WIP Tail of the Dragon / Deal's Gap 1.0.1

Current progress as-of 7/26/2017 is 13.5 of main route 129 is COMPLETED and most the hill-sides are neatened up as well. I haven't put the forest in, or the rest-stop area, or overlooks etc in yet.
The dams aren't built yet either, nor is any water except the water plane itself (map-surrounding water).
The AI route on the main route works almost perfectly and has over 200+ miles of testing.
An i7 4790k with a sufficient graphics card (to run a heavily forested map) will be able to run the player vehicle and 9 other AI vehicles so long as you don't hit a RAM limit (this is with ALL cores @ 4.4ghz, on my delidded 4790k, it's a bit of a pig and on air cooling, so it's not going much higher than 4.4).
The finished map should look something along the lines of these four pictures!

Just a sample of something much closer to what the final product will look like, and yes, the forest floor is brown with dead leaves.
Another corner (yes it's a different one)

Added a little undergrowth as is typical for next-to-the-road stuffs

Another turn with forest and a little undergrowth here


(OLDER stuff below)

Never-seen-before-completely-unfinished-work (WOW!!!) That grey stuff will be a large river with damns, falls and such, the grey is merely stone when seen from very very far away. This will be mostly all forest here.

I've managed to be able to fit the whole Tail of the Dragon into Beamng.drive's terrain here, any more and it would have lost it's accuracy too much. I've yet to carve in the roadway (yes, this will be a toughie), but the added benefit here is I live less than 2 hours drive from this place, so I can go check it out anytime.
The southern end of route 129 extends about 1 (road)mile south of the TAIL OF THE DRAGON stop.
The northern end of the route extends about 1.5~2 miles north of the north-end of where the Tail of The Dragon route ends at Housley Drive, the end-point on the map here is about a quarter-mile north of the Tabcat Creek bridge.
There will be roughly 2/10ths of a mile on each end cut-off to preserve the immersion so you don't drive off the edge of the map into the skybox, ARGH.

This uses East Coast USA as a base, and will use that forest/buildings as needed.
I already have all the roadway textures I need, and will add more as I see fit (not that I should need more).

It will feature the main route (as shown on this picture at the bottom), with it's 300-something turns, and such, which you can read about here, via Roadtrippers.com :
https://roadtrippers.com/stories/tail-of-the-dragon?lat=40.80972&lng=-96.67528&z=5//

If anyone would like to see the TREE OF SHAME or the TAIL OF THE DRAGON building itself (or it's large statue of a dragon), please make these models and send them in!
I may be able to make the building itself in time. It may or may not make the 1st version of the map.
Going to smuggle in Ouerbacker's original motel prop from Nevada Interstate to use as the motel here, since I've already made use of it once.

This map is a 4k terrain with a square size of roughly around 2 meters (map size 8km x 8km), give or take a small %, I will adjust as needed. I will try to get the surrounding mountains in as a skybox, but no promises here (I downloaded a terrain for it, I will try to put it in for added realism at some point). A portion of the terrain on the NE corner of the map has been removed to help with rendering speed, as I won't bother including it when it's MILES from the nearest roadway.
The map size is roughly 5.1 miles x 5.1 miles of terrain.
I will try to keep this nice and FPS-friendly where possible, but realism comes first and foremost, otherwise, go play OUTRUN or TOP RACER2/TOP GEAR 2 or something :x

If you have any suggests, let me know, just keep in mind I've only done what is here because adding more to it would reduce the ability of the game to be able to accurately render what is a windy roadway with lots of banking and twists and turns. If it was a highway, I wouldn't mind losing a little bit of detail on the square size vs the expanse of the map gained. It's a little bigger than Nevada Interstate but smaller than So-Cal Interstate maps, in size. It won't have nearly the volume of roadways that those do either. This will have what it has, that is it. No loop roads, no nothing. This is merely 'Tail of the Dragon' route and that is all.

This is the most-requested route I've heard of, by fans of my maps. You can rest assured this will be high-quality and will look beautiful when it is completed, and should also not take me a terribly long time to do this either - compared to my other maps.

NO MESH ROADS, just decal roads, as always with my maps. There will be signs, the common ones and the 'welcome to Tennessee' and 'Welcome to North Carolina' signs too. No traffic signs will be present.
I will try to keep this as small of a download as possible, by omitting resources I do not need.
If your computer can run ECA (East Coast), It *should* be able to run this. I will try to keep it functional for those with less than 8gb of system RAM but I can make no promises in this department especially on Early Access things such as Beamng.drive.

Work on my other maps will continue, I just wanted to get this map underway as it won't take nearly as long as they will.

 

When you release this, I know what to make:



The two vehicles I always associate with the Tail of the Dragon

 

There are a few trails that exit onto the Dragon that would be really cool to include. Parson's Branch Road exits onto the Dragon from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There's more here at this site, but I've only ever been on Parson's Branch Road, so I don't know how good the other trails are.

 

Got the road map loaded in of what roads will be in, there's more off to the bottom right that goes a good mile past the TAIL OF THE DRAGON shop, roughly. The shot is looking mostly north / north-east (about a 1-o-clock position).
Here's the lower part, by the TAIL stop:
So, judging from the lookout, and the dam, it's close enough for me to go ahead with this. I have spent HOURS on just getting the roads lined up, and that 'map' overlay is stolen off google, and is a 16k x 16k texture overlaid onto the map, sized so that 75% of the roads or more perfectly line up (what does not, I can eyeball, if it's off, it's by a mere few feet, that's all). The nice thing is, I have about 4 spans/5 nodes from edge to edge of a 2 lane road, so it should be plenty defined enough.
It's within 0.05km of it's real size, so it should be good to go. It's very very close, I doubt anyone would notice anyways unless they have a tape measure! The map is 5~5.1 miles across (8.05km, just a hair over 8km that the height-map came from). Discrepancies from driving up and down across the map (likely cause), not taken into consideration.
I hope you like my art, but not so much you will miss it when this comes out for release in a while, because there will be water where the 'art' is.
The roads that will be in there are in the picture. Requests for other roads for this map will be considered.

Really thanking myself for buying enterprise solid-state here, 1gigabyte disc speed and this i7 come in super handy when processing the 16K x 16K graphic file that is that overlay showing road position (which won't be present when it's released). Had this thing so busy the music sounded like a lagging SEGA or NINTENDO :x
--- Post updated ---

Heehee yes smokey awaits, doesn't he. Well, someone's gotta keep everyone from killing themselves. Gotta love those P71's - speaking of which, that State Trooper vehicle looks like one of the very last ones made on the line, with the civvy rims and grille.

 

I just wish the bike still worked, so we could have the tree of shame.

 

1.9~2.0 miles of road have been formed, and banked, and such. I am sure there's like 10~12 miles of road atleast in this map, + the side roads other than the main one... just a progress update, that is all, so ya'all know it's not forgotten about. Overall I am pretty happy with it, while I am sure it's not going to be 100% perfect recreation, it'll still be close, and it'll still be a lot of fun to drive...fast...and crash... on one of the hundreds of curves on this road. Those decreasing radius turns really get you though, and there's quite a few of them.

 

New day new progress! New pics, some road-shots here, please pardon the hideousness of it all, it's very early in development.
What's done:
Terrain's in and laid out - using the EAST COAST USA/ECA map/textures as a base, but not the road textures for the main roads.
Stuck in a few road textures, these should go pretty far, the normals aren't done up right yet, so ignore the road's odd marbled look.
Overlay is in so that the road goes pretty much in the right spot, this should eliminate guesswork for the most part.
Forest is scripted in (from ECA map), so that's ready to go when I get there.
Water plane is using the ECA stuff so it should look pretty good. Rivers will re-use the default ECA stuff. Why re-invent the wheel?
3 miles of roadway are done and graded, with the sides blended to the terrain within reason. Test driven, you will not be driving FAST here!
One bridge deck (and railings) are in, that's all for now. AI support is in for the roads done already.

What's not done:
Anywhere the dark green is along the roads (where I still have the road alignment guide, it's dark green to contrast).
The other 10~16 miles (don't even know for sure) of roadway in this map.
Normal maps for the road textures. Diffuse and specular textures are done already.
The entire forest. Don't worry, I'll make sure there's so many trees your GPU cries and your RAM screams UNCLE, and FPS plummets (heh)...
The rivers aren't in yet. It's a picture of water.... I drew H20, WOOTER, and a fish where some of it goes before...
The dams aren't built yet.
There's dozens more hours of work to go on this.. but I do like 6+ hours generally in a sitting or until bored/backpain returns too great to handle.
No buildings are placed. There will be some, just not yet.


A proper hairpin


Looking south/southeast up the mountain - ignore the dark green edges in the background, they're where it's not done yet!


Up close showing some of the banking on the hairpins - I tried to 100% match it to real-life here, so it should be spot on or at-least close!
Ignore the 'marbled look' on the road, that's the normal-map doing that as it's not done yet.


Looking North / Northeast down the mountain, to show the 3 miles of road that's done. The dark-green stuff is the unfinished part.
The area beyond the TOP of the screen shot most likely won't make it in as it doesn't fit in the terrain... that part's boring any-who.

These roadways are extremely winding but the grade is pretty much consistent from what I've noticed.

MOAR winding curves


North end of the map/roadway. It won't continue past here unless I start doing meshes or we get tiled terrain.
This pic is super-ugly as I haven't even started finishing up the terrain at all here, guides still in place a bit.

 

I have driven through deals gap in a base model Subaru Imprezza, this was a year ago. I was able to keep an average of ~28MPH. With the Hirochi Sunburst I should be able to do the same thing because your road layout will be very accurate. The speed limit on the deals gap road is 35MPH.

 

yeah that's about what I can go through it at, faster in spots where it's not so winding... but yeah, it's about as close as I can make it (the roadway that is done, that you see, will be pretty much what roadways will be like in that map, and will mostly remain the same when the map comes out).
Except there will be a forest and it will 'look' done and all
Glad you enjoyed your time on the Dragon.

 

The curved roads look great! Looking forward to the progress

 

tiled terrain would probably make a lot of projects easier / possible

 

Current status of the project is currently 7.2 miles completed out of a total of approx 14 miles of 'Tail of the dragon' main route. (I have plotted out an additional 1 approximate mile additionally, to bank yet and grade yet.) It's officially HALF WAY on the main route. One third of all paved roads are done!
Current status of the side roads nearby is 0 miles completed out of a total of approx 5~7 miles of misc side roads/routes.

It *IS* fully banked for the miles that are completed, properly given groundmodels (asphalt traction where needed, grass where not etc), and the landscape is decently blended with the road bed.

It IS NOT furnished with anything such as trees, homes, stores/buildings etc yet. The damn also hasn't been started. I have gotten back to putting more time into this now. I'd like to get this roadwork completed within the next month or so, maybe even this month.

If I get one mile done in an hour or two, that's a LOT of progress, I take my time with this (but once it's done there, no more work will be needed aside of making the numerous pull-off areas).
Correction, 1.6 miles takes 6-8 hours... ouch...but that road surface is SMOOTH 'N FLAT as a squirrel's body on a NYC highway @ rush hour g'heh heh ... yeah.

Yes, I edited the amount totals in the later hours of 7/17 to reflect days progress, you're not imagining different numbers there. And I have edited it again.
I know, there should be more pictures of it, it'll be just like a new EAST COAST USA map, with all different roads and more mountainous terrain, except quite a few times larger (map size is in the OP I believe).
Go look @ the real Deal's Gap / Tail of the Dragon if you need some images.
I will make the 'oops' tree full of parts & the Tail of the Dragon building there, I want to take a drive out there @ some point before I do the model. I will take some pictures to use for my models, that I will do photo-realistic (with visible collisions, sorry). If I have issues getting the collisions to work in time for map release, I will 'sub-contract' that out to anyone that can do models with collision decently enough (though, that being said, I will make the models, with a collision model separate).

I will make absolutely sure that AI is flawless through the corners (lots of nodes used!), and that it works very well and looks as real as possible for car crash videos - I didn't forget you video guys (the car-crash comp guys will get it about a week to 10 days before it's ready to ship out, so will anyone helping the project).

This project got expedited due to me finishing some of the back-end work on The Leading-Brand-City map, but the game feature I need (shape editor) being a crash happy mess, so I will wait for a version update before assembling the map components there, that means: That map's on hold temporarily (next beamng.drive version?) until the bug is fixed in the editor, and I am doing this one now! Yay! This shouldn't take nearly as long as others provided I work on the @#$%ing thing...which I am.

Yes, I will add paths @ some point.

Added two pictures here, It's ugly, but it shows my 'This is where the road goes, stupid' overlay, and the fire-line (the brown area).
Eventually, it'll get the regular green and gobs of trees where the road is.
1st pic
The part of road on the very left side is where I left off the other week, that's roughly ~3.5 miles of road in this picture, or about one quarter of the entire main route. I am working 'left to right' here. Shaw Grave Gap is there where there's a word written near the center of the map.

Google link on Shaw Grave Gap location
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.5054243,-83.951582,997a,35y,359.32h,3.55t/data=!3m1!1e3


2nd pic, looking NW, the motorcycle stop would be about 4~5 miles behind the camera, I chose this to look down the fire line so you have something to compare how curvy the road is to.


Again, the dark green area won't be there in release versions, it's just my overlay (which was a pain to make, but worth it in the end). Once I put the trees in it will look much better.

 

The top speed on the tail is 30 MPH legally, the challenge is staying on your side of the road. A lot of people have died cutting across the double yellows on this road.

 

I haven't worked on this map for 3 days so I have resumed. Mammoth Valley and Yellav Valley have been fixed (by me), with the latter now having it's missing AI paths restored, and now both maps load (and yellav won't crash at night as it's got a light script).
They were too good to miss out on, honestly, and Yellav Valley in particular is very beautiful.

On to the Tale of the Tail of the Dragon:
8.55 of 14 miles done on the main route currently.
ALL of those miles have the ground-model applied and such.
NONE of those miles have Guide-rail (yet!)
The DAM is *NOT* built yet, though the ground is shaped for it.
The fire-line is plotted out (high-tension wires run through here, and the ground and brush are mostly cleared where machines can get to, as this area doubles for power utility, and a fire-break). I am hoping to be able to put a dirt path here, to drive down, in the future.
98% of the grading with the hillsides (sides of the road) is done where the road is finished.
I've mastered the methods a little better, so now I should be able to do this 25~40% faster and it still looks BETTER when it's done with less work than before.
Next week (about a week from now) I am trying to push out a preview to one or two of the crash comp guys, so you'll get to see it in the week following next, a few days before it comes out. It's basically just 'a road through a woods without trees' right now. Boring as (expletive deleted), so I will be furnishing it nicely once the main roadway is done. There won't be very many guide rails, that's for sure! So careful, cautious driving will be rewarded, driving like a maniac will only land you into the thicket, or bounding off/down a hillside. Will be scenic though.
I don't know that I will put out a low detail patch for this. All's I can tell y'all is that I would hope in 2017 people can render trees in real time.

If you can't handle lots of trees, or your video card is allergic to them, speak up, I am sure if enough people demand it, I will consider something different, but remember, this is in the middle of the WOODS. A large part of this is state park lands, and only fire-access routes and high tension wires (which I don't have a model for yet) exist here.

If anyone's got a model for high-tension wires (high voltage lines), with the tall towers, that isn't stolen from someone else's commercial game, please let me know!

FPS will be fantastic in this map with the exception of the trees. Otherwise, it just uses the default tree settings from ECA.
If you can run ECA fine you can run this map fine. There will be about a 2.x mile visibility, just as Roane County has (which is to be expected, as this area is less than an hours drive away from it). In the future, if linking maps becomes available, this will be able to be driven to from the main map.
I may choose to add more to the map in the future if at a later date I become better at modeling things. My terrain here will have a skybox, a 3d one, possibly with collision. I can export collada models out of my terrain program, so that works too. Sick of that EDGE OF THE EARTH BS.

Work continues.
Screenshot below, looking north/north-east (down, mostly):

Don't worry, the writing/fish won't be there when it's done. I wouldn't be a happy fish if I was swimming in a river of asphalt anyways.
From left to right, first 6.x miles of the road (up to the dark green where the road is, that's my overlay) is DONE 100%
Past that to the right edge of the screenshot, 1.x miles is all graded and everything is done but the ground-model painting (surface traction & appearance).
Yes, it's hideous. But this is progress. It will look much better when there's a concept screenshot out, but I am waiting until the road is done for that. I hopefully can get this road-works done by the end of the weekend, or a day or three following, failing that, there will at-least be something coming out within the next 15~25 days.
If you want a need for speed III hot pursuit track like the one that went through the forest (alpine?), this will be your ticket, because that's exactly what it is. This tail of the dragon is one of the top routes in the entire USA for challenging but rewarding driving.

So while you wait for this to be finished, do enjoy some of Mammoth Valley and Yellav Valley!
Don't forget to give @meywue and @synsol a big thanks for helping me get the files over to you guys (for those maps, and mine in the past).
Developers working with the modding community, from Doom for the MS-DOS mid-90s computer, to Quake, to Fallout 4, and now, really give a game lasting entertainment value with an almost free source of brand new content, which keeps demand up, and a game maintained.
I've always wanted to make some NEED FOR SPEED race tracks, but don't care for the latest iterations of the game itself, and this game had a map editor built in. So here we are, soon to be the 4th map. At the latest, this release should be by mid-august. This will be a primitive, main-route only, without other fancy things in it etc, with just the road and the forest where it's completed enough to put it in.
The map, just checked, is just a hair over 5 miles x 5 miles.

 

man you sure are making a lot of progress, best of luck.

 

Shoot. That is the best map to drift on

 

Yes it's very good to drift on because you're not going to be able to go very fast. Even 40mph will send you clean off the outside of many of the turns faster than you can say "Over like a fat rat". It's not STEEP, it's got a steady grade up and down for the majority of it (very very little of it is level ground), the turns are banked realistically though so you should be able do as I do, and handbrake through them. It's quite tested, I have most likely put 80~100 miles on the 8.55 miles of it that's done, banked, and ground-modeled (got a little further). I say done but: there's no furnishing like trees, guide-rails, or road-texture add-on decals like skids or random cracking etc yet. There's no signs yet, either. That will get put in soon, too. I have @RedRoosterFarm to thank for even having signs.
It's quite fun here & my RX 480 8gb is at 90~120fps depending on where it is in the map (v-sync off), the highest of my maps (Nevada comes close, post-update). Basically, even a Nvidia 970 or GTX 1050 Ti would do fine here also. Pretty sure a 2gb graphics card will do high detail just fine, as there's no 1gb of road textures this time. I just wish my desktop and the editor ran better than THIRTY FPS. ARGH! Something about my Windows desktop being 30fps is aggravating. It was fine with the 7850 2gb Asus-brand radeon I had before.

Done tonight for editing, Going to go & enjoy the map for a bit, because IT IS FUN, even quite barren. It's quite akin to most any rally/road "race on winding back-road" game you can think of. I have an underlay I am going to use for the roadways, so that the edges don't look as sloppy with the terrain painting (though, admittedly, not nearly as bad as Roane County's square grass; which is getting fixed when the game is in BETA btw).

Yes, thanks, many thanks bud. Will most surely have this backed up tonight in-case of disaster or human error. I back up everything, but on a side note, even if everything in the USA gets wiped out, and I somehow survive, this map will too!
Backup files on on-line backups, and offline backups (not always hooked to pc), check.
Spare computers that can run Beamng.drive, check.
So even if this thing blows up I will still be editing.

Did a performance test, moved around with the freecam for a bit with the car sitting at the far end of the map, idling away (physics not paused), roughly in the middle of the map (the variations are moving about in the map and things loading etc)... That's with a free-cam speed of about 100 or so (normally it's 25).

This is without trees, so there's nothing lagging the map yet obviously.

 

Finally some road to do some touge on!

 

Yes, welcome to a thread I am involved in. BOOK! *WHUNK* Happy reading
Will be great for drifting but not much room for error.

 

[E U R O B E A T I N T E N S I F I E S]

edit:Is it going to have guardrails and a sh*t ton of trees?