Make a free-roam map of any real area for Assetto Corsa

An open-world map of your real city, every street open

Free roam is the simplest mode: pick the map type, find the place and mark the area with a rectangle, a circle, a polygon or freehand. There is no route and nothing is closed off: every street, road and track inside stays open and connected as in real life, roundabouts, junctions and bridges included.

The track installs like any other and shows up in the stock launcher and in Content Manager. Start a practice session, pull out of the pits and drive wherever you want.

From a neighbourhood to an island

You decide the size. These are the maps measured by the author on his PC:

Measured on the author's PC. The free version generates up to 1 km²; the full version has no limit.

The whole of Formentera is 15.5 million triangles, and the author has driven it at a steady 120 fps. La Savina, the Estany Pudent and every track on the island are in it.

Town and coast

Urban maps carry the most buildings and so take the most space. Puerto de Sagunto, with its blocks of flats, the beach and the docks, is 4.8 km² and 1.5 GB. On small islands the landscape wins: La Graciosa, with its sand streets and its volcano, is 30.2 km² and 797 MB.

It works the same outside Spain: a street in Cascais, Portugal, was the first track generated in another country.

Motorways and interchanges

Motorway interchanges come out with their slip roads, bridges and underpasses stacked as in real life. The one at Puçol, near Valencia, crosses the railway on several bridges; you can drive over and under.

8 real free-roam and drift spots to generate for Assetto Corsa

Ideas to start with. The first five have been generated and measured on the author's PC; the rest are kinds of place that work well:

• Formentera (Balearic Islands): the whole island, 120.4 km², 2.1 GB, a steady 120 fps in-game.
• Puerto de Sagunto (Valencia): town, beach and docks, 4.8 km², 1.5 GB.
• La Graciosa (Canary Islands): sand streets and a volcano, 30.2 km², 797 MB.
• Puçol motorway exit (Valencia): slip roads, bridges and a roundabout, 4.5 km² in 3 minutes.
• Cascais (Portugal): 0.7 km² of streets running down to the sea, inside the free version.
• Your nearest industrial estate: wide streets, roundabouts and yards for drifting; most fit in 1 km².
• A harbour or a ferry port: long open docks and access roads.
• A ring of roundabouts on a town bypass: linked circles to practise transitions.

For a mountain road to drive up and down, see turning a real mountain pass into a touge.

Make your own Assetto Corsa drift map: industrial estates, docks, car parks

Industrial estates and warehouse districts make great drift maps: wide streets, roundabouts, open yards and no tall buildings blocking the view. Harbour docks are fun too. Find the estate near you, mark the whole thing and you have your own street drift map, with the tarmac, kerbs and car parks exactly where they are.

Because the whole area stays open, you can link roundabouts and streets just as you would on a community drift map, except it is a place you actually know.

Performance and memory

For generating, more memory is better: 16 GB handles areas of a few km² well, and large maps such as an island or a city want more. Before starting, the app tells you how long it will take on your machine, and if a generation stops halfway, you can carry on where it left off.

In the game, tracks handle a lot of map with ease: all of Formentera runs at 120 fps on the author's PC. A very dense city with tens of thousands of buildings asks more when loading. Start with a district and grow it.

Generating your area vs downloading Shutoko Revival or LA Canyons

The best-known Assetto Corsa free-roam maps, such as Shutoko Revival Project (Tokyo's expressways) or LA Canyons (the canyon roads above Los Angeles), are mods built by hand by the community over a long time. Worldlaps is not another map like those: it is a way to make your own.

• A hand-made mod is better if you want a famous place polished in detail, with the lighting and tuning its authors have refined over time.
• Generating your own area wins if the place you want has no mod (your hometown, the industrial estate next door, the coast where you spend the summer), if you want to try several places in one evening, or if you want the whole area with every real street.

The two live side by side: a generated track is an ordinary folder in content/tracks, next to the maps you already have.

Online with your friends

The map is an ordinary Assetto Corsa track, so it works on a server as long as everyone has the same folder. To share it, keep the open-data attributions that ship inside it and use the default free (CC0) parked cars.

If what you want is your own town, carry on with how to put your hometown in Assetto Corsa; and if you would rather have a closed circuit on those same streets, see street circuits.