WIP Bay Route #9

[Mr Whippy]

That seems more manageable...

I think real roads where a given section feels good, tied into other good segments.

Ultimately real roads need to connect places but we don't need to get anywhere, so the Autobahn NFS5 logic is great because we can't ever really get anywhere but it never feels like we are on an Autobahn that leads nowhere, if that makes sense.

As soon as you try make off-ramps make sense by leading somewhere but they don't, then the illusion is broken, unless you then add industrial zones and lower class roads, but then that is another minefield hehe.

So if it can be all kept highway, with big junctions just leading into other highway loops so it never feels like we should be leaving the highway, just moving from one highway to another, then that will be great I think.


The current track started kinda feels that way, but obviously at some stage if you copy the real thing your gonna come un-stuck. That is why I think if you personally (or from reference) know some great sections that feel good to drive and have memorable outlooks, then tying a bunch together into a loop that feels like Tokyo, but isn't, then that is perfect


Here is my tweak to that map, which suddenly keep the spirit of it but adds in junctions to make it more 'playable' as a going nowhere kinda course but will still feel interesting because it feels very familiar to the real city in that area.


Just throwing in some junctions, some that will get you in any direction, some that only bleed off from one direction, and enough extra loops to give you about 6 various routes around the city rather than one...

The only real roads that area made up are the one to link the top right to the tunnel below, and the junction slip roads to make more loops than in real life.

The bulk of the extra road added is a tunnel too.


Hmmm

Dave

 

[aadilf1]

The NFS5 Autobahn was my favorite track in any game at the time, It was the first real 'cruising' map I'd ever played in. Especially with the Car Indicator lights which made the game realish

 

[aadilf1]

The NFS5 Autobahn was my favorite track in any game at the time, It was the first real 'cruising' map I'd ever played in. Especially with the Car Indicator lights which made the game realish

Also, has anyone really increased the size of the track since Giz uploaded it? I really want to have a go at a long nice Tokyo highway in my modded Supra

 

[Mr Whippy]

Hmmm, just looking at the actual roads, it looks difficult to try do what I thought might be possible.

A lot of the roads are elevated vs ground level in the opposing direction, so suddenly you are exposed to a LOAD of buildings you can see and get near.

And there are so many on/off ramps it'd be sad to have them all closed off. You'd feel like you didn't have many options when driving along, when maybe 1 in every 10 off-ramps were actually usable and tying into other loops.


This is where I think using long sections and big interchanges to make a 'highway to nowhere' network is what you need to do... with maybe one or two off-ramp sections that lead to petrol stations/car parks for starting areas etc.

You can still add in the over-passes and roads going other ways and stuff, and the airpor, and bridges and all that stuff, but you'll never get to interact with those elements because your route is going nowhere except around and around with a few loop options.


I love the theme though. A twilight course in this environment with a nice emission panorama texture map with twinkling lights everywhere, maybe a subtle fog, and just oodles of quiet highway with light traffic.
No it won't be real on one hand because of the looping etc, but on the other hand I think having a hundred on/off ramps that you can't access will hurt realism and believability just as much.

Hmmm...

Dave

 

[Stereo]

And there are so many on/off ramps it'd be sad to have them all closed off. You'd feel like you didn't have many options when driving along, when maybe 1 in every 10 off-ramps were actually usable and tying into other loops.

Hrm, I'd thought the Bay Route (marked in green) was basically an expressway that only has offramps to lower grade highways, and relatively infrequent of those, so that the loop I drew was already hitting about a third of them, and the rest could link back to itself as you've done. But I didn't zoom in all the way, so I'll have to take a closer look.

Having a real highway in mind is nice 'cause you don't have to guess at corner radiuses and such; you might change the angle but you have real reference on how large the offramps will be, and the general styles. The one south of the airport is really packed into a small space for example.

edit: The frontage roads don't seem to link all that often, but themselves have quite a few offramps. Would be a bit of a copout to have the frontage roads not linking to anything.


Some of the off-ramps are also legitimately blocked; see google maps. I don't know what that's about. And some of the overpasses are under construction; which would be a reasonable excuse to block some off.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yeah if you could theme it right then it'd look ok...

It's just some of those off-ramps off that main highway lead to a LOT of various roads and stuff. Some drop down to street height and suddenly it gets very busy with buildings and stuff you have to make.


I think if you can just take chunks that look good that can all tie together so you always feel like you can go off ramps and join other routes, then it won't feel artificially constrained, but you will get the same feeling of being on these Bay Route highways.

It would be nice to really build some of these roads, but it's in the heart of a huge city and at some point you have to put road blocks up, but even if you put them up at the end of off-ramps then you need to build up to and beyond the road blocks which could still be as much work as the whole highway and highway side elements in itself... and the only use of all that extra work would be so you could take an off-ramp and look at things, to re-join the highway any way.


There is absolutely tons of reference material on Google satellite imagery and Street View to find good chunks of the highway that can all tie together I think, capturing the spirit of everything, the right flow of the bends, the architecture, the gradients etc etc but without making a direct copy.


For instance, that long straight to the SW of the airport is about 7 miles and it looks dead straight and pretty much flat!
It's impractical to try build that into the circuit because it takes you another 7 miles away and would need miles more of following real routes to get back near the other elements... but simply tying that bit into other epic sections of the Bay Route so you just combine all the memorable best bits into one multi-loop circuit would be great.


I suppose the real question is, do we copy reality (dangerous without a metric shed load of reference data (especially the all important Z axis height data) and time!)
Or do we ape reality and use some creative freedoms to capture the spirit but actually make it drive and feel better than real life if we want


I'm a big fan of both, but I like the idea that we can all have more input (even if only a few build the actual 3D work) if we all throw in ideas to make it more interesting and exciting and suitable for all of us to enjoy as a community

Dave

 

[Stereo]

The thing I didn't like about the NFS5 Autobahn was the blind curves and extreme banked turns. I suppose they make it more interesting, and reduce viewing distances, it just seems odd.

The map you posted earlier, with several high-speed crossovers on two basically parallel highways, seems like enough complexity to get started with. Disregarding reality, I'd probably want a U-turn available fairly often, where you can go from northward on one to southward on the other and so on - since they're parallel the real links are mostly northbound to northbound type. The Autobahn didn't have them cause it was designed to be easy to navigate from start to finish in a defined direction; for cruising around, legitimate ways to turn around are nice.

The Tokyo bay line has this interesting interchange which is just a rest stop, without introducing much complexity to the routes - it'd be nice to stick this somewhere on the southern airport loop, or on your eastern loop.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yeah the Autobahn in NFS5 was a bit excessive in many areas, all those arcade racers are. Too wide, too banked.
The spirit of the autobahn was well conveyed though, and as said it never felt wrong when you drove along it. All the junctions felt sensibly placed and not just there to offer a different route to drive along.


I think you can retain a lot of reality (basically build to the equivalent Japanese equivalent of the UK DRMB) but just make a layout that works for the looping game requirements.

I watched this video last night:

What makes it feel like Tokyo is the road design/materials, signage, back-drop, horizon, architecture etc etc...

We can easily duplicate all these great things, with a layout that avoids actually going anywhere, all while making it great to drive on.

Most of those buildings can just be cubes with nice textures/shaders, more so if you are on an evening/twilight course where it's even harder to see details.
Make the course roughly circular around a central bay area (water), and you can strip out even more need for anything except a distance panorama texture of buildings that is seen when you are at the other side of the course.


If you are happy to help get good efficient shaders for stuff like vert lighting (so we can bake AO or even lighting for an evening course/tunnels) into suitable shaders for everything else, then I think most of the work on this is just gonna be doing lots of planning, drawing out high detail plans for the course, and then just getting on with the mesh work.

YouTube has a whole load of reference material too. These videos are great hehe.


So if the current logic is to pick out sections we like the look of (from a top down POV), tie them together to form a series of interesting loops, interconnects etc.

Then throw in a rough idea of the stuff around them. Ie, at this point we want dense city scape, a raised highway. This bit wants to be a bridge over water. This bit a sparse industrial zone. Etc.


I think that way we can give ourselves a nice starting point?

Then if it all gets done, looks good and drives nicely and we feel it can be expanded more, we can then start digging out from this highway into these zones? Maybe start making off-ramps to hit these industrial zones etc...? But that would be a year down the line at least I'd say hehe.


Hmmmm

Dave

 

[GizmoY]

You missed the infamous Wangan to Yokohama line on that map dave! that leads to Diakuko Futo.

Alot of Urban elevated highways are surround by tall sound absorbers. So the scenery doesnt even have to be that detailed

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yeah that's it. I've been watching these videos a bit today on my other screen just while doing other stuff and most of the time I look over you don't really see that much detail.

All the main highways have barriers which instantly cuts out a lot of what you might see. Then they are elevated which pushes the street detail even further away.
Then you add in sections of absorbers and other things, that makes them even further away.

In the cities you are usually elevated and can't see the lower parts of buildings, or if you are low near street level then if you are on the highways they are usually even higher sided (probably for safety etc) so you still can't see building bases etc.


So all in it's a pretty 'ok' task. Mainly just what you have done already. The elements of highway and associated props, then 'floating' buildings poking up at the sides hehe.

All in all I think you could get a pretty nice look. Obviously it just takes time still and that is something not everyone has on their own... it quickly becomes a very big task!

Dave

 

[Stereo]

If you are happy to help get good efficient shaders for stuff like vert lighting (so we can bake AO or even lighting for an evening course/tunnels) into suitable shaders for everything else, then I think most of the work on this is just gonna be doing lots of planning, drawing out high detail plans for the course, and then just getting on with the mesh work.

That reminds me, there's probably some neat tricks you can do with the projected headlight 'shader', which just uses layer0's texture colour - any reflective objects can be masked out so that the non-reflective parts don't light up in the headlights, using a custom shader for 'normal' lighting which doesn't refer to that texture the same way. Might be possible to get some high-reflect happening too, I forget if ambient/diffuse affect the headlight shade.

And I'd be happy to help out with whatever shaders would make it easiest to set the track up. I know the 'alpha for emission' is one since it's inexplicably not part of Racer yet. Probably some similar shaders using different sources of emission map would help.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yeah that is exactly the sort of things I'm thinking...

I've already been thinking of nice shader methods for the buildings... Twilight makes life quite easy.

Ie, the buildings can just be a diffuse/emission chunk, with the main building pretty basic. The odd floor/window that has lights turned on (and you get near so it matters) can be just an extrusion into the mesh and a room texture with emission properties.
Then the front of the building can just have a thin plane over the top of it with a 'glass' material that is using custom reflection maps (maybe have a bunch of 5 or 6 different ones for variation)... the glass texture can probably be an atlas in actual fact with a bunch of look up values for different tints/reflectiveness values.

I think that will be fast and elegant. In theory a whole chunk of city can be two shaders (one diff/emission, and the other the glass one), and just atlas all the buildings diff/emission textures at the end.


It'd be really nice to get the water reflection shader thing working, for both the open water areas, and a subtle road reflection working properly. Then tied into vert lighting for the road surface and the env ambient lighting for cars we might start to get some really nice looking visuals in twilight!


Hmmm

Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

Well I've been thinking more about making this, and I think Stereo is up for it too (helping with shaders to make the impossible possible we hope )

But it's hard to make a course and be creative because creativity takes a lot of time, more than just copying something sometimes.

So I think a good idea would be to just make a small loop for now, that we can do a proof of concept with and then expand it out to cover more and more in the future... but for now it NEEDS to be able to stand as this and work well. It also needs to be small enough to be achievable in a realistic time frame.


My current plan is to just build this but make it loop with extra junctions etc. Also it isn't intended to be super perfect. Top down will be good, and heights pretty good, but every detail can be done by eye. As long as it looks about right and FEELS right as a Tokyo driving experience more than anything, I'm happy.

The route is around 18km long, takes in a bit of residential, commercial, the airport in the distance, a tunnel, a bridge, some stacked highway elements etc...

It's pretty huge but the reference imagery from above and angled is pretty good for this area so I can't see a big problem in laying down the main road mesh and getting that nice, then just building out from there.

Obviously made up junctions/slip roads will have to be added in to make this system loop around, probably with the top 'spiral' element avoided, maybe running up the highway and then back down (so you can see it but since it leads to street level you can't get on it)


What does anyone think of this as a starting route?

It's quite short considering a big chunk is repeating bridge, repeating tunnel, or dead straight sections with high sides...


I'm just gonna grab imagery and lay out the top-down polygons for now (mesh smooth type approach) and see where it goes.

If anyone thinks this is a bad idea, or has a better idea, or thinks of some cool ways to add in some nice interconnects that make it all more interesting please feel free to let me know!


This type of course seems really popular and I want to make something that is gonna be enjoyed by others and can also show Racer off nicely.
Also hopefully because it's something others are really interested in it'll attract some help where possible which makes life easier... or maybe even once this concept is finished up others can use the base resources to expand out from it.


It might not come together super fast, but I want to make a track that we can all share and enjoy together, look great, use all the features Racer has going, and more... and a Bay Route seems to be it

Dave

 

[aadilf1]

WARNING: UNRELATED TOPIC

Wow... absolutely beautiful Mr Whippy. I can see it all happening right now... My 1200hp Supra doing 150mph+

 

[Mr Whippy]

Just to make it clear, I'm starting a new build of this style track using Gizmo's work and concept as inspiration...
The content from earlier in this thread is all his work

Maybe I should start a new thread, but first to actually get some concrete stuff down (not literally of course hehe)

Dave

 

[cristianno]

The bloom does work, just needed brighter lights than I'd expected. And when the sources are small it flickers a fair amount (which is why some of the farther lights have bloom, some don't).

This is just with a different texture on the bloom x-tree, a small white circle. emission=400 400 400.

As you can see, the transparent part of the x-tree still interferes with headlights - does this on other tracks too, not sure how to avoid it. I'd recommend just modeling out the surface of the lights, and setting that to an appropriate brightness.

Or, if they're textured right, using alpha as a control map for the emission would work too. The yellow half of streetlamp_1.tga is the light, right?

This is without the X-trees at all, just bloom. Mipmapping is definitely a problem here; to do this properly you'd want to make the mipmaps by hand.

please Cronw Vic link?

 

[Harey]

please Cronw Vic link?

Instead of bumping old threads just to ask for a link to a private vehicle, try pm'ing the person. But in any case, I know that's not Stereo's, because its one of my private cars, he helped getting the lights working on it.

 

[cristianno]

Instead of .....

thanks for the tip ... in relation to Vic, forget it, I will build my own

 

[GizmoY]

Well, a Long haitus...But im back! I bought and moved in a house early 2015, so not had a great deal of spare time to mesh around with Racer...

Once again, ive got that Urge to Speed on the Wangan...so, im back toying with this and my other highway project...Osaka Loop.

 

[GizmoY]

just been having a read through - Im still limited to Zmod, i think trying to learn a new 3D system will kill my motivation.

I think in regards to a loop. I think this would be a good start - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/3...7119cb:0xfc28a74b727988c8!1m0!1m0!1m0!1m0!3e0

you have the imfamous straight through the Ind estate where all the high speed runs are done towards the bridge and easing off for diakoku parking area - Which is where the pits can be/ starting points.