Racer v0.8.19 is out

[Ruud]

It's at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0.8.19.zip . I won't have much time the coming 3 weeks so hopefully there's enough to play with.

Known issues:
- the README in the zip mentios log-averaging for luminance, but in fact that didn't work as expected, and I'm just adding RGB values now.
- Shadowmapping smCor[] is being worked on to be more stable.

For those who missed v0.8.18, here are the changes since v0.8.17:

v0.8.19 (27-08-10)
------------------
- The cubemap camera position was wildly off, giving incorrect culling of objects in the reflected
environment often. This also fixed the appearance of seams in the cubemap sides.
- Using glGenerateMipmap() while loading textures - supposedly faster than using GLU.
- Switching free shifting and up/down shifting is now automatic. The default mode is still
stored in the data/controls/presets files for the initial gear.
- Auto exposure downsampling is now down without mipmaps but FBO's instead
(data/renderer/fullscreen_shaders_hdr/luminance_downsample_*.cg). Mipmaps was not working ok.
- In Ctrl-2 you can now see the luminance and RGB values of the rendered image. This to debug
sky values (the values shown represent a kilolux value).
- Auto-exposure is now working ok, so the TOD editor now also has an exposure factor next
to direct exposure (only useful without auto_exposure). This factor is multiplied with the auto exposure calculations, so even if the auto exposure is trying to get a nice lit image, you can bring it down at night (purposefully under-exposing).
- Used Stereo's ToneMap function to desaturate dark colors. Also added a blue-shift for night scenes.
- Cloud color is multiplied with lightAmbient (sky color) in the sky shaders, so the clouds are now
more visible and don't need 'clouds 7' hacks.
- Auto exposure 'steps' setting has been replaced by 'time_per_sample'; it used to be framerate
dependent.
- Controller lock can now be specified (data/controls/default.ini). Used it on a G27, setting lock
to 900 in the controls file and in the Logitech Profiler software. Setting it lower in Profiler just gives a mild software-controlled lock which is not too useful, so I just leave it at 900.
See data\controls\presets\logitech_g27_racing_wheel_usb.ini for an example (joystick0.lock=900).
Set the car.ini's steer.linearity to 1.0 preferably. Now, the steering lock will match that
of the wheel directly.
Racer caps the steering lock to what the car can do (car.ini's steer.lock), so for this feature
you really need a capable (900 degree wheel), otherwise you won't be able to make the degrees required for the car to turn fully.
The default controller lock is 0, so people with less capable wheels can still play (probably setting linearity for the controller to around 0.5). In that case, the full range of the controller maps to the full range of the car's steering wheel.
- Per track TOD loading; the track can contain a tod/ directory. Curves that are not defined
are loaded from data/renderer/tod.


v0.8.18 (20-08-10)
------------------
- The Lobbyserver wasn't updated to use the new ENet version, so older version could connect
but were refused, and newer versions couldn't connect. Fixed.
- Autoexposure formula revised to exposure=gradient/luminance+offset. Thanks to Colin Pan.
It's much better but somehow the scene luminance doesn't seem to be calculated correctly
for non-power-of-two resolutions (glGenerateMipmap).
- Added a 'loading' or 'busy' indicator (data/images/loading_*.tga and the loading.indicator_pos setting)
- Rain was invisible in bright times of the day
- Some particles were dark as a result of the switch to klux lighting
- Tonemapping (in hdr.cg) used a 0.1 factor - removed that and for auto_exposure this means
gradient should be set to ~1.0 instead of ~10.0 (exposure=1/luminance).
- Added special.ini parameters under 'sun': azimuth_offset (rotation wrt North),
year, day, month, latitude, longitude and timezone. The sun XYZ TOD curves disappeared.
See also http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/newtrack.htm#sun
- Added 'sun azimuth <x>' command to change north angle live.

 

[Some1]

Nice gfx there, although CSM seems off? (specular under the car on the road?)

I think CSM is enabled. If you look closely you see that the wheel blocks some of the specular. That can only happen with shadow mapping, right? The occluded secondary shadow under the car is not even taken account in the shader is it? It's still just a black flat surface with transparency applied under the car...

Oh, btw... the light flares are now messed up because of exposure/lux stuff. At daytime they get pretty gray instead of disappearing.

 

[Stereo]

Nice gfx there, although CSM seems off? (specular under the car on the road?)

I have smaller wheels on the left side of the car so there's a bit of a gap (I was fooling with wheel blur models and didn't get around to fixing it), plus it's in turn 2 of Carlswood where the track surface and splines don't line up well. I think it's blocking specular ok in general.

The car's ambient occlusion style older shadow also is not blocking specular.

 

[boomer541]

Get the following Qlog error when turning into the sun on carlswood, original racer.ini:
Sat Aug 28 13:55:14 (ERR ): [racer/1528] DFBOTexture ctor: OpenGL error (1282): invalid operation
Also get it when trying to work with other tracks but not on carlswood unless I edit tod.

Inside instrument needles turn black when sun on them, disapear when not in sun.

Sun position not correct for locations other than carlswood, needs checking out. it is in the east at 1700 and disappears at noon! Stupid me, I forgot to add the - in front of the logitude!

Turning off auto_exposure.enable gets rid of the darkening when turning into the sun.
I don't use auto exposure or bloom, I don't like them so I turn them off!

I get an increase of about 20 fps with this version over v. 0.0818.

The exposure curve needs to be lowered and flattened with auto exposure and bloom turned off.

I've gotten fairly good results with gyral after making a new sky dome, looks better than original.

 

[Mr Whippy]

I like bloom vs no bloom, it's like real life when using polarised sun glasses to remove the glare when driving in sunny conditions

Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

Hey all...
i have some lightning errors...and don't know how to fix....
This is only with the 0.8.19....
First pic ist with the lambo cam0, every thing white, second pic is the same cam but moved to a different angle....third pic ist a different cam....all fine...but why?


please help me....


EDIT: got it....shame over my head...i had the old glass shader in use... witch contains...
;texgen_s=reflection_map
;texgen_t=reflection_map
;texgen_r=reflection_map
;blendfunc=src_color one_minus_src_color
...lol...

 

[mdbobbo]

lighting difference I've noticed

Firstly I've taken enviromental mapping off
and turned off the ghost car so that the lights work on the car I'm driving
I'm running the CG version on carlswood_nt and Taupo
the cars I'm testing are lambomurcielago and bmw_m1 Procar

there's firstly a lot of errors on Taupo I undrstand that but it's mainly to do with old ZModeler buggy exports.

what I'm actually showing here is the track lighing and how it's changing with the two cars.
the BMW still has much to bright lights but I realise that it's a bit old and needs updating for those settings to be correct, and the BMW's lights are completely different than the Lambo's.
So I've not shown the BMW lights for that reason.
well that the introduction.

when I run the lambo on Taupo, the track goes into night mode and the BMW is day.
An odd variance that I've not seen before and thought it worth mentioning and showing.




Also there are varances in the lighting on carlswood_nt.
Although the track looks quite dark most the way around the track I've posted some screen shots here so you can see how the track lights up when traveling directly into the sun and darkens just as the sun is not in direct line of travel.
it's not all that visible but you can see the road a bit on the first screen shot, besides isn't it supposed to be daylight like the shot of the BMW on Taupo?



of course I'm still a novice when it comes to track and car lighing so these are just notes that might show what others might like to see the difference to.

edit:
There's not much car and track road testing here at present, Racer is going though some big development changes and most of what I've got is just here as a back up at present if you loose something please let me know I get 1gig per sec download and not sure what the upload speed is.
And mainly because my wheel and pedals have gone turkey up - the brake is on 50% all the time and the steering wheel ain't what it used to be either, besides Racer now has much better setting for 900 degrees wheels.
Question: what should I get in a 900 degrees steering wheel etc.. I'm interested in spending some coin soon, might even upgrade the graphis card and screen too on this 2gig single chip Pentium 4 or just go the whole hog and boost the whole unit, any suggestions are most welcome ... but time will tell.

 

[Alexander Knoll]

yep i have the same...if i drive directly in to the sun....some times if i drive around a track the sun intesyty raises up, extreme, 10m after it comes down to the "normal" lightning....

 

[boomer541]

Turning off auto_exposure in racer.ini will eliminate that darkening BUT you will have to adjust the tod curves as eerything goes white.

The shadows need to be adjustable as they are way too dark, NLRL.

Making progress with gyral, got good sky now need to fix all the shaders about 200 of them!

If anyone gets a good lighting (tod) setup for a track it would be nice if they would post the files so others can try them out. Perhaps a thread for fixed tracks would be good.

 

[Some1]

The shadows need to be adjustable as they are way too dark, NLRL.

No, they don't. Shadows are basically just areas where the sun doesn't shine. They are dark, because the gamma is too high.

Here, in autumn, when the sun doesn't go very high from the horizon, when looking at the direction of the sun, the shadows also appear pretty dark because of the intensity of the sun and human eye doing "exposure" of some sort...

IMHO, we cannot start a thread about fixed tracks, because we cannot fix tracks yet, becuase ' to fix' is not yet defined in the current state of Racer. As soon as 0.9 final comes out, we can start fixing content!

 

[Mr Whippy]

Shadows are dark because the diffuse is high and ambient low, perfect for a clear sunny day.

Throw in 50% partial clouds and the ambient almost doubles, and diffuse drops by about 1/3rd... shadows are more natural now... what most of us are probably familiar with for a cloudy summers day.


I posted some curves up for a mid-latitude.

Auto exposure definitely needs fixing though, it biases too often for the sky, which is fine if you are taking a photo where we want ideal exposure of the full view, but we are looking at the track as priority for driving etc, so we need to weight the auto-exposure for the darker stuff in the scene I suppose (not sure exactly the best way to do it, but it does need fixing )
I guess weighting for the darker stuff may then cause problems on a night with the headlights whiting out everything... there must be a method to do it that is elegant and effective. It just needs adding


Imo, 0.8.19 is very good, with good numbers. The default TOD curves, again, imo, are not very well set up. Carlswood NT generally isn't a very nice track to use as a benchmark.
I'll try get a beta of my track out sooner than later simply to show that a track can look quite natural and ok with realistic settings

Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

Just looking through hdr.cg and found this line...

// Calculate black & white value, looking at brightness of red/green/blue individually
float bw=0.28*color.r+0.59*color.b+0.13*color.b;

I'm just wondering if the color.b is referenced twice, yet the comment tells us about red/green/blue individually. Should one of the color.b be color.g I wonder?


Hmmm

Dave

 

[Some1]

Just looking through hdr.cg and found this line...

// Calculate black & white value, looking at brightness of red/green/blue individually
float bw=0.28*color.r+0.59*color.b+0.13*color.b;

I'm just wondering if the color.b is referenced twice, yet the comment tells us about red/green/blue individually. Should one of the color.b be color.g I wonder?


Hmmm

Dave

Maybe just a typo?

 

[Stereo]

The kinda hackish way I biased auto-expose towards the lower half of the screen is by editing luminance_downsample_f.cg:

OUT.col=accum*0.25*(1.25-0.8*uv.y);

uv.y is 0.0 at the bottom of the screen, 1.0 at the top - so this makes a gradient from 0.45 at the top to 1.25 at the bottom of influence levels, to overexpose the sky and make the ground more well lit.

Only really works if the camera is upright, obviously.

Hmmmm, do you get much diffuse from glass? I thought it didn't really diffuse because a, it was highly polished, and b, has very low opacity.

The problem with just eliminating diffuse is the decals and stuff on the glass - they should have diffuse lighting.
Maybe scaling diffuse back by baseMap.a is appropriate though. If it's completely transparent I agree, there should be no diffuse (or ambient for that matter).

float3 litColor=(baseCol*diffuse+specular)*baseCol.a;

Haven't tried side by side tests but I think this is an improvement, in reflect_window_f.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Nice work there Stereo!

The solution for auto-exposure seems a logical method, but as you note, there may be odd situations where this isn't ideal. I'm not sure what logic could be applied but I think it's a case of just get a bit more sophisticated when we need it and then stop when everything seems to work ok.
Will test your code now

edit: Hmmm, works nicely for outside shots, but now it's also weighting for the sun reflection on the bonnet on my 'bonnet cam' when heading into the sun (which is off the top of the screen), so it's now darker because of that haha!
Also, for interior, it's super bright outside now. Interior cams seemed to work ok because of the high amount of low intensity stuff in view (ie, inside of the car)

I wonder how GT5 and NFS Shift and the like did this...




Not really sure on the glass with decals, perhaps that's a different shader again? Not sure really here, I'm happy to use whatever really as long as it's flexible and effective!


Will also try your last part for the reflect windows, what is it actually doing that is different than before, in layman terms

Dave

 

[Stereo]

edit: Hmmm, works nicely for outside shots, but now it's also weighting for the sun reflection on the bonnet on my 'bonnet cam' when heading into the sun (which is off the top of the screen), so it's now darker because of that haha!
Also, for interior, it's super bright outside now. Interior cams seemed to work ok because of the high amount of low intensity stuff in view (ie, inside of the car)

I wonder how GT5 and NFS Shift and the like did this...

It's really a situational thing, cameras should probably include some autoexposure settings to define the type of exposure (point weighted or full screen average) and a general bias to push it up or down, if we're gonna leave it up to the game to figure out exposure.

Maybe we can get some hotkeys to +- the exposure's bias so it's not a choice between full auto and full manual exposure modes.

 

[boomer541]

Working with tracks other than carlswood the shadows are solid black. I'll post a couple of pixs to show what I get tomorrow.

On gyral the textures are very dark and increasing tod curve values only increases car intenisty not the track, and there are no shadows on them with ambient and diffuse at at 1 1 1 1 in the track shader. Adding emission=0.1 0.1 0.1 1 to the track shader increases intensity and allows shadows on the textures, puzzeling!

Just my 2 cents.

 

[DavidI]

Must be something you aren't setting right Boomer. I've got nice shadows on Mugello & Broken Springs.

 

[Some1]

Working with tracks other than carlswood the shadows are solid black. I'll post a couple of pixs to show what I get tomorrow.

On gyral the textures are very dark and increasing tod curve values only increases car intenisty not the track, and there are no shadows on them with ambient and diffuse at at 1 1 1 1 in the track shader. Adding emission=0.1 0.1 0.1 1 to the track shader increases intensity and allows shadows on the textures, puzzeling!

Just my 2 cents.

Are you sure your track is setup up correctly? Correct shaders, correct lighting values etc.?

 

[mdbobbo]

tracks with Auto exposure turned off - racer.ini various setting from mdbobbo

Ok so it's been a few days now and I'm checking settings that are different from the Default Racer 0.8.19 download this week, P.S. The version runs well I even downloaded the Nvidia's new drivers from June 2010 and everything is still looking good.
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us
So what's different?

First here is my Racer.ini file changes I've made and as usual most are just my personal settings If you like the settings then there's an attached ini file renamed Racer.ini.txt and compressed with WinRAR to racer.ini.rar to upload for the up/download. So rename it to use in racer.
the Whiteout and flare are turn off in this file.

When I do make any changes in my Racer.ini file I notate the line with my ID name ; mdbobbo, the only line in Racer.ini that this does not work on is the ...
; Driver id (name)
driver=mdbobbo
driver = .... Line as above ( if that line has a notation it ends up becoming part of the driver name ) just thought I'd add that, the original is ...
; Driver id (name)
driver=The Driver

Here follows the rest of the changes I've made shown in individual lines here to save space.

; Ghost car options (use 'ghost save <name>' to save current ghost lap in data/tracks/<trackname>/ghosts/<name>.ghost)
enable=0 ; mdbobbo turned off ghost car to see if the lights work now on my car was 1

well that works, the lights now work on the driven car .. sweet

helicopter
{
; Mass of helicopter
mass=47 ; mdbobbo was 20
; Spring constant to pull heli above car
k=256 ; mdbobbo was 10
; Damping to keep helicopter from overshooting car location
damping=260 ; mdbobbo was 50 same as my original
; Height of heli (avoid going to high for clipping and rendering speed)
height=2.0 ; mdbobbo was 50 same as my original - changed from 2.0
; Lens
fov=75 ; mdbobbo was 50
; show_dials_2d=1 ; mdbobbo attempting to show dials in helicopter view
}
Just my preference and I've also noted it's values have changed .. the car seems to turn more radically now from my point of view with my old setting for Helicopter so I might adjust that as it's a bit too radical for driving using the mouse.
Oh for the New Steering wheel I can't wait ... :car:

sun
{
; Sun white-out factor; the bigger, the more whiteout. Try 50000 first.
whiteout=50000 ; mdbobbo using whiteout and flare was 0
; Visibility method; 0=always (if in frustum), 1=zbuffer, 2=raytrace (NYI)
visibility_method=2 ; mdbobbo trial to see what the frame rate is was 1
; Enable flare?
flare=1 ; mdbobbo trial sun's flare setting was 0


I really expected Racer to grind to a halt by changing to raytrace (NYI) but no I only lost about 2fps from this change, even when "whiteout=50000" and "flare=1" there's no daylight as shown with the lambo first and the mustang second there's some sun but not daylight as such.
notice the difference between having the car lights on an off is some improvement


; Length of flare distance to sun (1=sun itself, 0=center of screen,
; -1 is mirrored across screen center)
length=1.0 0.5 0.33 0.6 0.4 0.2 ; mdbobbo turn off mirror sun was 1.0 0.5 0.33 0.6 0.4 -0.25 0.2 -1
I've had contention with this part of the sun setting from the beginning as our world really only has one Sun so in reality it's only going to come from one side but the setting have changed With the racer versions and does not actually show up twice anymore ( still I'm trying to see the lighting differences so changed this anyhow )

auto_exposure
{
; If enabled, calculates luminance of the scene and automatically adjusts the 'exposure'
; It then overrules any exposure setting from track special.ini files or the script 'exposure' command
enable=0 ; mdbobbo turn off auto exposure was 1
; Time per luminance sample (increase value to improve framerate)
time_per_sample=100
; Exposure is calculated using: gradient/sceneLuminance+offset (this was changed in v0.8.18)
offset=0
gradient=1.0
; Minimal exposure
min=0.0
max=1000.0
; Gradually change exposure with a Kalman filter
filter_gain=0.05
}
It was suggested to turn off the auto_exposure so there you have it .. it's turned off.
and the sun has magically disappeared :no:SUN..??

....................... the next setting I've also put most of the sections code in so you know where it is in the racer.ini file....

mirrors
{
; Simple rectangular mirror at top? Use the mirror texture!
; So if used, also enable texture.enable (set to 1)
simple
{
; Draw simple mirror on top of screen? If 1, also set mirrors.texture.enable to 1.
enable=1
; Position (if undefined, it is centered horizontally and placed near the top vertically)
; Size of simple mirror (onscreen)
wid=135 ;mdbobbo was 350
hgt=45 ; mdbobbo was 120
}
This, for me is large enough on screen and since I'm actually viewing my driving from a "kittcar" floating camera [I suppose I should call it Kittcar view LOL] ( a fallacy opulenced with the use of my choice of helicopeter camera settings ) and a bigger mirror gets in the way when braking as the "helicopter on a bungee cord kinda catches up and looks straight down toward the car more. a setting choice to frighten the bejesus out of guest drivers on my PC if they hit a wall. LOL try it just for fun you'll see:tongue:

now that we've got that out of the way, here's a few screen shots of Gyral Trophy Luckenwalde
to show that it's all night, also notice the sighting aspect of the 1969 Mustang by Storm, many of the vehicle lights now seem to have this brilliance that needs a bit of toning down so that they combine more naturally with the track scenery, and the last picture is taken from an inside view showing the screens are now opaque.

 

[Ruud]

I've not tested/corrected auto_exposure.enable=0 yet (so that the original exposure.crv would be used). Perhaps each camera must have an exposure correct, so we get: finalExposure=autoExposure*todExposureFactor*cameraExposureFactor to get inside shots tuned.

Boomer's problems sound like none of Gyral's material are using Cg; without Cg, nothing will light anywhere near what it's supposed to.

The .g /.b typo is indeed a typo, ouch. And as there's a lot of blue in the sky, you're well advised to try .g instead.

The lights being whitish is a problem with not having enough measurements; the light should probably fall off quadratically. Now it's probably easier to keep a relatively non-gradient projected texture, and do Z calculations in the projective shader and fall-off the texture's light there, to avoid needing to be a lighting wizard when doing your textures. Still have to measure the amount of light from a car (at night, at 0 meter, 1 meter distance etc, to get a grip on the amount of lux a car light gives).