I was just thinking about tracks and customising them more, to give them more mood and character. Right now the best tracks are still done using fixed TOD, and the added support for f32 suggests HDR skies appearing soon (and they are quite cheap to buy in high res from cgskies.com these days)
But any way, I think a big problem for us is still CSM shadows. I remember suggesting we had a way to tweak some variables in TOD but we never really got anything back at the time.
However, a good alternative might be to simply hard-code some variables for CSM per track? That way the racer.ini and shader settings are updated pre-track load?
Ie, under track.sun settings?
csm_blur (a factor to multiply the hard-coded shader variable by, so we can blur the map more or less depending on the sky. Slightly cloudy or misty days have softer shadows, so softening the map adds to realism a great deal (we can do this manually but it's not really user friendly unless you run batches etc))
csm_scale (a factor to increase/reduce the map size, so 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2 etc... softer shadows can use lower resolution I find, so run lower res and use less of the costly blurring method)
csm_dist (a factor to scale the csm map swap distances, then for smaller tracks we could add a bit more quality, larger tracks could have them go for further. You wouldn't spot so much on the close ranges but 20% might make a lot of difference on the farthest shadow map on a specific track, it could also be set very small (say 10x smaller) for studios or other tracks where you simply want very high quality shadows for screenshots or showing off the car in the car selection scene etc)
Just throwing these out there to see what people think.
Right now we could do this via batch/ini.exe but ideally we want it to run per track. Maybe this is something we could ask Ruud to implement fully?
Cheers
Dave
But any way, I think a big problem for us is still CSM shadows. I remember suggesting we had a way to tweak some variables in TOD but we never really got anything back at the time.
However, a good alternative might be to simply hard-code some variables for CSM per track? That way the racer.ini and shader settings are updated pre-track load?
Ie, under track.sun settings?
csm_blur (a factor to multiply the hard-coded shader variable by, so we can blur the map more or less depending on the sky. Slightly cloudy or misty days have softer shadows, so softening the map adds to realism a great deal (we can do this manually but it's not really user friendly unless you run batches etc))
csm_scale (a factor to increase/reduce the map size, so 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2 etc... softer shadows can use lower resolution I find, so run lower res and use less of the costly blurring method)
csm_dist (a factor to scale the csm map swap distances, then for smaller tracks we could add a bit more quality, larger tracks could have them go for further. You wouldn't spot so much on the close ranges but 20% might make a lot of difference on the farthest shadow map on a specific track, it could also be set very small (say 10x smaller) for studios or other tracks where you simply want very high quality shadows for screenshots or showing off the car in the car selection scene etc)
Just throwing these out there to see what people think.
Right now we could do this via batch/ini.exe but ideally we want it to run per track. Maybe this is something we could ask Ruud to implement fully?
Cheers
Dave
