Racer v0.8.25 released!

[Ruud]

Another one, esp important with the tangents problems (white spots/dark triangles):

Get it at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0.8.25.zip

Changes:
- Setting racer.ini's textures.compression to 0 had an effect on visuals (no SRGB).
- Ctrl-1 now shows when the force feedback is saturating the wheel (>20 Nm).
- Controller setup screen now removed POV and added horn and wiper controls.
- 'sunny' default was 0, should have been 1.
- standard_bump_f.cg now takes specularity from the normalmap's alpha channel (2nd layer)
- Only 3/4 of the tangents was passed for each objects. White spots and black triangles.
- Baja shader bug fixed (dyn_standard_bump_speca.cg was used)
- ff_damping (in car.ini) was applied to the wrong FF setting (friction instead of damping)
- Small change in spline triangle checking for road surfaces; in Carlswood doing Shift-F
4 times failed to recognize the underlying spline triangle.
- Y offset in viewelt_f.cg removed; dials were slightly moved up a centimeter.
- Using Cg 3.0 toolkit (was 2.2) from July 2010.
- smCor for the 3rd shadow split slightly increased
- Only angular 3D view elements (dials) were painted correctly. Other texts could appear rotated.
- 'show splines' and all debug lines & points were rendered in HDR mode thus dark. Now drawn in LDR
after postprocessing to remain visible at all times.
- Live track envmapping anti-aliased the whole main FBO on each side update (ouch). Faster now
when setting render_once to 0.
- Mirror was anti-aliased twice. Slightly faster now.
- Exposure gradient changed from 0.5 to 0.35 (darker exposures)
- Music & background image handling in all setup screens now supported.
- More live track options in the graphics setup screen.
- Added bestline_v/f.cg for visible rendering of the 'best line' (F3 to toggle bestline)
- Added bestline.tga in data/images as an overlay image (uses alpha channel).
- 'sunny' included in sky shaders (GetSkyColorAtm) for the sun disc
- Undetected controllers would crash the controller setup screen in a few places.
- The lobby was painted incorrectly when using 3 monitors.
- Fixed stack underflow in car selection screen.

 

[QuadCoreMax]

Wow Ruud, I love the log, thx a lot, more feedback soon !
Downloading....

 

[Cosmo°]

Seems to be a nice release so far. I'm getting better framerates, can now work with the new steering parameters properly and it's great to have the debug points back for development. Thanks a lot Ruud

 

[Some1]

All is well, except there is something wrong with the specular on the bumpmapped textures:
(notice the tire)



EDIT: Also, the shadow splits still have issues following the camera field of view.

 

[luthobu]

Works pretty good. Still had to replace dyn_standard_reflect*f with older versions
but all in all a far better release. Not good enough for daily use (with my GPU) but
getting there. Perhaps Godot is closer than I first thought

 

[Alexander Knoll]

THX Ruud! This is with the best release, a longe time agoo! Every thing, icl. autodetect from DFP...works well! fps is nearly 2x ! had ~20fps with 024, and 39fps with the 025! THX!

 

[Eholov]

OMG! Unbelievable! FPS and graphics very good!!!

 

[Alex Forbin]

The DFP autodetect is working fine now. The steering also feels better.

Alex Forbin

 

[krsman3d]

A very good release indeed. Only the skid marks are still not working and I can't make the reflections look good with dyn_standard_reflect.

EDIT: skidmarks work with this car http://www.tracciontrasera.es/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloaddetails&lid=608. I'll have to investigate.

 

[insane666]

invisibleman has a bmw ...

 

[Alex Forbin]

Only the skid marks are still not working and I can't make the reflections look good with dyn_standard_reflect.

EDIT: skidmarks work with this car http://www.tracciontrasera.es/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloaddetails&lid=608. I'll have to investigate.

Confirmed here too, the skid marks do work with the shark but it has no CG shaders, Once you add them they no longer work. I suspect it is a blending error since the skidmarks it leaves on non-CG are simple on/off affairs with no blending.

Alex Forbin

 

[dangar]

What happened with GHOST cars?
They seem to be dissapeared since 8.0.24

Somebody have same problem?

 

[Ruud]

All is well, except there is something wrong with the specular on the bumpmapped textures:
(notice the tire)



EDIT: Also, the shadow splits still have issues following the camera field of view.

Some shaders may have trouble with high values (HDR only means values upto 65000), so that may be a reason. Can you mail me the car somehow?

 

[Some1]

Some shaders may have trouble with high values (HDR only means values upto 65000), so that may be a reason. Can you mail me the car somehow?

Yesterday, after experimenting, I found out that the alpha value coming from the bumpmap was occasionally negative, which then produces the effect. When I clipped the alpha value in the shader to [0.0 ... ] then the effect disappeared.

 

[Stereo]

In dyn_standard_bump_f.cg, etc.

float4 UnpackNormal(float4 c)
{
  c.rgb=2*c.rgb-1;
  //c=2*c-1; // <- this is the original line
  //c=1.8*(c-0.45);
  //c=1.9*(c-0.475);
  //c=normalize(c);
  return c;
}

It's unpacking the alpha channel and giving negatives, should only operate on rgb of the normalmap.
I suppose this function should be moved to an include, since it's used by all the bumpmap shaders. bump_reflect_f writes:

 bumpColor.xyz=2.0*(bumpColor.xyz-float3(0.5,0.5,0.5));

 

[Ruud]

Ouch, indeed. Some shaders just used expand() on a float3, which didn't have that problem. I still added utils.cg and now all bump shaders reference that (UnpackNormal(float3)) so that alpha is always untouched. Great find.

 

[Ruud]

Confirmed here too, the skid marks do work with the shark but it has no CG shaders, Once you add them they no longer work. I suspect it is a blending error since the skidmarks it leaves on non-CG are simple on/off affairs with no blending.

Alex Forbin

The skidmark alpha must be pretty high for it to be visible (not entirely sure why). I've updated the skidmark shaders for v0826 and modified the skid generation a bit so that they're now nicely visible again.

 

[dangar]

Another boring problem I have noticed since 0.8.x...

Shader definition "texscale" does not work in CG shaders (~vf_standard).
Somebody agrees/knows how to fix...?

Kind regards!

 

[Ruud]

The 'detail' shaders have texture scaling for their detail textures (use 'scale=...'). 'texscale' is really an old way to scale the other texcoords; not in general supported by the shaders but I also don't think there is a need to generally scale texture coords. That should be done at the modeling end. It only seems to make sense for repeating overlays (detail textures).

 

[Mr Whippy]

I hate to whinge about this issue again, but the halving of the shadow map resolution between camera and car on external views is still making things look really wrong.

As it stands there is no way for an author to do anything about this, we are simply left with wrong looking shadows (ie, soft nearest the camera, then sharp at the end of the car furthest from the camera)

The halving NEEDS to be tied to the internal camera shadow profile only... this isn't a perception thing, or a nice to have, it is as wrong as the alpha inversion bug above. It's just wrong


The rest all seems pretty good though, fps have improved here, so much so that I'm getting about 5-10% more than before with 4 splits on the shadows AND shadow blurring turned on!

Dave