Modslab's German Autobahn - A3 Spessart v1.0

27.2 km of the real Autobahn 3 over the Spessart, both carriageways, and no speed limit on 151 of the 157 sections that make it up. Patreon only. BeamNG.drive 0.39.x.

The road

The A3 leaves the Main valley at Marktheidenfeld, climbs through forest to Rohrbrunn, which is the highest point on the whole autobahn, and drops down the other side towards Aschaffenburg. That climb and that descent are what this map is. One road, both directions, closed at each end with a turning loop so you never have to stop and turn around.

The alignment is the OpenStreetMap geometry of the actual carriageways and the ground under it is SRTM elevation data, so nothing has been straightened or flattened to make it drive nicer. Minimum radius 1,053 m. It climbs 264 metres at up to 6%, which is what the real Spessart climb is signed at, and the climbing lanes open exactly where they open in life. Eight viaducts, the same eight that are really there, the longest 690 m on concrete piers. Three interchanges and eleven country roads cross the corridor at the angle they really cross at, as scenery. There are no slip roads: the map is the autobahn and nothing else, and every metre of it is drivable.

The real ground carries on for 30 km either side and 12 km past both ends, so what you see on the horizon is Spessart rather than the edge of the world.

German down to the sign

RQ 36 cross-section. Three 3.75 m lanes, 2.50 m hard shoulder, 30 cm Randlinien, Leitlinien 6 m on and 12 m off, a 4 m median with double steel Schutzplanke down the middle and a continuous outer rail on both sides, 5,128 posts of it.

Then everything that hangs off a German motorway: 2,180 Leitpfosten with retroreflectors at the 50 m rhythm, 10 Schilderbrücken over the carriageways reading Frankfurt a. M. / Aschaffenburg one way and Würzburg / Nürnberg the other with LED panels on every third one, Zeichen 282 and the advisory 130, kilometre plates every 500 m, an orange Notrufsäule every 2 km, Wildschutzzaun along every kilometre of forest at 4,470 posts, and a Grünbrücke over the corridor in the middle of the wood. 34 hoardings on the way through — Spessarter Bräu, Autohaus Kessler, Reifen Brandt, Main Versicherung, Radio Spessart, and a few of ours.

The forest

34,000 trees and bushes, beech on the slopes, fir on the plateau, birch on every disturbed edge, planted where OpenStreetMap says the forest is. It is dense enough that you cannot see through the wood from the road, and it thins into scrub and rough grass where the land opens out into wheat, rape and ploughed fields, one crop per real field. They are BeamNG's own models with proper LOD, impostors and wind, so 34,000 of them cost about what a stock map costs.

Day and night

Time of day runs, so a session goes through dusk, into a real night, and back around to dawn. At dusk 302 lighting masts down the median come on, one cone each over both carriageways, and go out again at sunrise. Rasthof Spessart stays lit the whole night through, and two thousand retroreflectors pick out the next corner before your headlights reach it.

Traffic

AI traffic circulates the full 27 km in both directions through the turning loops, on a proper three-lane one-way navigation graph, right-hand traffic, and it drives like it is on an autobahn rather than in a town.

Six spawn points

The east end with the full climb ahead of you, the four-lane climb itself, the summit at Rohrbrunn, the west end, mid-route, and the descent. Each one has its own preview.

Under it

875,850 triangles of road and scenery, a 34,184-item Forest, and 185 textures, 174 of them shipped pre-cooked so there is no import wait on first load. 5,350 automated checks run over the build before it ever loads: that the ground is never above the asphalt, that there is no hole anywhere in the corridor, that every sign faces the traffic it is signed for, and that not one triangle on the map is inside out.

Worth knowing before you download

It is a motorway. It is fast, it is long, and it is forest. No mountain pass, no drift course, nothing to explore off the road. What it is for is finding out what your build actually does in fifth and sixth for four minutes without lifting.