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

This has become by far my favorite map to cruise on. There is a certain authentic feel to terrain which is based on real data and combining that with a skilled developer who can tie it all together produces some really awesome driving experiences.
Outstanding work Bob, keep it up!

So Cal is also incredible btw!

 

Due to the lack of precision placing guard-rail (which is in, and can be manually placed as needed), I've managed to come up with a bit of a hacky solution. Enter the TWO DIMENSIONAL looking THREE dimensional guard rail! heh. yup Hey it works, no more placement precision issues. Now if only I could fix the railroad track that easily.
Pics from Loudon Hwy. About a mile of it is in, just east of Decatur Hwy. It's the little creek bridge right near the Decatur Hwy terminus of Loudon Hwy. More bridges will look like this. Lots of bridges in the southern US have this railing, it's like typical metal guardrail that's encased in poured concrete. So yea, totally 2d-looking, but entirely DOES conserve the piece-count here, so as it stands, I will have *JUST* enough pieces to finish the map. I've used 52% of my objects up, at most, and there will be enough objects to finish this map up, but not a whole-lot more. Trees/Houses will most-likely never count toward map object limits (though there is a RAM limit on the host systems), as that's in the forest-brush and the forest brush as I mentioned is only limited by RAM and processor (loading time) and video card (ms per frame-time).
These pics aren't awe-inspiring, though they might be if you see the license-plate, heh. I haven't finished up the forest here or the terrain, so it's rough. Only the road/bridge is in.

*Anyone who has experience porting DAE's (Collada, Opencollada format 1.4.1(etc) ) into Beam/Torque3d, and knows exactly what settings to use in sketchup 3d, please let me know. There's dozens of beautiful new houses I'd totally like to add in, but it keeps saying unsupported line or unsupported this or that, freezing the editor upon spawning/placement. WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO BE SO #!$%ING DIFFICULT!???
I am going to try again with Sketchup 2013 later, beings that 2016 did not work, though I opened both my DAE's and game DAE's up and they both said 'Collada 1.4.1' in them. WHY WHY WHY.

 

i found this tutorial by drowsysam helpful
http://www.beamng.com/threads/video...th-working-collision-textures-for-noobs.5071/

anyways, im really looking foward to the next update. Looks great!

 

There are plenty of tutorials like the one listed above thay will help you with that. I'm super excited for the next update.

 

Thanks everyone for the comments and positive feedback. I've still been working on the area of Decatur/Decatur Hwy.
I've plugged another 10.3 miles of roadway in tonight, and aside of a few patches of grass where they shouldn't be, this map is closing in on 90 miles of completed roadway (there's another ~2 miles of road in addition, seperately, that's 'in' but not formed-and-smoothed yet so not included in the 10.3 miles). I will be adding the forest into the area possibly tomorrow evening. I have changed my mind about a mid-month update, I will most likely put something out over this weekend and go back to weekly updates as it keeps people waiting less time.
There isn't much else done besides all the stuff in the no-mans-land that was south of the bridge, heading to the south of the starting point in Kingston. That small area (15% of the map, max), is where the 2 miles or so of roadway was added the last 2 days), 3.5 additional miles being in Rockwood (east of the starting point, not too far from the middle, just south of the middle of the map).
I slightly updated the bridge rail texture, the horizontal part of the barrier texture was too narrow. It'll do until I get a real 3d model put in (and won't hold up map progress until then). There's now 3 bridges that look like this one (two more were added tonight).
I did a google comparo of looking straight down at the map from as high as I could go before it vanished. Shut the fog off for the screenshot here. I tried my best to follow the contours of the google map to my map I'm making here in Beamng.drive, and I think I've done a decent job.
You cannot see trees (which ones are actually planted there thus far!) and you cannot see much detail, you can only see terrain texture here, 90% of the asphalt has roadway on it (the roadways fade out when you get about a mile from them, for performance reasons).
The TN Comparo screenshot is a large double-width screenshot, 3840x1920 or so, comparing BEAM to the Google map page in the web browser. This only shows the roads that have been added, not all the roads that will actually be in the final product. The total road-mileage will most likely top So-Cal Interstates 120+ miles easily, and roads will be added until I run out of objects most likely. 52.34% of the object total is used thus far, and houses & trees & ramps don't count towards the object limits (exactly 2117 objects of 4096).
Google link if you want to peruse around here, this is the southeastern-most corner of the map, south of the Kingston starting point.
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.806174,-84.5529409,4672m/data=!3m1!1e3

In-game shot is of Smalley Lane just east of Heckler Gap, and another shot where Smalley Lane and Decatur Hwy intersect. Here you can also see that you can tell the AI where to go, and actually know WHERE it's going - if you know the area. The roads are NAMED the real roadnames! For locals wanting carchases, this will be quite a hoot because there's ALWAYS FULL AI SUPPORT HERE!
There's a road in the wrong spot going due south from heckler gap (runs across the rock-faced mountain range there, it should be in the valley to the west of where it is, in the comparo screenshot), ignore it, it'll be a dirt path eventually, in the proper spot.

 

This map is awesome with the right hardware.

Definitely need more than 8GB of RAM!

 

Yeah thanks, that means something coming from another map-dev.
Just a heads up, Beam still has a very slight memory leak, but you have to leave it open overnight to see it. Thankfully RAM is cheap, so I'm gonna have to drop another 16gb of memory in here for 32gb soon, because even without the memory leak, I still have hit 99% ram usage twice this week with content creation. The Beamng.drive memory leak will be filed under bugs in a day or two, before I release this. It shouldn't effect normal playability though. Still loading in around 5~6gb used in Beamng.drive, so if you've got another gb free, that should buy you atleast 1~2 hours of playtime on this map before it bugs out for those with 8gb of RAM.

I don't have any HDD's here so I can't tell when/if it's using or ever used the page file unless I look in task mis-manager. Really need Beam native support for linux so I can just keep Winblows OS on the old i3 or the AMD FX machine I have here, use this i7 on linux with some more ram & really open it up for some true work-flow. Don't want to be using WINE (Windows Emulation layer libraries) for everything.

I really want to keep this running on 8gb machines, however, it's an absolute bear of a map, and the forest layer takes up many GB. So there's not a whole lot I can do about the memory-footprint of this thing short of a barren, boring map. That's more something that must be done on the software-dev's end of things.
It can be truly awesome, even if not everyone can run it, or it can be just 'meh' and not be as good as it could be.

I will most likely go with my plan of adding a lesser forest file optionally placeable in the zip file, or a multi-.mis setup like Ouerbacker used in Mammoth Valley. The options would look like almost no forest, some forest, full forest.

--That is all for now
--- Post updated ---

Thanks a bunch, this is why I use real terrain on my maps - both So-Cal and Tennessee USA have REAL terrain. There's no way I can make terrain as good as mother nature can, so I use USGS data upscaled into a power-of-two format usable by the game, coloring it myself. There definitely is an amount of vision required in this - but having done it for 20+ years since Doom Editors came out, I have been getting a knack for this type of thing. Atleast we have terrain now (Half-life was one of the 1st), as it makes map creation so much nicer.

 

Well it's coming along nicely. It's such a thrill especially when this is the area you have grown up and lived your entire life in. I know most of these roads like the back of my hand. It's surreal to see it like this.

 

I think the release of 0.7 will drastically reduce memory usage since the developers are removing the entire internal server and networking system. This would probably reduce the overhead memory consumption for most gameplay content.

 

Good to hear, know any ETA on that coming out, or is it just a 'when it's done' sort of thing (typical)?

Yes, I know the feeling there - though I haven't lived in the area my whole life, and actually, I live 20 mins drive from the west edge of this 'map', I've lived down here a bit now and I think I like TN, USA, much better than where I used to live up north.

There will be atleast *TWO* if not *THREE* more editions of Tennessee, USA, along route 40. I plan to do all the area from Knoxville in the east (where 40 splits off just west of knoxville), all the way up, through this map, and over to atleast Cookeville.
I already have the terrains ready, just haven't been ported into Beam yet. Some will be a smidge larger than this one (eek!) some will be the same size. Go huge or go home, I say. As long as I can put a smooth roadbed on it, I don't care how pretty or detailed the terrain looks!
It's about the driving - the function - not the form. It doesn't matter how pretty it is, if it has no roads, or no fun to the driving, it sucks.
Things will only get more realistic as time goes on. As I learn more functions with this, I will implement more features and goodies into the maps. I will build and build and build until it's either too slow or it runs out of object instances.

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Speaking of which, I've added about another 5.5 miles of roadway mostly in the Heckler's Gap area and slightly northwest of there, including:

Chamberlain Cove Rd
Highland Reserve Dr/Laurel Hill Dr
Manley Dr
Finished/Smoothed out yesterday's alignment of Manor Rd/Griffith Point

Yesterday's roadways were Smalley Ln, Woody Ln, etc.
There's more than mentioned, but these are just the ones currently selectable in the drop-down AI box.
Obviously River Road and things like Decatur Hwy are in there too, as well as road-names I mentioned above.

The total is up to.... 13.1+10.1+5.5 miles of roadway added ( 28.7 miles of road added IIRC - it's close). I'll most likely add another ~7 miles of road or so to bring the grand total up to around 100 miles of road added into this, and then go-ahead and release it once the forest/watershed areas are touched up a bit. Houses will most likely get added into the areas after I get the road network built.
Careful, it's very very easy to get lost and disoriented here especially when the trees are in. I will definitely need to do a few signs before I get done with this!

Screenshots time! Nature lovers rejoice! This will have plenty of nature. Maybe we can get the devs to code birds splatting on the car
The area I've been working on for the last few days all done up nifty with TREES. This was barren here before.
I took one of the screenshots very close to the ground to show what high-detail textures look like.

 

Yeah while it may seem like a daunting task, road signs would be very beneficial to the size of this map.

 

Four to six plus weeks, according to tdev. So at best that's mid September. Though I imagine we can expect a bunch of outstanding features to be added that have been on the backburner, but don't quote me on that.

Also, I'd like to download this map, but I'm afraid the size is putting me off. Have you considered using 7zip's lzma2 "ultra" compression to cut down the final size? Usually the compression ratio for such a thing is around 40% - 60% the original size, which would be a boon for a 1+gb map with tons of redundant data.

 

There is unusual shaking of the camera in first person when driving,i downloaded the map a few months ago though,it might be fixed now.

 

That's called LARGE MAP SYNDROME, it shows up on Nadeox's SSRB map also when you get further out. Considering you're about 4x further from the central point of origin (0,0,0) then you would be in any in-game map, this isn't suprising. The devs know about it, from my map(s) and also from Nadeox's SSRB map. This map was original a 'engine-stress-test and limitation test' map that was never supposed to see any PC besides mine and the dev's. It because something more or less due to demand. I can't do anything about the shaking, that's game-engine related, but other than possibly being a bit of a visual irritant to a few people, there really isn't anything negative it does to the game/has on the game experience. So it's only visual. It's the lack of precision that comes with being so far from the 0,0,0 point of the map.

There will most likely be an update in the next day or two on this map. I'd give it to mid-sunday or sometime close to that, I should have a new mega.nz hosted download here for people to enjoy. Not sure if 8gb-RAM equipped systems will make the cut (buy more ram, seriously), but I will try to keep it playable for them (if not, an update patch will follow shortly after, though you'll have to manually apply it).
Trying to get about 100+ miles of road for the next version. It's currently @ about 92~93 miles now, total, roughly 27 miles more than last version's update. Trying my best to get the main structure of all the roads done by the end of the month so I can get some RACE missions in. There will be single-car point-to-point races, and multi-car races (to suit i3, i5, i7 class processors). A 15~20-mile 8-car race is quite the fun time

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I bug-checked the roads I made recently to remove small imperfection in the leveling procedure, and any errant trees that got planted in asphalt are fixed too. The 3 small creek bridges I made have now been AI-routed so the AI won't have an issue here at all. There isn't too much else to say other than that. I will be working on this for several hours again tonight so I may have a later update.
--- Post updated ---
Ram usage is currently at 6gb RAM usage on load of this map, with the RAM usage increasing to 6.3~6.8gb depending on how much you drive around. So yes, please free up as much as possible before starting a drive in Tennessee map when it's updated again.
This is solely for Beamng.drive. So close other ram hogging apps out like your music player or WEB BROWSER etc.

 

At the rate of your development speed and quality I'm surprised the devs don't enlist you into the development ranks lol. The work you do for fun is amazing. We need someone like you working with the developers to help aid in map making etc. Your texturing with roads and such could be very beneficial to the development of rural towns and such in future maps for the game.

 

I do this work because I enjoy doing it. If I could make money doing it, great, I am disabled, so it's not like 'I can't use the money' but I don't require it. As always I appreciate the kind words... it's nice to hear something nice, ya know?

I got the rail-bridge done on Ruritan Rd - Made a quick comparison screenshot, it's not perfect, but it'll work. It's a bit under 2mb so it may take a moment to load. Obviously mine's done in glorious summer, and theirs is done in the bleak BLECH of winter
The commercialus-maximus fits under it, too, by about 2~3 feet. So I'd estimate it's about a 16 foot clearance.
I am sure I can fit a classic can-opener in this map somewhere. If anyone knows of a good place, let me know (it can't be on the highway).
There's now RED, GREEN, and DEEP BLUE Girder textures... well it's flat & reflective metal texture, but it works nice for girders/beams etc.

 

Best part about that screenshot is i knew exactly what it was before i even read your post lol

 

Another great map Bob, been having a ton of fun exploring this map. He isn't kidding about the 8GB+ required ram, my PC can just barely load it. Again though, really great map.

 

Looks good, I have solid-ish 60 fps (excluding occasional lag spikes). It is the first map I actually noticed fuel consumption. Apparently 600 hp hillclimb Sunburst with longer 6th gear and wide opened throttle is not your first economy daily driver choice. I have no idea why.

BTW quick question and an apology. Does it have AI support? I'm too lazy to look through all the text and thread (which is the thing I apologize for) and this is only one thing I want to ask.

 

It does he's going pretty far in depth with it as well