Land of Sands (270,000+ sq km map) HUGE 1.0

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by theberat

1 month ago

This mod does not belong to me, I do not sell it. I'm uploading only for modland users!

Land of SandsAKASandia or Huge Desert MapA very hot and big place, where you can test cars in hot temperatures, or just drive around the map, and exploring the limits of the game!Download link is right below the post.Okay, it's finally the time for me to actually post a work in progress map that i've been working on for about a month or so. This map is a sequel to my previous map Antarctica (https://www.beamng.com/resources/antarctica-98304-x-98304-km-in-size.25724/) Which is a big map based on real-life continent, and mostly used to test cars in cool conditions. This map is the opposite of that, it is hot and sandy, which is good if you need to test cars in hot conditions, and see how long they will last.

UPD May 29th 2023: The map has been released now, and it only took me one in a half months to finish it, but as far as the concept of the map goes, it took 2 months already by this point. The map still has plenty of things to finish, add, or polish, so it'll be more better than before, and more comfy to drive on. Lots of pictures you will see on this post is back when this post came out, now the map looks different, so keep that in mind.

Compare to Antarctica map i made, it is about 32 times larger than Antarctica, and it's made to be this big for few reasons.
Reason 1: Why not? Experimenting is fun anyways.
Reason 2: It's also handy to test cars on a long run from one bit of the map, to another.
And finally, reason 3: It is perfect for air vehicles, as they can land anywhere, as far as it's not water below them.

How exactly big this map is?
According to the game (and not my calculations), the terrain object is exactly 274,877.9 sq km, which according to the Wikipedia, is larger than New Zealand, United Kingdom, Western Sahara (which is the base of the map). Romania, South and North Koreas, Japanese island Honchu, and Iceland. That's how big it is.And comparing to Antarctica again, this map has quite a lot of stuff included, such as traffic lights (that work, of course), night time lighting, couple of towns and villages, a VEEEEEEEEEEEERY long highway and other roads, working gas stations, and more.Lore(might be questionable or confusing)The island was discovered in 1899 by some British folks who were going to South Africa, initially they were thinking that they have arrived to North of Africa, but what has actually happened, is that they have arrived to the island that was far from North of Africa.When they found out that it is the wrong place, they decided to not just leave the place, but instead build towns and occupy the island with people, and create a new country on it. And later in 1902, Sandia was created.When cars arrived to Sandia, they were imported from Japan, since they were cheap to import, and easy to fix. Since 1960s, it has started witnessing natural disasters, which destroyed and ruined some bits of the island, mainly the road system outside of towns, the most frequent natural disaster that the island has are earthquakes, which caused most of the roads to stick out of the sand, which in that matter causes troubles when stopping on the side of the road for normal vehicles that are not qualified for better off-road and climbing. Not only that, it also caused some roads to be bumpy, as well as curve very sharply, causing those roads to be driven one by one for each lane.Sandia is the most hottest place in every season, especially in Summer, which is a perfect opportunity for some people to start traveling to the place to take vacations.Some people arrive to Sandia in their cars from around the world to do "Arabic Drifting", which is a type of drifting at highest speeds, which is mostly done on public highways with cars already driving on them every day.Sandia has taken some designs from American cities, East European cities, and Italian cities, by building structures similar to those countries, the most popular style used in some towns is Italian, which also gained attention from Italians themselves, which made an impact on Sandia, as it introduced Italian language in its society.Somewhere in 2000s, Ibishu built the testing site for their vehicles on the island, to test the cars (not only just Ibishu branded ones) in hottest climates possible.Main features of the map-270,000+ sq km terrain, which is enough to take about 8+ hours to circle around it
-Working street lights at night
-AI Support (although it's very stupid)
-Very long highways, which is enough to arab drift until you get bored with it, and not because the road ends
-Complete freedom (...obviously)
-Kart Track (located in Hill Town spawn point)
-Secrets
-Memorial to my old cat (R.I.P.)and probably other things i didn't mentioned.Now to the QnA part of this post, i'll try to answer the questions that you might have when you first saw this post.Question 1: Why is it this big?Answer: As i said in the post, it's just curiosity and for other purposes, such as air vehiclesQuestion 2: What's the whole point of the map?Answer: Providing a giant place to test cars in hot conditions, as well as having fun times in either single-player, or in multi-player with your friends. And also for arabic drifting as well.Question 3: How big the file is?Answer: around 600+ MB, but not over 1 GB.Question 4: Will it explode my PC?Answer: No, it is optimized well enough for machines that have minimum specifications for the game, or below that. I haven't yet tested it on my 8 GB i3 Laptop, and 4 GB Celeron AiO PC, but once i will, i will update the information for this question. (If i ever will)Question 5: What happens if you go from one corner of the map to another with that size?Answer: The graphics will just freak out due to Floating Point glitches. To fix that glitch, game devs have to rework the entire game engine so it'll support larger scales of maps like this one, but it is very... VERY hard to do on the engine from 2001 (Torque3D which is what BeamNG uses as a base, is based on a 2001 game engine used in a 2001 game Tribes 2, which is a competitor to popular games of that time, such as Unreal Tournament '99)Question 6: What's the maximum FPS you get on your machine?Answer: Let me provide the specs i have, and then i'll tell what FPS i usually get in the gameCPU: Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz (overclocked up to 3.5 GHz)GPU: Radeon RX 570 4GBRAM: 16 GB running at the speed of 2667 MHz (according to Task Manager and BIOS)The game on the map with these specs runs on average 90 FPS or even higher. Maximum it can go is up to 120+ FPS at normal settings. I checked it later with setting lighting setting to Ultra, which dropped my FPS down to 60, due to the usage of full PBR lighting.Question 7: Does it have PBR textures?Answer: Yes.Question 8: Does it have AI traffic support?Answer: Yes, it does, but traffic is veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery stupid in some places.Question 9: When and where this map will be released?Answer: To answer the "when" part, probably summer, or late May. As for "where" part, it will be either repo, or if something goes wrong with repo, it'll be on forums with google drive link instead.UPD: This question can now be ignored, as it was found out that the only way to upload the map, is through any file sharing website (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.), i choose Google Drive since i'm more familiar with it than anything else, and it's also trusted since it's from Google.Hopefully that's all questions you may be asking once you'll see this post, If you don't have a question answered in this QnA section, you can comment here, and i'll try to answer it.And here's the pictures i took in the map, showcasing some places and the license plate of the map. (Warning, most of them are old, and long before the map has been released)