Racer v0.8.26 released!

[Ruud]

The usual, but 2 big things: a garage when selecting the car (getting rid of the white cars) and an important bugfix if the CG is not at the nullpoint.

Get it at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0.8.26.zip (100Mb, due to the extra garage track!)
CG movement patch (only the racer.exe) is at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0826b.zip (1.5Mb).

The garage is still a rough preview but you can plugin your own garage1 track (I might add the possibility of multiple garages). The CG bugfix is optional; in racer.ini find 'move_cg': 1 is the new default, 0 is the situation as from v0.8.25.

Changes:
v0.8.26 (10-12-10)
-----------------
- Skidmarks tweaked to be more opaque.
- Some bumpshaders modified the normal map's alpha, giving funny reflectiveness issues.
Resolved using an extra 'common/utils.cg' file with UnpackNormal() and used in all bump shaders.
- Best line tweaked; fades out near the car, green lines are faded. Less intrusive.
- Added Logitech G25 wheel preset file (thanks to QuadCoreMax)
- Modeler can now export a template shader (.shd) file for a loaded model
- Pressing P in replay a few times doesn't mess up the volume (on/off) anymore
- Non-Cg version still created mirror and live track FBO's
- Particle system would crash with some car/track combinations. Seems related to culled single-poly fences.
The road is culled and single-poly, and really hitting the track seems a problem for Newton.
- Same change for the particle system done to the exhausts (arrays instead of std:vector)
- Not all collide polygons were used for Newton's collision tree. Rebuild trackcollision.bin
- Car selection screen now loads 'garage1' track as the environment. Pitpos0 is the car location.
- Tracked spline selection now accepts Shift-[,] for multi-select (local grip editing)
- Default font made a bit smaller, since everyone's running at least 1024x768 anyway.
- The Ctrl-9 screen could show bad load balance when the nullpoint was outside
of the front and rear wheel susp<n> locations (extreme CG movement tests).
- CG translation bugfix in the physics; an important one! Use move_cg=1 in racer.ini.
- Ghost car playback didn't work correctly.

 

[luthobu]

EDIT:...ok...the shadows are not longer the nicest....

Not weird, that is "Coast" right? There are some bugs in that track that can be causing this,
like the road bug at the first curve. There are some invisibles that might become "visible"
with the shadows. But I am not saying this for sure. Not tested.

 

[Alexander Knoll]

yup...ah..ok..so sorry for that...with 025 i had it not...

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'm not keen on the shadow defaults here.

I'm fairly happy with my own settings though.

30m split size for the first map, AND blurring, is just too soft and not sharp enough to be a decent sunny day shadow.

I've got 10/45/200 here and they are much nicer (imo), and thats with blur off too... ok they can look jaggedy in some still pictures, but in motion they look much better!

 

[Some1]

I'm not keen on the shadow defaults here.

I'm fairly happy with my own settings though.

30m split size for the first map, AND blurring, is just too soft and not sharp enough to be a decent sunny day shadow.

I've got 10/45/200 here and they are much nicer (imo), and thats with blur off too... ok they can look jaggedy in some still pictures, but in motion they look much better!

Oh, and let me just repeat myself for the 3rd time - the shadow splits do not follow the camera frustum but the sun instead, thus producing low res shadows (on the car, close to the camera) when the sun is low on the horizon!

If I can, I will post a video tomorrow, to illustrate the bug.

 

[krsman3d]

Subject change. What are the best settings for ABS? I've been experimenting with different values and found that max_velocity_ratio=1.05 and min_velocity_ratio=1.2 are good for a 60/40 weight ratio front wheel drive car but not optimal. It does not feel like real ABS. What settings should one use?

PS. Has anyone got good damper curves?

 

[EngineOfDarkness]

I mostly used to set the max and min velocity ratio quite close to each other, like
max_velocity_ratio=1.09
min_velocity_ratio=1.10/1.11

What kind of damper curves? I recall Dreamfactory uploaded some of my old ones, but these are racing dampeners, so they are very stiff in comparison to street or "streetracing" dampeners.

Edit: There you go http://www.racedepartment.com/racer/41118-new-file-added-bilstein_damper_courves.html . The last Post also has three additional dampeners I made some time back which are not included in the download Dreamfactory provided.

 

[Alex Forbin]

Oh, and let me just repeat myself for the 3rd time - the shadow splits do not follow the camera frustum but the sun instead, thus producing low res shadows (on the car, close to the camera) when the sun is low on the horizon!

If I can, I will post a video tomorrow, to illustrate the bug.

What shadow settings are you using? I'm trying to confirm it, but using the default settings it appears to be uniformly fuzzy at the edges.

Alex Forbin

 

[Mr Whippy]

Oh, and let me just repeat myself for the 3rd time - the shadow splits do not follow the camera frustum but the sun instead, thus producing low res shadows (on the car, close to the camera) when the sun is low on the horizon!

If I can, I will post a video tomorrow, to illustrate the bug.

8.26 seems to have removed the front/back camera half tex shadow map thingy...

Not sure what the thing you mention is, but irrespective of that at any TOD, the 30m split for the first map means ~ 1px per 3cm, which is fairly low... and considering it's blending into the next split from 7.5m infront/behind too, then you can imagine the pixels we give to the shadow here are pretty low too!
With a 10m split you should cover most cars with the 5m bit, and you get 1px per 1cm, which is a nice sharp shadow potential over your car!

Dave

 

[camsinny]

Just a quick Main Menu is attached.
I'm not sure if in its current state this could be achieved but surely it couldn't be too difficult to achieve.

 

[luthobu]

Just a quick Main Menu is attached.

Spooky.. looks like blood to me..

 

[camsinny]

Well it was more colourful but I figured they could be brakelights so I made them all red... :shrug:
Anyway I propose they be individual objects with alpha...that way they can float around and make the menu appear more fluid.

 

[boomer541]

I like the original menu! Just make the text a bit bigger like it was in ver 0.0825!

I'll try the patch and give my unabashed opinion tomorrow. My first car was made in 2004 with the null point located about the center of the car and I've had no problems with cars rotating about the cog.

 

[DavidI]

The menu should be user theme-able, for the mod makers etc. Low priority though, I'd prefer physics 4wd etc before worrying about the menu's.
ok font could be a touch larger.

 

[Alex Forbin]

Nice camsinny.

Alex Forbin

 

[Ruud]

I mostly used to set the max and min velocity ratio quite close to each other, like
max_velocity_ratio=1.09
min_velocity_ratio=1.10/1.11

What kind of damper curves? I recall Dreamfactory uploaded some of my old ones, but these are racing dampeners, so they are very stiff in comparison to street or "streetracing" dampeners.

Edit: There you go http://www.racedepartment.com/racer/41118-new-file-added-bilstein_damper_courves.html . The last Post also has three additional dampeners I made some time back which are not included in the download Dreamfactory provided.

On those damper curves; they seem pretty symmetrical bump/rebound. I've seen sportscar damper curves (actual data) where the rebound is about 5x as stiff as bump. Good for not dropping into potholes perhaps with stiff springs.

 

[KS95]

The menu should be user theme-able, for the mod makers etc. Low priority though, I'd prefer physics 4wd etc before worrying about the menu's.
ok font could be a touch larger.

I agree although I think that the next stable version should have a new menu, like Camsinny's, which looks more modern and upto date.

Then the next stable can be for better physics. Along with 4wd , I'd like to see proper automatic transmissions and some kind of system for turbo/s.chargers.

 

[DavidI]

... I think that the next stable version should have a new menu, like Camsinny's, which looks more modern and upto date.

So maybe Ruud or someone should open a new thread, run a competition or something along those lines.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Well, it should just be made so it can be adapted easily. More customisation basically. I like Cam's layout with buttons along the bottom, and then a nice picture or video in the middle front... obviously not priority stuff.

The garage is a feature we have NOW and can be improved loads, I'd prefer to see us catch up to Racer now at v0.9, rather than add yet more and more features while 95% of content is still lacking or just conversions etc.



As for the menu generally, the garage track takes ages to load. Not better to load the garage track as the main menu background perhaps, then when you select a car it is there already and doesn't have to load?

I know Racer will just load slower, but it's like it's broken taking so long to load when you press "select car"


Hmmm

Dave

 

[Some1]

8.26 seems to have removed the front/back camera half tex shadow map thingy...

No, not really... the standard camera seems to be okay, but the SMD camera, which is mostly used for chase and cockpit, is still buggy.
The default shadow mapping settings hide the bug, but it is still there.

Here are two videos illustrating the problem.
I've disabled shadow blur and shadow split blending. I'm using 2 splits 'splitdist0=10' and 'splitdist1=500' and shadow map size of 1024, to better illustrate the problem. On the videos, you see the first split is clean and nice, the second one has intentional severe aliasing (commonly called 'shadow acne') artifacts (from the smCor values), to make the splits more visible.

The first video shows how the first shadow split is not correctly aligned around the car center, making the car run out of the first split as it drives around in circle. Using standard camera, the first split is nicely in the center.

The second video shows how the shadow split moves with the sun, and look closely at the end of the video, the first split starts to float away from the car, again making the car appear in bad shadows.

I would also like to see the shadow acne minimized or eliminated, so we could have great looking self-shadows etc.
Please check out this link about common shadow mapping problems and solutions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee416324(v=vs.85).aspx

Shadow mapping in Racer is good, but not perfect!

 

[Ruud]

As for the menu generally, the garage track takes ages to load. Not better to load the garage track as the main menu background perhaps, then when you select a car it is there already and doesn't have to load?

I know Racer will just load slower, but it's like it's broken taking so long to load when you press "select car"

The first time it also loads all cars, so that might take a while too. The next run it's faster (disk cache). Still, it would be good to have a DDS version, which loads a bit faster than TGA's.

On the shadows, could you post your shadow split settings from racer.ini, and the smCor[] array from constants.cg?