Texas Discussion Thread

[VTXcnME]

I'll try to mark them out when I find them again. Redo cities in California I noticed a few. New Mexico (Roswell if I'm remembering right) has one. Elko, NV has one I believe.

I'm not near my computer to teleport around and get the exact locations. And they aren't long roads. As I say, a few blocks end to end. But they are artifically blocked on either end. I'll look more closely at how detailed they are now for sure. They look the same to me in passing.

[Optional Features]

@VTXcnME Without changing the scale, SCS could make places feel big. Part of it is the surroundings of the place.

A road passing through a plain that has 50 feet of land on each side, raised like a V feels small.

A road passing through a plain that has 500 feet of land on each side, all of which is almost flat feels big.

This is what SouthernMan is showing in his pic: there's land in all directions and mountains in the distance. It feels large and spacious.

SCS maps feel incredibly cluttered and tight.

[Optional Features]

Can you point me to some examples? The vast majority of non-drivable roads in this game that I've looked at, including ones in cities and towns, are low detail and would not live up to the standards of the actually drivable roads.

Look in Denver: leave the decorative (grrrrr) dog food plant and make a left at the stop light ahead. Make another left at the next light and follow it up till it connects with the main road.

There's a cut plane there that makes things look weird, but basically it's right along a freeway, connects two driveable roads, includes a company with a name, and yet is blocked off and designed not to be driven.

I deleted the cut plane, one of the barriers, and some of the low poly deco objects and gates. The result is not bad at all, and I barely know how to use the map editor.

I even have a video of it, but it's uploaded to discord. If you message me, I'll share a link so you can join and watch.

[Optional Features]

In addition, I'm starting a thread of places that could be businesses, but are currently decoration.

I would happily pay scs to make these usable. They are everywhere, and it's a shame we can't put them to work.

[Quark]

One user with literally no skill lol: this is only like the second major time I've toyed around with the editor. And I already know enough to at least make the city feel bigger.

It may work in some cases without much additional work, and might in your case, i don't know but i doubt that only opening these roads alone makes cities feel bigger, in a general sense. The purpose of these roads and buildings is to give the impression of a bigger city than it actually is, from the drivers perspective. Now, if you do open such a road that was never meant to be driven on then you not only have to increase the level of detail there but ALSO of the adjoining streets and visible surroundings in general, and in many cases there is simply NOTHING there behind these buildings and the city ends abruptly there. You would now have to place additional buildings and roads there in turn in order to keep the appearence of a larger city. More work and like Supersobes mentioned performance might become an issue too.

[Optional Features]

@Quark I don't mean to be rude, but are we saying we should settle for a mostly decorative, mostly blocked off city that is mostly false front (designed to give off an unrealistic perspectivr) while delivering time and again to the same tired old prefabs that have been in use since the game was released?

I mean it comes down to what is the point of the game. If it's to haul cargo, that needs work. If it's to look at scenery, we need less city and more rural areas. If it's to look fake while seeming real, that seems like a bad strategy.

And I agree that some areas this wouldn't work, but in many areas it would. Denver, what I'm working on, is one good example. Twin Falls has a long road and out of it that is unused. There are some in Wyoming, some in Washington, heck most of Portland is decor despite much of it being visible from the playable area. Look under the 405 bridge for example. That area is all businesses irl including at least two concrete plants and a grain elevator. SCS modeled most of that, but blocked it off. Why?

[Quark]

I'm afraid you have to live with mostly "decorative" cities where a big part is blocked off, yes. Can you even imagine how much work it would be to make a huge citie like Portland or Denver drivable for the most part, in typical SCS quality? There will always be huge chunks of a city in a scale of 1:3 that are only decoration, even rockstar would never be able to model every bigger city in the united states in the way like they did with Los Santos in GTA5, with literally hundreds of driveable streets... imagine doing Texas with 6 or so huge cities like that. How many people should work on such a DLC please and how long would the development take? Not to mention the ancient monocore engine of ATS in its current state.....enjoy this slideshow But yes at least we agree that your approach would work in some areas and in some it wouldn't.
What i don't get is why always this generalizing and hyperbole... of course there is quite a lot truth in what you're saying but you also like to make it look worse than it is. Sorry. Yes this game is FAR from being perfect in any way, it needs work on almost every front "WE" know it all.

[Optional Features]

I don't know how much work it would take as my mapping skills are rudimentary at best, but what I do know is more detailed cities (and particularly industrial areas) with more dropoffs, unique dropoffs, tight turns (casuals beware), and more animations/ai/pedestrians would make me as a player want to play more.

Right now, to compare SCS and Rockstar again, Rockstar made one big city at like half scale with a lot of decorative buildings (like SCS), weathered textures (the opposite of SCS), and a handful of interiors (obviously not an SCS priority). SCS has created like 20 major cities at this point with lots of decorative buildings, but blocked off most of them from the player's perspective.

So while Rockstar can just pump out junky car packs and keep people intrigued, SCS has to keep making the map larger or a significant percentage of their base will lose interest.

This is a failed strategy as SCS will never be able to keep up with dlc demand. People are clamoring for Montana: they are clamoring for Texas, and shortly after they will be clamoring for Louisiana or Oklahoma.

If, however, there were 100 companies per city, twice as much road, and places you can get lost or stuck in, I think people wouldn't be as focused on the next dlc.

I could be wrong, but it's my opinion.

And to go back to the Portland example, it's not like I expect them to have a 1:1 version of this or any city. It's when I can look down from a bridge at an industrial area that handles probably half of the city's truck traffic, and I can only dream, something is wrong. That one city alone, plus Denver, plus SLC, plus parts of Seattle (again the port), plus a long list of rural places represent an incredible missed opportunity for places to deliver.

I think SCS would have been better served dialing in a handful of states with complex road networks, a complex cargo system, truck yards and better garages, and a more challenging economy than rushing through the US with thin gameplay hoping the mapping team can work fast enough to keep people entertained.

[supersobes]

Look in Denver: leave the decorative (grrrrr) dog food plant and make a left at the stop light ahead. Make another left at the next light and follow it up till it connects with the main road.

I deleted the cut plane, one of the barriers, and some of the low poly deco objects and gates. The result is not bad at all, and I barely know how to use the map editor.

To me, that area of the map is severely under detailed to be considered as a drivable road. Let's compare it to a drivable residential street in Ontario, Oregon because that's the first place that came to mind. In Denver, it literally just houses plopped on the grass. It looks okay from the Interstate, but close up, it looks incredibly unrealistic. Now Ontario on the other paw looks a lot more believable because of the details. This place was designed to be seen up close by the player, and things like vegetation, signs, and props help make it look this way. Maybe we have different eyes for what we consider to be detailed, but I think that any map developer at SCS and most map mod authors would agree with what I'm saying here.

Denver, CO:
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Ontario, OR:
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I also should mention that this street in Denver is just an arbitrary street meant to fill the scenery. Comparing it to Google Maps, it doesn't correspond to any street in the real world, while most drivable streets in the game do. For those of us who are looking for realism, having the streets correspond to a real street is very important.

SCS puts cut planes there for a reason too, so I don't think it's a good idea to just delete them. I'm very familiar with this area of the ATS world, and I know that performance suffers greatly here on my PC. The cut plane is useful because the game doesn't have to load and render any of the scenery behind it. By deleting the cut plane, you make it so that the computer has to load both scenes on both sides of the cut plane at the same time and ultimately undoes the performance optimization that SCS tried to do to the area.

I do agree with you about the Purina plant though. With it being a famous landmark along I-70 (and the place there the CDOT webcam to watch the progress on the I-70 rebuilding project is mounted to), I was a bit disappointed that we couldn't deliver to it, but I was still pleasantly surprised to still see it in included in the game scenery.

[Optional Features]

I would agree with you that it needs details, but aside from house shadows, some driveways, a mailbox or two, and a couple planters, it's not that bad.

(Also, the portion you showed is the worst part. The second half after the tracks is far better and nearly as detailed as the Ontario example).

I like details, believe me, but I play C2C (as do many others) because in a game with limited things to do, roads matter way more than they should. So the more roads, the better. And the more access to industrial areas, the better.

If individual states were more complicated, long distances wouldn't matter as much (hence gta). A GTA-sized map with every street driveable and every company deliverable (even without interiors) would be far more of a challenge than this game is with 1/3 the US done.

The point you mention about scenery is what frustrates me as a gamer. It's scenery that I cannot interact with, so why include it? It's like putting a hamburger in front of me, and then giving me a plate of raw turnips. All the best prefabs are decorative scenery: I want to deliver to them.

To continue my mention of SCS Portland, look at these Google Earth pics, then look at the in-game map. I don't expect 100% of it to be functional, but we got close to zero (with somewhat accurate models for several of the businesses). Zero isn't acceptable: at least 10-20%. The giant warehouse, grain elevators, and concrete plants would get us there with some deco buildings around them.

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