City of Corryton

[SwiftHyena2593]

Here's a city build that i've been working on for a while. Or well, it's more of a weird hybrid between a build and a static map, considering that I used some dts brick system I found here to make buildings/props/etc into single bricks. This build also uses a massive print pack I made with textures from various games, like the 3d-era GTA games.

This is the city of Corryton. A friend and I began building it way back in 2018 originally, and I've added to it on and off through the years. With all the free time I have thanks to the lockdown, I've been adding to it for the hell of it. The city is planned to feature everything you could ever want in a city, like a mall, stadium, Six Flags theme park, multiple hotels, various freeways, a monorail, an airport, convention center, a countryside area with various small towns and farms, state/national park, and the list just goes on and on. I'll be adding more pictures soon because there's some more stuff that I've built that I didn't have screenshots of/or have added since i've made the thread.





Facing toward downtown and the freeway inspired by San Francisco's old Embarcadero Freeway.


City park WIP





Facing down boulevard in tourism/entertainment district. For now it's simply known as "The boulevard", although i've considered naming it stuff like International Boulevard, naming it after Louis Armstrong, or just simply calling it Corryton Boulevard.




Neighborhood




Sculpture of the city skyline that a friend and I built in the WIP Six Flags theme park, which I'm planning to build functional rides for, as well as a bowling alley, and a water park adjacent to it.


Some random houses I built (This is an old picture, this neighborhood was deleted to make way for a freeway interchange and the houses were moved)



I've also borrowed some stuff from here (Damien's add-on/save/etc dump). There was a save of the old Jeep Server HQ which I found and I've been rebuilding it into a hotel. There currently isn't much built inside besides a few rooms.


I've barely touched the exterior so far. I don't really know what I'm going to do out there just yet.

[Ad Bot]

[Khaz]

very cool and interesting

is this being hosted?

[SwiftHyena2593]

very cool and interesting

is this being hosted?

i usually host it almost every day whenever i'm in the mood to do so.

[SwiftHyena2593]

Added some buildings around the park.

[Night_Hawk]

Very interesting and cool.
v20 GSF Ghost Map Vibes intensifies

[mrwallace888]

Is there the possibility you could beta-release the map and brick save so we could richard around with it in singleplayer or using our own addons?

[SwiftHyena2593]

Is there the possibility you could beta-release the map and brick save so we could richard around with it in singleplayer or using our own addons?

First of all, there is no "map", I was comparing the DTS bricks to static maps. I don't plan on releasing the save, mainly because it's something that isn't ever supposed to be "complete", it's something I add to and come up with ideas for often, and it'd be a pain in the ass to update the save file every day. Plus, it's just not something I want to release, not because i'm a richard and I dont want other people to enjoy it, but it's more of something I wanted people to join my server and contribute to it by adding buildings and what not. I do however plan on releasing the modter print pack and some of the bricks I made for this sooner or later so people can make their own stuff like this.

If you want a city map to mess around with that I have released though, you can check out my Cambridge map I released last year on Blockland Glass. This is a full-on static map, but there's open lots for building, and lots of roads and stuff to drive along. The only downsides to the map are that the buildings and the riverbed have no collision, because I lost the .blend file for the map in a hard drive failure before I could finish working on it, and I just released it as is.
https://blocklandglass.com/addons/addon.php?id=1294

I have plans to make/port more maps as well. One of these that i'm slowly working on is a recreation of all 500 square miles of O'ahu, Hawaii using OSM2World, which is a tool that makes 3d models from OpenStreetMap data. And I'm not making this stuff up. I've actually managed to import it before back in early 2020(albeit with plain colors for textures because OSM2World literally died if i tried exporting with high quality textures.) A friend and I drove across it over the summer and it took us 1 1/2 hours to get across the entire map from the southernmost point all the way to the northernmost tip of the island.




*trees are bricks i placed myself fyi


Like I said, It's not the most detailed map ever, but it's definitely something that has never been seen before in Blockland. This isn't even the first time i've done this. I've also imported other places, like the entire city of Reykjavik, Iceland, and one of the Canary Islands, Lanzarote. Even as far back as 2018 I was using OSM2World to import small cities and sections of towns.

Here's how OSM2World stuff looks with textures:





Still kind of bland obviously but with some retexturing and polishing up, you can have something incredible.

Like I said, I plan on working on O'ahu and adding as much detail and textures as possible. It's a bit of an ambitious project but I'm down for the challenge. Anyways, I'll even link OSM2World here and a few other resources for those who'd be interested in messing around with it.

OSM2World
OpenStreetMap so you can download map data
JOSM Editor incase you want to edit said map data for whatever reason.

I'm sorry for that long as forget post but I just figured it'd be worth mentioning all that because it truly is something amazing.

[mrwallace888]

That's cool. If you were gonna do Oahu I figured you could also just take the map from Test Drive Unlimited 1 or 2. :P

Cambridge is pretty alright. Collisions are wonky but like you said you lost the files or something so you released it as is. I wonder if maybe at some point you could somehow work on it again or something. Don't get why the collisions are wonky anyways, I never used Blender or anything like that but my assumption was that there's a plugin or program or something that could auto-generate collisions anyways. Unless it's like... a limitation or something (like collisions in BL can only have so many vertices, or that collisions are too performance-intensive, so you make them where it matters, etc.). To which in that regard it'd make sense. Or if Cambridge was given working lights and stuff (but idk if that's possible with maps or if you have to build them yourself with bricks).

Something I'd look forwards to though would be something like porting maps from Garry's Mod (such as bigcity or highway, or even fork somehow idk, or just smaller city/race maps like EvoCity) or bringing back old BL maps. I heard NYC was pretty big. :P

I don't know, just some suggestions. But those pictures are looking really damn cool. I wonder how performance is, I mean I'd assume it's not too bad because terrain looks flat and everything's rather minimalistic.

I know I'm an impatient forgeter (because time's slow lol) but if one of these days something in this regard could be released as an "open-beta" or something, where it's at least playable or testable or something, it'd be neat to have.

Regardless, amazing job on all this. I guess I'm partly upset because I was really hoping this static map stuff would like... you know... take off, and we'd be getting all sorts of crazy maps. I myself have been looking for a really good driving/city map of some kind that's decent in size and the like, so I'm especially happy about that Oahu thing. I just wonder if integer accuracy will be an issue with it (in just about every game engine, the further you get from the origin, the more jittery and violently shaky things begin to get).

In the meantime, does anyone know if there's a way to port static maps to that static map mod (the one that came with Bedroom and Asteroids and all that)? It'd be nice to pick maps with a dropdown in the Environment menu instead of having to enable it and restart a server.

[K3k0m@n]

Regardless, amazing job on all this. I guess I'm partly upset because I was really hoping this static map stuff would like... you know... take off, and we'd be getting all sorts of crazy maps.

staticmaps never took off because theyre such a janky and unoptimized system to work with, and end up looking far worse then maps in v20 ever did
even though making proper maps for v20 is also a pain in the ass, at least you end up with proper terrain and better looking lighting in the end
and most of all a result that users can download in under a minute, while v21s staticmaps are a complete hog on datablock count that take soo long to download over a slow torque connection

[SwiftHyena2593]

staticmaps never took off because theyre such a janky and unoptimized system to work with, and end up looking far worse then maps in v20 ever did
even though making proper maps for v20 is also a pain in the ass, at least you end up with proper terrain and better looking lighting in the end
and most of all a result that users can download in under a minute, while v21s staticmaps are a complete hog on datablock count that take soo long to download over a slow torque connection

I personally disagree with the lighting part, because static maps can look really good with the right shader mods IMO. But you're definitely right about datablocks. Oddly enough though, the maps i've made with OSM2World end up being extremely low for a static map on datablock count (O'ahu only has about 530 datablocks). But that's mainly because I didn't give anything collision and I join everything together, and then divide it up again into chunks of a few thousand vertices. I'm not even sure If I will honestly, unless it's a building with an interior or something like that, because there's so many buildings and objects, the datablock count would be ridiculous. Plus, I've never figured out how to get height data to work in OSM2World (idk if it even supports it), so the maps are just flat on the ground. Which is kind of both a good and bad thing. Good because then you dont have to deal with making collision for the terrain, not dealing with the terrain models themselves doubling the datablock count, and building stuff alongside existing buildings/roads easier. Bad because it's flat obviously and might not be as interesting to explore for some.

Making/porting regular old maps however, is like you said. Kind of a pain in the ass because the collision making tool that I use, VHACD tends to stuff itself and freeze up Blender a lot if you're trying to make collision for something complex like terrain, among many other things like the map not even appearing sometimes when I export it even though everything was done properly, the export script taking forever to export a map with many objects/datablocks. (It once took me over an hour to export a map from blender)

That's cool. If you were gonna do Oahu I figured you could also just take the map from Test Drive Unlimited 1 or 2. :P

I actually tried to port Test Drive Unlimited's map to BeamNG but I ran into some issues with the model format while importing it into blender. Plus it just seems like i'd run into a lot of issues trying to port it into Blockland. Maybe if I can get it into blender I'll try to at least reuse the roads and buildings from it.

1.
Cambridge is pretty alright. Collisions are wonky but like you said you lost the files or something so you released it as is. I wonder if maybe at some point you could somehow work on it again or something. Don't get why the collisions are wonky anyways, I never used Blender or anything like that but my assumption was that there's a plugin or program or something that could auto-generate collisions anyways. Unless it's like... a limitation or something (like collisions in BL can only have so many vertices, or that collisions are too performance-intensive, so you make them where it matters, etc.). To which in that regard it'd make sense. Or if Cambridge was given working lights and stuff (but idk if that's possible with maps or if you have to build them yourself with bricks).
2.
Something I'd look forwards to though would be something like porting maps from Garry's Mod (such as bigcity or highway, or even fork somehow idk, or just smaller city/race maps like EvoCity) or bringing back old BL maps. I heard NYC was pretty big. :P
3.
I don't know, just some suggestions. But those pictures are looking really damn cool. I wonder how performance is, I mean I'd assume it's not too bad because terrain looks flat and everything's rather minimalistic.

I know I'm an impatient forgeter (because time's slow lol) but if one of these days something in this regard could be released as an "open-beta" or something, where it's at least playable or testable or something, it'd be neat to have.

Regardless, amazing job on all this. I guess I'm partly upset because I was really hoping this static map stuff would like... you know... take off, and we'd be getting all sorts of crazy maps. I myself have been looking for a really good driving/city map of some kind that's decent in size and the like, so I'm especially happy about that Oahu thing. I just wonder if integer accuracy will be an issue with it (in just about every game engine, the further you get from the origin, the more jittery and violently shaky things begin to get).

In the meantime, does anyone know if there's a way to port static maps to that static map mod (the one that came with Bedroom and Asteroids and all that)? It'd be nice to pick maps with a dropdown in the Environment menu instead of having to enable it and restart a server.

1. I still have the model pack I got the models for Cambridge from. It was from a city model pack from the Unity store, but I got a free copy of it from a friend. Maybe someday if I have nothing better to do I'll make a re-remaster of Cambridge (I say that because the released version is actually a remaster of the original Cambridge model) The pack also contains some other cities I might try to import. Also just figured I'd state it wasn't even named Cambridge by default, it was just a generic city I polished up and named.

2. I started to work on a port of GSFGhost's NYC last summer but it's just been on pause for a while. I also have thought about importing some maps from Left 4 Dead 2, as well as gm_bigcity. I don't know if any of this will happen just yet.

3. The performance is really good as you expected. The game does get a bit shaky and weird though when you go real far out, as expected. It wasn't too unbearable when my friend and I drove across the map though. Also, the old static maps mod you mentioned is long dead. It'd be incredibly bad for the datablock count as well to have multiple maps enabled at once, rather than just having one loaded and restarting when you want to play on another.

At this point I might as well make a seperate thread in Modification Help for this stuff.

[mrwallace888]

At this point I might as well make a seperate thread in Modification Help for this stuff.

Probably should.

[K3k0m@n]

I personally disagree with the lighting part, because static maps can look really good with the right shader mods IMO.

i guess in your case with outdoor scenes it doesnt look too terrible (aside from every single surface having the plastic-like shader which looks trash imo), but if you try making any interior map like bedroom you'll end up with no lighting inside of it. fine for blockhead scaled stuff since you can place brick lights but classic maps like bedroom/kitchen are just entirely shaded inside and look terrible compared to how they did in v20

[mrwallace888]

Does Blockland support the use of Normal Maps? It'd probably help with the plastic-y look of everything.

[Masterlegodude]

Does Blockland support the use of Normal Maps? It'd probably help with the plastic-y look of everything.

As far as shaders like those go, Blockland only has specular highlighting, which depends on the brightness and color of the diffuse/albedo texture, so you have no real control over it

[Antares]

Hooly nuts this is amazing. Time to re-establish the United States of Peekarica in Blockland.