How much do you really know about map sizes?

[@CajunWolffe]

Great video; once again, I learned some useful things. I did a 4mx4m map in FS 17; it's still a work in progress, and truth be told, it always will be. It has two complete train systems and ask me if I'm tired of laying track. By the way, I have a sweet mod tool made by some modder back in the day; I forget who now, but its purpose is to lay the spline perfectly in the track to ensure the train is at the right height and centered even on curves. I can put it up for download if anyone is interested. It is a blessing when doing train splines. It sets inside the rails and has a pull point in the center to advance the spline as we move it down your tracks. I found that if one wants to do a big map, one needs to have a lot of time to devote to it because it takes a lot of time! I got into modding back in the Quake Unreal Tournament era. I have boys. When Battlefield 1942 came out in 2002, I fell in love as it was designed to be modded, and a lot of stuff you could do in freaking notepad! This is where I learned the 1025/1024 height/texture map thing. I used to hand paint them in Photoshop and, using a particular script save them as an 8-bit raw file at resolution (1024, 2048, or 4096). A texture offset raised or lowered the ground mesh/height map within the game map cube to bring down the ceiling to restrict altitude for the various planes, helicopters, and jets. I particularly like the AI as it was, and still is, one of the most unique game AI in that it was "reactive." It was not scripted and ran on 2D pathmaps, black go, white no-go. Later in Battlefield II, it went to Navmeshs. When adding AI to a new custom map, we had to make tools to hand paint them in special editors built by community members. File sizes were critical back then because my gaming machine, considered pretty bad assed for its day (I'm a retired engineer), had a whopping one gigabyte with ATI 9700 pro 256 video card, which was considered top on the line back in the day. Some folks had like 256 MB of memory running 64 MB video cards.

[@bauerbrown]

HA! I still remember my first "High Performance" ... "Computer." Mac SE, 9" monochrome display, 40MB hard drive (and this was considered a superdrive), 1MB of RAM! 14.4 Kbps external modem, a Motorola CPU .... and the rest of the stats are just as dismal. Boy, have we come a long way! I didn't get into modding until late FS17, early FS19, and it's only ever been Farm Sim. I fell in love with the game first, then realized it's potential. While I didn't have actual experience with modding itself, I did have lots of experience with the individual skill sets that were necessary, or at least useful. I haven't looked back since! BTW, the spline tool for tracks sounds pretty neat, I'd like to check that out.

[@CajunWolffe]

@@bauerbrown Check your email.

[@user-LarryA]

Thank you Sir for all of the detail on map sizes plus all of your other informative UTV. New to map creation. Learned a lot from your detailed instructions. Older Than Rocks. Huge Learning Curve. May have some questions in the future. Have A Great Day.

[@ChuckWilsonWilsonsStudio]

Loving your videos, and your intro is just amazing we really like it, who ever made that did a great job!

[@bauerbrown]

Thanks, I appreciate that! I'm glad you're finding the videos helpful.

[@Nero_1069]

Hi Bauer. Thx for all your videos, very informative. Is there a correct method to resize or upscale the weight files. It seems if you are making them bigger from the default then it will lose quality. Cheers.

[@bauerbrown]

There is no "correct" way, really. As you work and progressively save the map, the files are constantly being re-written and saved to the proper size, so it's not entirely like scaling up an image of your pet dog where you would lose quality. Even if there were a loss of quality, you're still taking a larger image and squeezing it down to fit a smaller area, so I think the difference in quality would be negligible.

[@Nero_1069]

@@bauerbrown thx man.

[@sixgun2719]

I have a question if I am wanting to make a 8km x 8km map and my dem is 4097. Would my other textures be at 8192. I have been looking at other maps and I see a lot of texture sizes of 16384.

[@bauerbrown]

I assume you are talking about the _weight files? Ultimately, the _weight files can be any size you want them to be as long as they are a power of 2. Personally, I think 16384 is overkill and only bloats the size of the map. I don't create 8km maps, but I think 8192 is sufficient. Only you can be the judge. You should play around with the different sizes and decide for yourself.

[@CMoDZ3D]

Could you maybe make a tutorial on making map borders

[@bauerbrown]

I can! I've been putting it off because there is very little you can do as far as borders, without using Blender or some other form of 3d modeling. I will definitely put that back on the list!

[@CMoDZ3D]

@@bauerbrown awesome, look forward to that one

[@timothymarsh9181]

Hello Bauer. Again I want to echo how useful your videos are for all things FS map making! Incredibly helpful and always good for a chuckle at a point or two. I'm pondering a six kilometer map. Starting with 2048 and changing UPP to 3. Other than the field dimensions needing to be done in a traditional way, can you see anything that would be gamebreaking? The last thing I want to do is get a couple hundred hours into a project and find that something simply won't work because of changing things up in this way. I'm just brainstorming (which will likely illuminate my lack of knowledge on map-making) but what about multi-terrain angle, tip collisions, snow masks, scripts for fences/powerlines, farmlands, etc. etc.? Also, I am still struggling at times to wrap my head around how it will affect the "scaling" of things when the UPP is 3 instead of the "standard" 2. I was just wondering if you had messed with any of this since making the video and could offer any further insight. Thank you! Hope to see more content from you soon.

[@bauerbrown]

I can't say for sure about multi-terrain angle, although I think it should be ok. Of course you know you'll have to do your fields the traditional way, but other than that you should be fine. I got pretty far into a 6k and didn't come across any issues other than the aforementioned field dimensions.

[@timothymarsh9181]

@@bauerbrownthanks for getting back with me. Did you start with 2048x2048 and change to a UPP of 3 to get your 6k map? Hope to see more content from you soon.

[@bauerbrown]

I'll have to check the map itself to see exactly what I did, but I don't have access to it at this moment - It's been a long time since I worked on it. When I get back to my main computer I'll have a look and see. What you're suggesting sounds reasonable, but it's also possible that I went with 4096 and a UUP of 1.5. I'll check when I get home in the morning and let you know sometime tomorrow.

[@Farm_Sim_Brisco]

Morning Bauer, this is very interesting information, never heard anyone talk about this before.. if the UPP is changed am i right in thinking the size of all the weight files would need changing.

[@bauerbrown]

The weight files don't need to change just because of the upp, but ideally, as the map gets bigger the weight files should as well.

[@RurallyRetreated]

Thanks Bauer! We’re in it up to our elbows now 😂

[@bauerbrown]

LOL! We sure are! Hopefully it made sense. I need to remind myself often that even though it makes perfect sense to me to me now, it did not when I was first learning and that's the level most users are at right now.

[@RurallyRetreated]

You explained it very well. I usually have to watch 3-5 times to thoroughly get it but that’s just because I’m me.

[@bauerbrown]

@@RurallyRetreated LOL! You're not alone! Eventually you'll have that "aha" moment and everything will make perfect sense.

[@mellowrebel4618]

FOR A MINING MAP DOSEN'T IT HAVE TO BE DEEPER THAN A STANDARD MAP?

[@bauerbrown]

It should, yes. You would want to set your default height higher than you typically would, leaving room digging and such. You'll still have a max height of 255, but ground level should be higher.

[@FatTruckGamer]

would 131km map kill someones pc?

[@bauerbrown]

I would say most likely yes since it's never been done. That would be an awesome map though! However, I wouldn't want to be the one to make it.

[@j.o.t.u.n.n]

Thank you B.B fir helping us noobs not look like tools in the forums. I'm looking to get a lap top are you using anything special

[@bauerbrown]

No, not really. My travel rig is an hp omen i7 gtx1650 ti, and the home rig is a msi ge66 raider i7 rtx2070 super. Both have 36 gb ram. Neither are anything special, but they are both perfectly capable. The rtx is obviously a better machine, but under most applications you wouldn't notice a difference. In the near future I'll probably splurge on an i9 rtx 40 series desktop. Desktop I usually build myself and it's WAY cheaper to do so. Keep in mind that you don't need to spend a ton of cash on these things. Even though it's not the latest and greatest, most gaming rigs are perfectly fine for most applications, just do the proper research before hand.

[@The_Purple_Joker]

15:20 starts talking about map size.

[@bauerbrown]

All of the information prior to that contributes to the actual size of a map, which I start discussing exactly 1 minute into the video. It's the people that skip right to 15:20 that always end up back on the channel asking questions because their map size didn't work out the way they wanted.

[@alexking2599]

4x and 16x are super simple and it's really a failure of basic math that people can't figure these out. But the use of both 4x and 4km doesn't help the confusion from those people. You also don't help with saying stuff like a 1km map is 0.5x. 1km * 1km = 1km^2 which is 1/4 of a standard 2km * 2km map. Which isn't rocket science :/

[@bauerbrown]

Which proves my whole point. If you apply the same principal to a 1km that people are using to determine "X" sizes, then it would be .5x which is inaccurate. The problem wouldn't really be with the standard sizes, it's the non-standard sizes that don't translate well into "X" sizes. I think you nailed it, it's a failure of basic math and as a whole, people are ... very slow to understand would be a nice way of saying it.