West Coast USA... (Old thread)

That is an 8 year old laptop. After you buy that car start saving up for a new laptop.

 

The fix for WCUSA is plain and simple, get rid of the race track. Transfer it to a new map, the same way Hirochi raceway is. i cant see the point of what is supposed to be the urban map of Beamng being consumed by an unremarkable racetrack that only takes away from the whole experience, and that honestly i barely see people use it for anything other than the drag strip.
Get rid of it, and rethink the map without it. Because the map had a lot of potential that it could never realize due to the lack of space, and without that track eating up 25% or more of the map, Im fairly sure they can do great things.

 

I probably will do that. get rid of the race track, because you have Hirochi race way, (maybe give give Hirochi raceway a drag strip). And then I will more the suburban area to the racetrack area and expand the city to be in the old suburban area and the space in between the old suburban area and the old city.

 

While in my opinion it has its flaws (specially the size of the racetrack), it's not unplayable because of them, at least for me. Its got a lot of character, even reminding me a bit of San Fierro from GTA San Andreas. It's also quite unique in the game due to its urban setting, most other maps are nature-focused.

While I do think other maps are more in need of urgent redesign *cough* Port *cough*, would be great to see a larger city map in the future.

And here's an idea for the modders: What about either moving around or relocating the city, so the tall buildings are where the racetrack currently is? With a more central city, not only will we have more space for suburbs and maybe an industrial area (where the city currently is), but it would give more of a dense urban city vibe, sort of like Los Angeles as you drive on the highway.

 

This map is essentially the drag strip map to me. I wish they would add a drag strip to a Hirochi Raceway or improve on the current one at West Coast. Honestly just want the lights to work in third person.

 

Honestly all the WCUSA criticism is quite unreasonable, the map itself from a game map perspective is an excellent use of space, the city isn't too large and there is a nice amount of variety. If you add more houses, all you're doing is just duplicating the same non-interactable buildings around and wasting space. As for removing the race track, you want to remove the most interesting aspect of the map to a seperate one?!? Half the fun of WCUSA is you can drive from the city area or suburbs to the track with your car on a trailer. There are plenty more maps that need attention in the game, including Italy, which I find actually quite boring, there are no motorsport facilities, a ridiculous amount of empty fields, and not enough shortcut roads through the mountains. WCUSA does need some more work, looping the highway through a tunnel would definitely improve it, I'd still love to see an airport, which is maybe something that could be built where the island currently is, albeit much larger.

 

Well, realistically speaking, a city would never be that small, and. A racetrack in said city would never be that big.

Moving the racetrack away from the city and expanding the city will do much good

 

If you wanted a realistic sized city, especially a California sized one, then the map would need to be absolutely massive. Even the generously large map from GTA 5 looks tiny compared to real LA.

 

Well, Even making the map Italy sized probably wouldn’t do it.

Making it a realistic size would mean that most people without a very powerful PC wouldn’t be able to run it. Heck, I bet I wouldn’t even be able to run it (see below)

 

With my old PC, which was not a gaming PC in any sense of the word, I ran on low to medium settings all the time, just for the sake of playing on WCA, I got ~10-20fps on WCA and ~50-70fps on maps like ECA and HIR, for the past 3 years I've had a gaming PC, it's great at running most games on full settings. Even with a 4K monitor. I still get 10fps with medium settings on WCA whereas I can play maps like Italy on full settings (with reflections on) and get ~30-45fps. I am greatly in favour of optimisation, as well as reworking. Los Injurus is heavily optimised, and if I'm correct, it's much bigger than Italy, and I still get ~30-40fps. I love this game, and I love the dedicated community, striving to make things better for everyone. If reworking WCA, make it so that both versions, old and new, are playable and workable for a period of ~2 months to allow modders to rework their content. This makes the outcome the best for everyone, a large city, with a racetrack, industrial areas, ports, highways, beaches, and leafy suburbs, that everyone can play on. I don't know how this would work or what it's called but there's a trick gamemakers use which doesn't render things the camera can't see. For a game like BeamNG, which relies heavily on physics and constant motion, just make it so that objects and entities have no visual existence to the game, but the Jbeams and physics are still operating.
TL;DR I would like to see a reworked WCA that builds heavily on the original, as well as a rework to the game's engine that will boost framerates globally (if possible).

 

I think a game engine rework would be way too much work for BeamNG’s team.

Plus, getting 60FPS with WCUSA doesn’t require that beefy of a computer. Most users can afford to upgrade to the needed specs if they wanted to.

Nvidia GTX 1050, 12GB of Ram, Intel CORE-i7 6700K would do medium settings fine with a few cars at 60 FPS.

 

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core Processor 3400 Mhz
NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060 3GB

Edit: Also i did say "if possible"

 

You're forgetting this is a game, not real life. Plenty of aspects in games get changed, most games have exaggerated proportions (even realistic themed games), and also condensed environments to save space. The racetrack is an excellent GP size track, plenty of places have racetracks right next to cities or street circuits, so why not here?

 

So It is possible to extend playable area in more interesting ways! In my mind this doesn't need looks as good like in usual playable area, because most of the stuff would be somehow hidden or barely visible.

Well, because this was my concept of Italian map before we had any information about it. I also were thinking about Monaco or other mountain related locations.

 

I can remember reading that the devs wanted to test and see if such a map was possible with the game engine. Other than that i think its proof that the map creation is evolving. I can see a huge improvement by just the mentioned optimization that Nadeox confirmed. Being able to use it with traffic on lower end PCs will boost the use, atleast for me.
For some reason ive always thought that the whole map looks pale? Almost as if the textures are very bright, not sure what does that.

Anyway, i could see a huge increase in use with the optimization which would make it possible to use the drag and race tracks more, along with traffic in the city areas.

 

The new lighting definitely helped with the colors and look, especially during a sunset.

But you're totally right, for the time WCUSA was released this was the limits of the game engine, but so much has been done since then so more may be possible now, though I'm curious to see if we will get a new map, or mainly remasters from now on of older maps

 

It's also not entirely realistic for a 6 lane road to merge into one lane suddenly. I like WCUSA, but it's a little strange seeing the highways just end suddenly.

 

I recently played a bit on the gta 3 ported map, and noticed how fucking great a big city would be for beam, I love the variety the different settings of beam maps offer, but I think it would be fucking awesome if the devs would pour their efforts into one single but huge 30x30 km map, I don't know much about the engine and its limitations or if that would even be feasible, but a map like GTA v with lots of variation, like wcusa but big, would complete the game for me

 

So, I guess I'm also one of the few that like how the map is as well, or as someone had mentioned, I have "low standards".

Anyway, when WCUSA first came out, I never could run it properly, due to a failing laptop, but even then I knew from the start that I'd get lost exploring around, fast forward to recent times to where I finally built up a decent desktop to run games flawlessly, I decided to jump back into the game, and I probably had spent maybe at-least a good couple days or so exploring around. I never really noticed the rather glaring issues that others have pointed out, nor did I have any issues running the map, so in my eyes I thought it was all fine. Though now, it's like, some of these posts is implying "The devs need to fix this NOW" and I'm just sitting here, thinking "Okay, so I can understand all the issues, and now do see them, but it's like, way over the top". I know this would probably illicit some responses, but that's what I honestly think.

I don't know, I never really found any issue with the map that was significant enough to make me not play it, I mean, with the recent update of Small Island, this obviously points that all the maps will receive the same thing, and plus everyone has to start somewhere, right? Nonetheless, I'd just be patient and see what comes out.

 

My main issue with WCUSA is that the AI paths are all messed up in a number of places, causing AI to drive on the wrong side of the road or the wrong way down the freeway, or to make u-turns in the middle of streets. These really need fixing to make the most of the traffic tool. This often stops me enjoying the map as traffic is great fun on a map like this. This I would say is the only thing that really needs fixing badly. AI that obeys traffic lights would be nice in the future as well.

A few of the dead ends could be better disguised, there are a couple in the city that would benefit from a few buildings to hide the seams better.

It would be nice to have the freeways loop around the outside of the map as they do in Utah to give a nice long run and minimise the amount of blocked freeways. Could do a mix of tunnels and freeways bordered by retaining walls so it wouldn’t all need to be underground. This I think would solve a lot of people’s issues with design and space and could give a great high speed freeway loop as another big map feature.

One thing I will say is that I don’t use the racetrack at all really, it’s kinda of a dead space for me in the middle as I tend to prefer ‘street’ maps to racetrack ones. I can see why people would want it swapped for more city or suburbs, but it doesn’t bother me really. Perhaps some more gaps in the wall to open it up more and allow easier access to the circuit would help people enjoy it more? Ive always found the layout once you enter the race track area confusing due to all the walls.