More progress, and much more FPS (Patreon)

We've finally hit 100% on what we're aiming for monthly on this project.  I want to extend a big thanks to everyone on that, as that will really help when prospecting for assets on this map.

I have purchased (with my own money as of current) a copy of World Machine 2, so that I can improve the terrain on this map, in due time.  I have to figure out how to get something resembling the Earth out of it, first.  In the end it will enable me to make as nice of a map as the developers would be able to put out - and not just this map project, all future, and some past map projects, too.

The new game update brought much good in the way of MUCH more fps to all places in the map, through improved handling of rendering while displaying especially the busiest sections of map.

Look for an improved 10~100% or more FPS in various spots of the map.  Draw calls are reduced by 25~50% on average, freeing up the CPU from being a bottleneck.  Measured with Shadows on, SSAO on, and reflections enabled on a modest low setting.

My previous rather popular ROANE COUNTY TN mod also saw a big increase in FPS, by as much as 250~300% in some places!  No, really, you can just about max everything on an RX 480 8gb video board with a semi-recent intel processor and have 0 issue.

I am having a little bit of a snag adding new models into the existing game currently, so I will be figuring out what's bombing that out.  Something with creating shaders is crashing the game out.  So working with staff on that to hopefully resolve this on the short-term.

In other news, the Collector road kit (5 lanes with a central turning lane for both sides) is almost done.  I have to make the curve pieces yet but the sloped ones are done as are the straight ones, driveway aprons, and half-pieces.  These feature new reflectors that will reflect light from the headlights from further away then the lines will, just like in real life.  This also won't cause more draw-calls, as the pieces are all reduced to ONE draw-call each with the new mosaic texturing.  That should also expedite creating new pieces, too, if I base them on that road kit.

I am trying to get a new update pushed in the next week or two as a maintenance update, but for now, there seems to be some game bugging going on in the map editing phase.  I can still work on new models, however, so that's not such an issue.  The current version will be given out for the time being until I can make sure that a new version won't crash on map load.

When Roane County TN map gets updated sometime next month (barring this game bug stopping it up), the release will be mailed out here to ALL members, about a week before it goes out to BeamNG servers.  

Thanks for your support!  I really am enjoying making this project, in between the times I am creating new swear words to describe the Maya software I use to do it :)