WIP Beta released The Tennessee USA Roane County 0.71 Beta Discussion/Suggestion/feedback Thread 19.3.1

ouch

 

It happened to my computer too.. Beamng just exploded!! xD

 

My PC crashes when I try to load this map.

 

Yes it takes a bit to load. It's a massive map, both in size, and resources. Possibly, due to the hard disk drive loading times, it's over a minute due to that - it's 30~60 seconds if you have an SSD depending on the speed of the host controller/processor. The sheer amount of thousands and thousands of trees makes it take 2/3rds of the entire loading time just calculating everything to do with the forest. Once your in, your in though. This state, and the nature of the rural area, means there's going to be a lot of trees. While I can cut loading times down a bit, it also means cutting content. The map just isn't the same without the forest, but it's possible to delete the .forest file but you'll lose the houses and the trees and the rocks too. Thanks for the screen clip of the grass in the road out past Harriman, I must have missed that. It's a little uneven out there, I haven't done final road-smoothing yet there. In due time i'll finish the details here and there, but hopefully I won't have to add too many more trees (just a few!). To flesh out the entire map with trees, would most likely crash the game. I will try to thin out the trees once you get over the ridge into the west part of the map, as that's causing the frame-rate to tank some (it holds into the 30s everywhere except part of route 70/Roane State Highway/Broadway of America - it's all one road - which dips to 24~25fps). Though, this dip in FPS I brought up isn't in the western part. Part of the reason the west side lags so hard is that's all plateau and rather flat compared to the eastern half.
This map release was designed to test out how it ran for everyone else, most people are pretty fine, I try and keep 30fps as the bare minimum, with a target minimum of 35~45fps. Maybe I just have to hold off on creating maps this detailed until machine specs advance another year or two. However, despite that, work will continue. I do not need to add much of any more resources here, so it actually may load FASTER on the next revision. I will be removing some redundant resources to get the file-size down further a bit. Intersections (some of them) need to be touched up, and various bugs/glitches (there aren't too many) fixed.
Overall reactions are quite positive. I thank everyone (and you) for their feedback. Will consider trying to make maps more fps friendly in the future, though, and may stick with desert maps as they just plain run better.
--- Post updated ---

Oh my. Consider deleting the .forest file in the level's directory (make a copy of the .zip and delete from the copy, or just move the file out).
You'll lose the trees, rocks AND THE HOUSES, and it'll be very bland and boring, but it'll surely run!
Your PC may only have 6/8gb of memory. My pc uses 7~9gb running this map alone. It's nuts how much memory the physics uses.
This map is absolutely monstrous though. This is the price for putting in real terrain, unfortunately.

Beam is in early stages. Maps like this that really push it will help the developers find bugs and generally odd behavior in the game when user's push the limits of the game.
EDIT: Also to note, there will be a minimalist version when this map is closer to finalized...

 

That's one of the things that I think is a bummer for this game, it is in early stages though so when its in a better state maps like this could have a better fps. 29 fps is playable for me, and most of the time I get that on the western part and I have a 750 ti and a i5 4460 so, for now this map is very good for what it is and how early it is.

 

So what's the fix for this? I get the same error. What, buy more ram?

 

It runs fine here (64-bit os/32GB ram) despite BeamNG crashing on launch the first time when I installed it.
One thing I noticed is a huge impact of the headlights on fps: as much as a 50% drop in most places.

Sure hope it's fixable through optimization, 'cause the dawn/dusk ambients on this map are just fantastic.

 

Isn´t there a way to delete the trees, but not houses or rocks? @bob.blunderton

 

In all honesty you could just turn forest item shadows off, would most likely double speeds it just draws away quality of the forest item.

 

You need a 64bit operating system. And I believe 8GB of RAM as well. This map is HUGE so it's going to eat RAM for breakfast. You're outta luck if you're on a 32bit Operating System though, but unless you have a PC older than Windows 7, it's rare you'll be on 32bit.

 

I´ve got 64bits and 8 ram gb ._.

 

Windows Crasher 3.0. After 10 minutes windows fixed itself and the game loaded kidda of normally, on 8gb of ram and a regular hdd

 

This is a great map, but even with 16 GB of RAM it is definitely tough to play, due to the massive amount of trees. I think that if you reduced the amount, it may run better for people like me. Nothing too drastic.

 

In areas of the map the lag gets worst

 

I will be thinning the trees out some. It was considerably worse when I first put the trees in, as I've thinned them a good bit. Chances are enough grass field in them will improve things much more without looking too plain.
This map *does* take a lot to run, BUT it's enormous, and you can cruise on for miles and miles without a worry of coming to the map edge too soon. There are considerable unacceptable frame-rate drops on Boardway of America/ Roane State highway (name changes, same road, it's also route 70 too), between about 2 miles out of Rockwood, and the fossil plant (near the Samuel Rayburn memorial bridge/Pine Ridge highway exit). So basically anywhere from the end of Pine Ridge and Broadway of America, to town of Rockwood. Also, the west part of the map is a little slow yet. I will replace some forest with fields, using google maps as a guide to keep it realistic looking.

I am taking some time to re-grade some of Southern California (So-Cal Interstate)'s highways, to improve the quality of workmanship. When I am done doing that in a week or two, I'll be back on this one.

I do not know of a setting or way to delete the trees without the houses unless I manually erase all the trees (I could! I may eventually do so) to make a low-detail version. I could go digging through the forest master location file, though that might be just as tedious as removing them manually in the editor interface.

-Slowdown problem is known, forest will be thinned but not in a lackluster way.
-Intersection graphics sorely need updating!
-Road network roughly half-done, this needs to be finished.
-Towns need to be completed.
-Wacky glitch on the hud map, where there's a road from Roane street/ US 40 all the way to Kingston's Kentucky st exit & US 40 that isn't really even there or supposed to be there. I think this is what 'confuses' the AI.
-Need to fix the railroad track placement's lack of precision, I filed a feature request/bug report on it, so rest assured the dev's know.
-Square-ish grass patterns cannot be fixed, it's a characteristic of a large map based on a not-so-high-resolution grid. I did put in a feature request for 8k and above terrain/land-grids, for finer-detailed terrain on larger maps.
-Sometimes cars get stuck to the custom bridge supports, this is a game bug with the collision models of sketchup objects, a bug report has been filed on this & I brought it up during the mod meeting.

On that note, the devs - as awesome as they are - were very receptive to the many issues I bought up, so maybe in the next update or two, we'll see some of them fixed. These things will help everyone make better maps in the long run, and encourage more people to map.
Regardless, work will continue on this map as soon as I fix up So-Cal Interstate a little better.

 

wii there be proper back roads with mud and potholes?

 

I'll see what I can do about making holes as best I can, but yes there'll be plenty of uneven back roads. I'll be using the local roads around here as a gauge to make them as realistic as possible.

 

Loading this map up hangs my system really badly. The mouse can't even move at times.

Perhaps 8GB of RAM just isn't enough anymore. I've been contemplating going up to 16 for a while. I think it's time.

or

could it be that this map is too big for BNG?

Regardless, this map is a wicked blast!

 

Glad you liked the map ~ from a fellow mapper, that's always good to hear.
To answer your questions and comments:
YES, this map is large, however, it's NOT too large for Beamng.drive. It's definitely recommended to close out your web browser and other non-essentials (like a media player, iTunes or something) if you 'only' have 8gb of ram on the system. Users with 8gb have run this but it's really cutting it close. I have a feeling the physics model, with all the forest included, really is eating into the ram requirement. It's a LOT of data, so 16gb systems will really have a much easier time with things than systems with 8gb. Users with 10~12gb of ram should also be fine.
While I wasn't at one point sure that this map would ever see even beta release, I almost had scrapped it until working on the terrain some proved successful. It sure does push the system, and the game, however, atleast in it's current state. I did however release this before the up-and-coming dev's modding support discussion #2 and used it as an example of how big of a terrain Beam can push, and some of the bugs or not-so-nice things that arise from such. The devs again were very receptive to what I had to say, which is always a plus.
For comparison, it's very close to the size of your Desert Highway in that it's a 4k resolution terrain pushed to like 5.x stretch. It's still only a 90~95% scale model of the real thing, but making it any bigger just makes it uglier than I'd have wanted if I expanded the terrain anymore.

So yea entirely, glad you liked it, do enjoy. I am sure in years to come this will be much more enjoyable with large maps in Beamng.drive as technology pace catches up to this game's requirements with physics and such. It would have better FPS if it weren't for all the trees, but I'll be thinning them out some here and there in the 'problem' areas. There will still be around the same amount of trees, however, they will be more spread out around the map as they should be instead of all clustered together.
On another note, I have read your concerns about So-Cal and am working on an update for that one, which both works much more realism into the highways and slightly more realism into the back-roads.
--Cheers

 

I did have everything else closed out. I guess Windows 10 64bit needs a lot just to maintain itself.

I'm going to get 8 more gigs this week so I'm betting I can enjoy my PC and this map better!

Keep on doing what you're doing.