAR Edition"; I wont be able to build the whole mountain (yet). The rest will to be generated from meshes - either from the old map or from scratch. Also included a comparison pic of the old track. I also updated the track; removed the dirt mesh from the twisty parts. A little unrealistic.
Around 4 minutes dirt section starts, excuse me bad driving, it is only kind I know of Actually I had never driven that paved section from startline up, because usually I had selected spawn location that is at dirt section. At the end brakes did go quite bad, so ended up into crash, dropping few wheels is just normal to me though.
The new version of the map is looking way better than the old one already, nice job ! And with the road at a more realist width, it's going to be even harder to drive uphill fast, I like it ! Also, it looks like you deleted the old Pikes Peak file but forgot to upload the paved version
Bad driving? It looked pretty good to me, considering the vehicle. Your big rig didn't look exactly stock. Got the update uploaded finally, it must have failed the first time. I wont be releasing the LIDAR version quite yet. It needs the top half realigned since its off by about 10-20 meters vertically and a bit horizontally too. The backdrop mountains also need the same attention around the edges of the heightmap. Even at 7 meters wide the real layout is about the same difficulty. The old one has all kinds of extra twists added to make up for the 20 meter width.
Hello Ewanc, how is it going with the LIDAR/Improved version of the Pikes Peak? Having played many hours on your Road Atlanta LIDAR version and having gotten used to that level of quality... I'm really looking forward to see what you can do with this track. (Road Atlanta was great even before the LIDAR version, just pointing that out.) Hope you are having a nice Tuesday.
I'm still working on it, but Ive been reworking my whole process, and may have even more coming than just the twisty part; I may do the whole mountain now. I had been struggling for the past month on a new way to generate heightmaps. Yesterday I finally got it all working. Now I can churn out really detailed (big) maps from 3D geometry much easier. No goofing around with the align with mesh brush or hand painting terrain. Ive been busy on an even more ambitious project this year. Yep, that's an 8km terrain (67Mpx) The plan is to build the entire area, with both race tracks and all the towns and access roads, using COM8's rFactor track as a base. lots of work, but at least I got the workflow efficient, so i wont get bogged down.
I forgot to mention; progress wise, Ive had to filter through the LIDAR; there are some trees and several uneven passes in the laser scans which created some bad anomalies, with big holes and jagged road surfaces. Its getting smoother but it still needs a track surface lofted over it. I modeled some of the guard rails for the twisty section, so its much safer.
