WIP Bay Route #9

[Stereo]

Racer traffic is like AI cars but with a little more flexible routes, as they use waypoints instead of splines they aren't limited to the track itself. It's still running the full physics simulation for each, so you only get about 5 without major framerate slowdown (since the CPU spends more and more time on physics - on my PC it's about 7% of a CPU per car)

One thing other games do to fight this is only run AIs near the player, and another is only do full-physics if the player runs into them (otherwise just run them on rails) but I dunno if Ruud has plans to facilitate either of these.

It'd be possible to script warping AI cars around so they're continually within sight of the player but still wouldn't exactly create dense traffic.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Sounds cool so far.

I'd probably rough out buildings for now with a generic city style texture and as simple cubes. Get the feel right then invest in higher details if they are needed.

I'd be more than happy to have just one parking lot to start with, and do a nice job of it. No point trying to do too much and struggling if you can build one good modular car park and then duplicate it around later


The traffic does indeed work. You need traffic models which we don't really have right now per se... probably a separate job to build some nice LOD'ing traffic that is really well optimised and looks good so you can get some heavy traffic without too much cost. Probably 1000 polys per vehicle/shader and try make it a single shader (gloss/bump/reflect), and get all the work done in one pass per vehicle (maybe wheels are another 4 passes, arghhh!)


For the aircraft I think you could simply script that to move up and across the scene every 2 mins or something... no need for traffic...


Dave

 

[GizmoY]

Traffic could be commercial kitty's. Basic texture etc. maybe a blurred static wheel model. Would eliminate the need for them to be a moving object. Wouldn't matter when your flying past them anyways.

I want the scenery to be nice. Airport with a moving plan if possible (if it can't fly. Maybe a taxi ng loop around the airport.

Heavy industrial area. Dock and ship yard. Bridge. Fairground With moving ferris wheel.

My vision for this was to have alot of players driving at the same time (maybe eliminating the need for lots of traffic)

I think racer lacks a good night track also. Stereo has nailed it with the lights! It really does give the track that certain feel. I just need to sort the city models

I managed to get some nice "asian" style building textures from a pack off turbosquid which will do just nice. Aswell as a glass walled high rise.

 

[Mr Whippy]

I think you need to look into something to illuminate the track surface proper if you are using this as a night track.

It looks odd to have all the lights but not being able to see.

It's also odd that when you drive under different lights the car still just looks the same colour...


There has to be some elegant fudge to get this looking better imo. The lights are indeed getting there from a drivers point of view, but as soon as you swap to an external camera it looks lacking still... I think with other cars driving around all looking dark from your point of view it'd hurt the feel of the track a lot.

Faking light onto the tarmac is easy, I'm thinking more for the cars... hmmmm...

This is where using a small mip of the live envmap, and then blurring it, as an 'add' for the baseCol.ambient appearance of the car would be nice... or something along those lines.

Then all those soft high intensity street lights would light up the roof of your car a nice orange or whatever colour they are


Hmmmm

Dave

 

[GizmoY]

I don't know about these complex shaders. But is it possible to have surfaces reflect a specified texture? Like env map for all the textures. But only reflect the light glow textures?

 

[GizmoY]

Something like that not work for a Temp solution to light up the roads? Not ideal i know, But could do as a "bridge"

 

[GizmoY]

Zmod is holding me back now! seems really unstable and constantly crashing, It can't even load some 3mb dofs of the track chunks!

 

[Mr Whippy]

Zmod is good to a point.

I've had real trouble managing big track imports in the past... I ended up having to do stuff in chunks to get bits into Max.

You really would be better using something like 3DS or Blender I think, it's just the learning curve in doing so... but long run it'll make taking this project to the required final level you want MUCH easier.



As per the lighting what you could do is have the lighting effect as another texture that you apply to the base textures in a 2nd channel.

So channel 1 is as it is now. Channel 2 would be for some other data/effect and then alpha could be used to multiply the emission value by...

So you could have many road textures like now, then just one or two lighting pattern textures. You'll have many shaders, one for each road with or without the lighting effect, BUT, you'll keep textures in memory down which is better in the long run.


Alternatively, when Ruud pops up again, it'd be great to ask him if there is a way to access 2nd UV's from a DOF, or if they are even present... being able to light map the track would be many times nicer for loads of reasons!

Still wondering how to light up the cars though. My only thoughts are some kinda script that changes sun.ambient values and uses trigger lines maybe...
More interesting still, maybe a way to use the sun.diffuse and set the position and strength based on distance to the light nodes... not sure how you'd do all this, just thinking.

If Onyx is powerful enough and you could set 'gizmo' type reference objects in tracks you could just put a gizmo at every light, and check every frame for the nearest light gizmo, put the sun at it's coords, then tweak the intensity based on range

Shadows and everything then

Hmmmm

Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

Just used Stereo's 'facing planes' vert shader for the lights here then used the shaders from my test course I did the other week for the rest.

Re-tweaked/balanced the TOD/emissions and got it looking fairly nice here I think.

If Stereo can think of a way to make those planes rotate, maybe based on viewing angle, then they would look really cool as you would get the streaks rotating in them etc...

Aside from having to resort to alpha to coverage, which is kinda not noticeable once you get moving with the motion blur shader, it looks ok (note the video was done without motion blur on)


Will post my files later, still tinkering a bit.

Dave

 

[Stereo]

That reminds me, the RX7's interior is using vf_reflect with mipmap_bias set up to 7 or so, and reflection down in the ~0.05 range (higher looks funny in the daytime).

It's a relatively subtle effect unless you know to watch for it, and it'd be better if the texture used an alpha reflectivity map. It's basically just the reason the upward facing surfaces are slightly more illuminated despite there being no lightsource.

I played with using the cubemap's mipmaps as the source for ambient light, but the edges are way too obvious if it's all the ambient light.


Not really sure which planes you're referring to with rotating.

 

[GizmoY]

Looks amazing dave! Are the lights being reflected on the road? Or am I seeing things?

 

[Mr Whippy]

Stereo, the mips don't work for that exact reason, the cube edges are still sharp.

If there were a blur filter that was quick and elegant that worked across cube edges that would be ideal.
I tried writing one once but it failed badly hehe... I'm sure you'd have more luck than me!


If you can get rid of the sharp edges then suddenly using the envmap mip for ambient lighting would do wonders on these kinds of tracks.


It's still difficult to get the mix perfect though. Ambient lighting via envmap does make a lot of sense but we are missing diffuse lighting too... in theory the envmap has diffuse lighting in it too (the sharper point lights), but how do we consider those?

It kinda gets out of the scope of the renderer somewhat... it's all special case stuff and becomes a nightmare.

What works well on a night course might look bad in the day time, and it's just that whole energy management stuff coming to bite us in the ass. Reflections, from diffuse to sharp, are what really light up objects, but in Racer we have fundamentally separated those two illumination sources.

Not really sure what the end result is there.



I think a big step would be getting ambient specular working nicely alongside diffuse specular, so the two can exist and look right side by side, balanced by the shininess value, and using the same fresnel properties through ambient spec > diffuse spec > envmap reflections, to conserve energy nicely across all the values.

You'd still need to manually balance things but the fundamentals would be automated ideally... ie, as a material gets less shiny we get more ambient specular replacing diffuse specular value, and the only control we have is a specular and/or gloss map to control how that works.

If we then want to add in some envmap to add more subtle effects we can, and manually adjust the specular value down to conserve the energy... (or maybe even automate that too), ie, total has to equal 1, so add 0.3 spec you get 0.7 envmap!?

I dunno... all just ideas but I know it's probably very possible within the existing structure we have... it's just setting it all up!


Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

Not really sure which planes you're referring to with rotating.

The actual planes that get transformed to face you, if they could then spin about the view axis as you move around. Ie, if you move towards it, then it will stay the same orientation, but if you move so it has to change the way it is 'pointing' it would rotate a bit... it'd just add more life to the glares as currently mine have subtle streaks in them but they look weird staying still...

Looks amazing dave! Are the lights being reflected on the road? Or am I seeing things?

Yeah, just a subtle reflection.

dyn_reflect shaders, with reflect=1 and fresnel something like 0.04 0.96 6.5.

Oh, I also copied the red channel to an alpha channel for all the road textures... ideally you'd paint your own textures that maybe were more gritty, had patches of water showing here and there etc... to add a bit more variation and sparkle and interest.

I think I'm using mip level 6, but ideally you want to use 4 or 5 and blur it a bit to get really nice reflections!

Ideally, once Ruud has fixed that ground mirror shader thing then you'd use that instead! Right now this effect using car-relative envmap means it doesn't look so good from track cameras


Dave

 

[RaoulEmilian]

Nice but small map.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Imagine it 10x longer with loops etc!

It'll be a nice track IMO. Even if the terrain is just emissive texture planes in the distance with very little up close detail it'll be very nice in my view!

It's inspired me to want to do similar hehe... But I have my own track to finish


Good work Gizmo!

Dave

 

[GizmoY]

This wont be a small map when its finished!

Its all about getting together with some friends, with some 300kmh Tuned monsters and letting it rip!

Next update aiming for next weekend, Im working on it as we speak, hopefully with some nicely textured buildings, and some eye candy stereo can work his shader work with!

 

[GizmoY]

i'm having issues with collisions with the walls and rails! i have separated the Road model from the Curbs/ Walls models and vehicles still drive through them!

Roads currently set @ Flags=4 (As per TrackED setting) and Everything else (Such as Walls, Rails etc) Flags=6.

 

[Pedro_Takumi]

in other words, it's becoming intense, the lights, the feel this track gives upon sight is something remarkable. this is and should be a work to be proud of, my best wishes for this project

 

[Alexander Knoll]

i'm having issues with collisions with the walls and rails! i have separated the Road model from the Curbs/ Walls models and vehicles still drive through them!

Roads currently set @ Flags=4 (As per TrackED setting) and Everything else (Such as Walls, Rails etc) Flags=6.

do you delete the cache folder?
hmm...i use flag=6 for road and flag=2 for rails, walls etc...

 

[Mr Whippy]

Pretty sure they all should be 6 (surface and collide) with Newton these days!

Ie, if you want the car to touch it and collide, use 6. Otherwise use 0.

Dave