WIP Tail of the Dragon / Deal's Gap 1.0.1

OFFTOPIC WARNING, but good for us pc-hardware gurus none-the-less...

Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra, you can purchase it here (I don't make money on the links)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0039RY3MM/
Rockit 88 Delid & Relid kit for Intel CPU
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WVYL61Q/
This is frequently out of stock and always in high demand, so give him a shout on Amazon or his website (faster!) and ask him to list one or purchase on his website. I messaged him on his website for his Rockit 88 series kit, to please put it in stock on Amazon, and a day later it was there! So I ordered, it came within 3 days I believe. Totally awesome and didn't harm the cpu on the 1st try.

I (and Beamng) take *ZERO* liability or responsibility for you voiding your warranty on your cpu (if it's still under warranty), or damaging your pc in any way. If you still feel confident after reading that, that is what I used, 10~20C difference between no delid and so-so Zalman ZM-1 paste before, and Liquid Ultra + Delid after. Liquid ultra used above and below the heat-spreader.
BE WARNED THAT PASTE/TIM MATERIAL I LINKED IS CONDUCTIVE. TRY THERMAL GRIZZLY, which might not be conductive if you are worried. DO NOT GET CONDUCTIVE PASTE/TIM ON YOUR MOTHERBOARD OR CPU TRACES/CAPS OR BOOM.
My motherboard happens to have a special sealing process so I wasn't worried, but if you're careful, you might get pretty far with it. The thermal material makes a good difference and it completely worth the risk to me, as if I blow it up then I have a good reason to upgrade If this is still working then I would be fool-hardy to replace it obviously.

Thermal Grizzly paste is pretty good and that is what they're using over at Siliconlottery website (sells cherry-picked cpus), from what I read it wasn't conductive either, so I would read up to make sure but it's purportedly pretty good! Best of luck, and do be careful with the cpu delidding, it does make a loud POP though when it comes loose. Once it pops you can usually pop it straight off. Watch a youtube video if you're not sure. If you use cheap paste or mid-grade stuff you might not see much improvement. If you use too much (or what you think is 'enough') it may end up HOTTER. Get the best!
If you do end up blowing it up out of sheer bad luck or misjudgement in some way (or accident), you'll have good reason to buy a Ryzen cpu - or a Threadripper CPU, both of which (8 core ryzen, and 12 and 16 core Threadripper) wipe the floor with the processors you and I have. Threadripper launches in I believe the next two weeks if it is not already available somewhere.

Don't hear my phanteks TCP-14E (it's a big red/white thing) rev up nearly as much as I used to before the delid process. At least, not until I fire my cat-launcher at 100 explode-on-death rad-rats in fallout 4 or have 10+ cars in beamng

I will check back in before I get some shut-eye tonight if you have any questions, or check back with you tomorrow.
Remember, message the Rockit88 kit seller if you need one, I believe they're made-to-order.

(Although off-topic, I don't mind if similar questions are asked here, though there's always the PC help thread, where I do participate)
--Cheers!

 

Coolabs Ultra.....not surprised, it's often recommended. I'm inclined to do it with solder, basically what Intel did until the gen3 cpus.
It's a bit more difficult to do outside of the factory but basically the best heat-transfer you can get.

Awesome little device! it's basically the hammer method, done more progressively! I'll definitely go that way.

Thanks for the detailed reply!

 

Your Welcome - I wouldn't touch that with solder, you'd be more likely to damage it, even if you were a professional. Once you hit 150~170C damage is almost a promise on a 14nm chip, and on your 22nm (I believe that is what it is), it's still pretty risky, that's why once you go over 100~105C you get into the damage risk territory with intel and AMD chips. I would not recommend solder at all honestly.
Just use Liquid Ultra if you want a manageable risk. It's about as close (as is Grizzly mentioned in previous post) as you can get to solder without subjecting your chip to extreme heat. At-least wait till Threadripper is out to knock prices of mainstream-enthusiast class chips down even a touch more, before you try melting metals to your silicon...heh. I waited until Ryzen was released to do mine for that reason, that way it wasn't "OH-NOES!!! I MURDERED IT!" it would have been "YEAH! IT'S DEAD! LETS GET SOME RYZEN, COFFEE, AND A TOMBSTONE, SERVICES WILL BE TOMORROW!".
So yeah, that, in a nutshell. Ryzen 8-core would still be more than a 2:1 increase in processor for Beamng.drive in the respect to how many cars at once it could handle, and the math performance (FPU) would be significantly increase, so if you were held back by your 3xxx series intel chip on FPS with physics, there IS an increase here that is note-worthy. Threadripper only increases this with added memory bandwidth, especially when you're running a ton of physics.

---

On another note, I've got a little shy of 3.5 miles of the 13.5 miles of road forested on the map!
Some pictures (undergrowth hasn't been put in in all spots because some of it will be auto-generated, I just don't have it linked yet).



In the last shot is where the 'DO NOT ENTER' official use only trail is in one of the hairpins about mid-way through the Dragon.
Yes, that's the Soliad mod, it's not all too bad.

@synsol , I've noticed a bug. Go fullscreen in normal driving, Take a picture with ALT+O , now immediately press F11 to enter the editor.
You have no Windows menu bar in editor (because the game still sort-of thinks it's fullscreen, even though it's really not).
Exiting the editor, going fullscreen and then back to windowed and re-entering the editor clears this issue.
I didn't want to keep cluttering up a ton of different bug reports
Also, sometimes, the game window isn't properly proportioned after uploading a screenshot (black letter-box bars, like a widescreen movie). Again, I can live with these things, this is Early-Access Alpha of-course, and toggling full-screen usually fixes it.
Just my 2¢ / two pence.

*Sad Face* ...crashed my Rustoluem Racing special...

D'oh!

 

Some for pics of progress, neatening up and putting the small bits of shoulder on some of the turns that require it, and getting some of the grass bits put in, so it doesn't look as barren in some spots.






Grass bits aren't in on all of them, the undergrowth still isn't linked in (that will help substantially fill in the forested bits), but it's getting there. Still only barely 20~25% of it forested though.
The lookout on the Dragon @ Calderwood dam road (top entrance to it), is in now. I have to put the barriers in and forest there and I am sure you'll see a pic of it soon after.
Looks like the foresting is going to take most of the first half of this month, so I wouldn't say a mid-month release is out of the question!
Something tells me I should have just made the forest all automatically generated That would have been much easier, trading my laziness (or temptation to be) for your cpu power... yeah, that's why it's being done manually.

AMD Threadripper 12 and 16 core High-End-Desktop-Processors release on August 10th and are available for pre-purchase at many retailers starting today/tomorrow. 8-core Threadripper is available on the 31st of August, but should be available for pre-purchase shortly. So keep an eye on your favorite retailer. Those X399 boards look pretty sweet, and these chips are all pretty much the top 2% of all Ryzen cores, so they'll all hit 4ghz OC's between 1.325~1.35v! Video encoding & Beamng.drive handling MONSTERS...
--That's all for now
EDIT: Threadripper prices (Retail suggestion!) (CLARIFICATION: US DOLLAR PRICES!)
16-core 999$
12-core 799$
8-core 549$
ALL PROCESSORS INCLUDE 64 (SIXTY-FOUR!) PCI EXPRESS LANES!!!
All are SMT-enabled (16 cores = 32 threads), all will hit 4ghz OC'ed, Quad-channel DDR4-3200 + OC abilities built right in. This is AMD's answer to the HEDT scene, and they didn't answer, they CLOBBERED intel
With Ryzen and now Threadripper hitting the scene, only a fool would buy an intel chip right now.
Beamng.drive LOVES Ryzen and Threadripper processors and performs VERY well on them!

EDIT: got all the road-side undergrowth bits of grass and such placed, in the miles that were TREE'd.
So that puts it 3.5~3.8 miles of the 13 miles of road to be forested. So now it all looks like this:

I can't wait till I get this all done, it's monotonous as can be, but it's sure awesome to drive on.

 

Just a very short (OHNOES!) post to update on progress, the undergrowth (plants that grow in the forest), is fixed up and working now, what a difference!






That last shot, wow, just wow, I am very happy with how this is turning out. Not trying to toot my own horn, but it really shows the work put into it now. What a big difference the little things can make.

 

That looks incredible man, keep up the good work.

 

Trying to do some of my most detailed and realistic work yet, always trying to do 'better'. Thanks!

---

6.45 miles are now forested, and the grass (in the fire-lines) is the correct 2~3 feet high (about a meter) that wild grasses get to.

another shot of the random turns that make up 99% of this track Drifting heaven!
YES, there's a @#$%-ton of trees, it's virgin forest, state park land. If your computer can't run this, play need for speed III for Windows 98, I am sure that will run fine.
Edit: this should land somewhere around 2 weeks from now, either a 'pre-release' private preview, with a more-polished release later, or something for everyone right at once. I have to see how it goes and how much progress gets done, but there will be something out this month in August.
The forests are thinner further out. I will omit unused portions of the map right before release as bare-terrain is ugly, and foresting never-to-be-seen terrain 2~3 miles from "just about the only road around", would eat up the memory footprint (making it require 3~4x more RAM). I am trying to keep this running for folks with 6gb of ram or more, as a goal.
There's lots of trees, but I will do a good test and see if possibly it works for those with 4gb RAM too.
There may be an FPS patch available in the form of a do-it-yourself patch (replace a single file) that knocks the view distance down with adding light fog (still enough to race down this 30mph marked roadway quite well) so that not so many trees are visible.
Video ram usage is currently at 2.65~2.75GB, and is pretty consistent, on high details, with reflections on.
A 3gb video card is required for high, a 2gb card for medium, and I would surmise 768~1024mb cards run LOW settings, as usual. If you can run EAST COAST well with some room to spare, you should have a good shot at running this map.
Folks with Nvidia GTX 970 /1050 / 1050 Ti, 1060 and above, or AMD Radeon 470, 480, and any new Radeon 5xx series cards (and including older Radeons like the 290, 380, and 390) should run this fine/playable the way it stands, with no optimization. There will be some draw distance reduction to improve frames, but it's a forest, you won't really see that far anyways. Even a mile may be overkill, but it's always changeable in THELEVELINFO (both fog and far_view_distance settings) for those that hate my decisions or have monstrous video hardware.
From what I gather, most folks have a Radeon 470 or 480 or higher, or an Nvidia 960/1050 or higher now, which should be fine with this. I am aiming for 60fps with those cards (well maybe 40-something for the 960) so that a majority of the folks with a gaming machine will experience at-least 60fps on 120~250$*** video cards.
That will be all, sorry for the book, but I am getting a few miles of forest done each day I work on this, I've been a bit busy IRL lately so it's slowed progress a tad (I had already taken this into account with the release schedule). Until next time & hope you enjoyed another book (of a post) in the series, heh...

--Cheers!

 

7.35 miles of the roadway is now forested, also did trimming along the edges of about 3~4 miles of road ahead of this, where the forest undergrowth that I recently put in was encroaching the road.
Working near the lookout, at one of the higher spots, somewhat centrally located in the map here:

Looking from the end of Calderwood Dam road (the upper end), north/north-east (about the 1 or 2 o-clock position). The next picture is looking at about 11 o-clock (north), down the fire-line, the brown/dark green in the distance is where I will plot it out more after I get the roadway forested. Figured I'd give you a view!
Dark brown hills are where forest goes (it simulates the carpet of dead leaves).

I've been working from the middle of the map out, somewhat... and then a little west of that point, just 2 / 10ths of a mile down the road...


It'll most definitely toss you around if you go too fast, it's a long way down off the low side - ~100ft or such (38 meters, about), and there's few guide rail. If you walked a dozen feet off the road (if you can even go more than 3 feet without falling down in many spots), you'd see this:

About as steep as you can get and still have trees and such on it. Hitting a tree is usually preferred to going over, even the less steep spots:

Though, if it's too much, there's plenty of pull-offs here.

Hopefully, the tourists* you get stuck behind, will use them and let you pass, to have to yourself what many call is one of THE top roads for any driving enthusiast. Hopefully! It's sure a hoot, but when you mess up, you mess up badly.
So anyways, work is being done, I have over half of this route (13.5 miles total to do, 7.35 miles is done) forested, and 2/3rds of it trimmed up nicely, and about 1/3rd is completely finished up with misc variation underbrush (so it doesn't look like grass is in square grids, as it is in all Beamng maps).
--Cheers
* @RedRoosterFarm is working on, as he has time (he's quite busy), on a MINIVAN, as I've previously stated, so eventually when he feels it's quality is good, we'll have a minivan to get stuck behind, and can simulate that too.

 

Absolutely beautiful work! Every update gets me more and more excited to check it out!

 

I'm really trying to make this the most awesome cruise yet. Over 300+ turns in 12~13 miles of roadway here. This should prove quite entertaining, and oh, with traffic, if you've got a Haswell-series i7 desktop CPU or better (Ryzen ftw my friends!), you can put up to 9 or possibly more (with Ryzen) AI vehicles in as traffic - which is limited to the main route - The Dragon, since that's where the fun is.
With 10 vehicles in play including the one you're driving, it's a hoot. I've never had that much fun in Beamng.drive.

Looking south/south-west off Tabcat Creek bridge, where the Sheriff usually is waiting in their Suburban etc.

Behind where I'm standing about 4/10ths of a mile, the north side of the journey ends here, all the action is to the south!
I will have more pictures up within the hour, I've gotten a few more miles forested (I finished all the way to the north side of the map here, I'm getting aches from sitting here without moving for 5 hours). I've started adding in the Douglas Fir trees too for some variety.
This is the north end of 'The Dragon' , the map continues about 1 mile or two, behind me.

10 miles are forested now, right on the money. That's roughly 3.5 left of the main route, and some of the side roads, which won't be open on the first revision anyways.




There are plenty of pull-offs as the terrain allows, some parts more than others, and also, I haven't finished putting all the undergrowth (the manually placed stuff) in yet. It's getting there. Foresting is monotonous as can be imagined, but it's still very rewarding to drive it. May I remind how difficult it is to get accurate mileage when I keep ending up parked up a tree or down the ravine... ugh. It's sure a fun drive though.

I should get an award for getting this car into this spot! Guess who crashed into the ravine again...

It's not hard to guess.
--Cheers!

 

0.10.x update has not slowed progress any or broken the map, just a heads up.
The new sound engine sure is nice for the immersion factor, and the cars seem to control a bit better.

If it's broken any of my 3 other maps, let me know.

PIANOS!!!





Oh what a sound when you hit 6 at once! I'm in tears of laughter here. Hahahaha.

 

So after a day or two of no progress (other than testing the AI heavily, then getting slightly bored of testing after an hour or so and no one crashing - except one road-rage case of someone ramming a slow ambulance off the road), I was reading some Threadripper reviews. All the youtubers who love to compile will love this new AMD CPU - especially after Handbrake is fixed up to handle more than 10~12 cores. It's a great new platform from AMD, and I will surely be paying close attention to see how the 8-core fares when it's released the 31st of August. The 16-core 32-thread, and 12-core 24-thread Threadripper CPU is released today, the 10th, and is 4ghz capable, with 60* PCI-express lanes free for your video cards or server SSD controllers (or anything else you might add to the slots), quad channel 3200mhz memory, and a separate game mode and creation mode to optimize your platform for your programs you want to run on it (it can make a big difference).
*64 pci-e lanes are available on the Threadripper CPU line (currently all of them including the 8-core coming on the 31st), however, the chipset uses 4 of these lanes, so you have truly 60 at your disposal. This is much better than intel's 44lanes to the board and 24 lanes additionally linked via a SINGLE x4 lane bottleneck - I mean bridge How someone would use that many, in either case, I'm not inherently sure yet, but time will tell.

Sticking pianos in the road when testing 11 AI vehicles (which, with all the trees everwhere, still ran at 34~54fps), on my dud of a 4790k (4.4ghz, seriously, this thing won't go any higher than 4.5 without nuclear fallout flying out the back), worked wonders, never-mind the hilarity. I can't tell you how much more I love this game with every new version. It's absolutely, awesome. I LOVE this game.
I am going to be purchasing a copy for a hold-out friend of mine, next month, because of the tears of joy this game brought me crashing pianos. Finally, I can have vengeance over suffering with some certain maps piano-based loading themes (who's creator I won't name) that stuffed PIANO music in a Beamng.drive map. To quote myself "Who let the piano in here", well, now we can kill it, and shut it up for good.

Surely, I will be moving ahead this fall, while I am working on my city map (slowly), to get going on something that will look like Looney Tunes *without the name used* *due to copyright/trademarks*. We can get our cartoon fill then.

Just to note, the 5th or 6th piano with 11 cars in the game caused it to crash; don't overdose on Pianos, folks. Having only 50~60% memory usage doesn't always mean you'll be able to do it because it might tell you that you're out of memory anyways. I will be more looking into this. 11 cars on this map for traffic, and we're still in Alpha, I'm loving this!

Whatever they did to the physics, it's better, I could do 9~10 before lag, now the 12th vehicle 'lags' a bit (though the simulation stays above 20fps, it gets noticeably jittery on that 12th vehicle).

So I will be working on this more tonight. When it does release, I'd say somewhere possibly after a week from now, be it a limited closed-beta (to anyone who asks, really, I'm not cruel), or a full-scale release, it's going to have 100% fine-tuned AI routes for-sure.
The way it's looking, I will use generic place-holders for buildings until I get the custom models done for 'The Dragon'.

 

I agree the AI and physics are very much improved with the new update! Having the AI actually be a challenge will make this map even more fun! I used to hate AI because I could always easily catch up, now they actually put up a fight in the corners!

Once again I am impressed by the updates. The forest floor looks fantastic, and those corners look like so much fun, especially the S-curve in your set of pics from Wednesday's update. I am so excited. You can definitely already count me in for a beta test request. Heck, I'd be willing to test whatever you have finished so far XD haha.

I haven't had a chance to play with the piano yet, I'll have to check that out too, looks amusing.


Once again thanks for the informative update, keep up the great work!

 

As Always, your welcome (and thanks).
It's very amusing. What's more amusing? 8 of them jammed into a U-move-it truck (rental moving truck)!
(picture from Nevada Interstate)
The upside-down one behind the one at the back cargo door, was playing music after all this. Came down the hill a weeeee bit too fast.
This is hysterical, absolute hysteria. My gut hurts from laughing too badly for too long.

Spawn truck, apply parking brake. Open cargo doors with O key.
Spawn 8 more pianos, from freecam near the ground and have them upright, if one fall over, that's fine too
They can go side-to-side in there 3 across, two rows deep, one flat against the door, and one laying down ontop (you can technically fit 9 this way, but I was at 70~ % ram use and didn't want to crash the game).
Enter editor with F11, pause physics with J before or after entering the editor. Move and rotate pianos into place (leave 3 inches or a few CM between them so they don't glitch into one another), using the F1 object editor's 2 and 3 functions (2 and 3 keys on the keyboard, 2 moves, 3 rotates), you can click anywhere a CLONE icon is to get the little handles or the ball to show up to move it, it's super easy, when your done, exit the f11 editor, leave physics paused, and hit CTRL+R on everything to save it's position inside the truck (do the truck too!), then hit J to then un-pause physics and go on about your day, it may take a few seconds to resume the simulation.
You'll need like 8~12gb or more of ram to do this, but it's surely fun as all get-out.
Beware, this is the first time in a game I've noticed "The load steers the truck", and that it does!
Whenever you want to restore the truck and pianos to mint condition, restore the truck first, apply parking brake immediately (flat ground is best so it doesn't move), and pause physics, then press TAB, R, TAB, R, TAB, R, (etc!) until you're back to the truck. Do enjoy!

 

dude, YES!! wipe out my car virtually before i can actually make the trip out there

 

Dude this is looking amazing! I was there last year and I can't wait to hammer down this road and not worry about going over the edge lol. If you guys have a fun car and can make the trip, DO IT!

 

A Miata??? Funny you mention that...
Hey, actually, if anyone's near middle Tennessee on the plateau, I've got a 1990 Miata for sale, it's like an orange color or something, convertible, needs the top re-done but I don't think it pours water in, it just looks like hell.
It's a black interior, has an aftermarket cd-player, needs a good cleaning and the interior would come up nice.
Runs and drives, needs a marker light, has some cracks in the bumpers from road-rash but the body isn't damaged (just cosmetic wear), needs a battery too, it doesn't hold a charge well. It wasn't in any bad accidents that I know of, and doesn't seem to have frame damage anywhere.
If anyone wants it, and has a lump of cash, I'd let it go for less than 700 easily, I forget what's on the odometer, but it's like, 140k~170k or something close within reason. It runs, it just needs love, a top, and some patching or bumper replacements, and a battery.
I bought it off my soon-to-be-brother-in-law as his dad was pissed it was just sitting there for 2 months, and it's sat here for 3 months. Clean TN USA title. Then my insurance went up because of some ticket I got a year and a half ago so I never drove the thing (but it did drive itself over here by it's previous owner).
It needs some love, a good cleaning, and what I mentioned, but mechanically, from the best of my knowledge it is sound.
So do let me know!

Oh, and it's a 5-speed manual, it's not an automatic.

The money will go towards things like WORLD MACHINE (which is like 200$) and other things like that, (and brakes for my Toymotor Crammy, or Toymotor Crawl-la, whatever you wanna call it, cramped uninspired POS with a dent I didn't cause).
World machine will help me make YOU FOLKS much better maps that I do currently, as it's what the developers use, but with my bad back, I am physically disabled, so I am on a fixed income. They can't even fix it with rods, it's too far gone, too much is worn down and disintegrated, so I sit here in pain a lot (and hence have a lot of time), and I've proudly thus-far refused codeine pills because I wish not to be addicted to anything. My sister-in-law got rods put in her back and to be honest I think she is worse off than before, and her back was better than mine to start with before the operation, so no TY to that, especially with the chance of failure that's rather high for my liking.
Eventually I will put donation links up, eventually, when I get my maps fixed up better, and they're what I originally intended them to be (Like Nevada Interstate is, mostly), to help with paying for programs to map better, but for now, the car's for sale out front of the place. Send me a message if you're interested. It runs/drives but it does need work and plenty of TLC.

 

If only I wasn't across the country, I've actually been thinking about a project miata. Probably a bad idea considering my current project E30 and the money sink it has become XD Although I have considered making the road trip there for the 5erfest BMW meets that make a point to run this route every year. I'll be using the e28 mod to recreate those drives.

If/when you do get donation links up, I'd be happy to help a little bit. I thoroughly enjoy your maps and I empathize with your situation as my mom is disabled and the fixed income is very difficult.

Really looking forward to this map, I have been honing my drift skills in anticipation of this route

 

A little under 11 miles of 13.5 are currently finished, due to me getting distracted and breaking 600 pianos or more
Hey I'm honest about it at least...
Somewhere close to another mile is done now today, maybe a little less, but have been putting in the pull-offs along the way and foresting & such and perfecting the road-surface. So once I am done here I won't really have to touch this part anymore.

Compare to the leading brand (the real earth brand!):

 

If you still have it next month, I would take a couple vacation days and pick that thing up and drive it back to Long Island lol. Do you have any pics?
--- Post updated ---

Dude that looks so damn good!
--- Post updated ---

Nah man you're lucky you got an E30 at all since the drift tax seems to have run the supply of clean ones dry. Miatas are great but an E30 will outrun my Miata any day of the week at the Tail.