Goals; immediate and further down the road.

Immediate goals:  Terrain work - that pink terrain, while okay for a freebie that So-Cal once was before the city grounds were broken (it was merely a road network, with not a sign or building in the entire map, made of mesh road bridges and tunnels), is not up to par with the game's stock maps, or some of the work by other modders such as DoullPepper (who's now part of the team at Beam) and Ouerbacker, among a few others.

To that end, I am picking up an indie copy of World Machine 2 this week.  It will be the first official use of Patreon funds made possible by you.  I am thankful for anything I get, and I will be picking up only the lowest tier of the program first, and upgrade if/when needed later for a reduced price.  It should really help me get a nicer terrain out of this, and I will be doubling the terrain resolution at that rate in both the X and Y directions (for finer details like mud tracks, technically it's going to be quadruple it's current 4k x 4k res at 8k x 8k).  It will be expanded slightly by about 20~35% larger across, so the current individual elevation points per meter won't precisely double, but will be about 60% finer detail.  I would go higher but I am still waiting on tiled terrain support for the developers.

Originally I was only looking at making this of the quality / immersion of GTA SA or maybe GTA IV type graphics, but it's going to be more close to GTAIV / GTAV style graphics as I am learning more about the game engine, it's shortcomings, and it's strong points.

Speaking which, exiting game-updates are coming, specifically better performance, new maps from the developers, and possibly a new vehicle or two when it's ready, so I am trying to find what I can do that won't be murdered by this month's coming game-update in weeks 3~4 of December.  I won't wish to be undoing what I do this month, in January.

On that topic of efficiency, I've been speaking with the developers about ways to optimize.  Both in their engine specifically and ways other developers and game engines do optimization.  I have experience over 25 years or there-about with other games so I know the ins and outs of several different game engines to say the least, what works, and what doesn't.  The developers know their engine isn't the 100% best right now so they're working on it as I type this.  Kudos to them for acknowledging it though, not many people man up to their mistakes.

Back on topic of this map, monthly update can and will still occur.  I am unifying things and trying to improve the models, to reduce draw calls, and fix anything I missed before, so I won't have to (hopefully) do it AGAIN.  The modular road kit will still be available, so no worries there, for those that wish to make their own maps.  I am just trying to keep things so that any computer regardless of specification (provided it can run BeamNG physics at all) can run this without needing high-end stuff.  Currently an X58 original i7 system from 2009~2010 can run this map, at 30~60fps with merely a Radeon 6750 1gb ddr3 video card at appropriate resolution on LOW~Lowest settings, but I'd still like to improve while keeping this map's objects useful to everyone.  This map project development is two-fold, to make an awesome map everyone can enjoy, and to make an object repository so anyone can build almost anything with it (in mostly a city grid layout, possibly more angled intersections in the future).

Working on this month:

Terrain as stated above

Military base with airstrip

Unifying areas with high draw-calls and getting some other things ready.

Recently done - porting terrain collision into my modeling program (25 million triangles, yippie) so that I can better gauge what I am making, how big will be too big, and so-forth, and also better make road-sections to fit directly in the existing map VS having to re-do complete areas when I introduce a new large building/scene to the area.

Suggestions are always welcome, and thanks for your support!

--Sincerely, The Bob.