Racer v0.8.27 released!

[Ruud]

Hopefully quite close to v0.9RC1.

Get it at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0.8.27.zip (75Mb)

The changes:
- move_cg=1 didn't offset correctly: cameras, wipers, generic models, brake calipers, exhausts, dials, helmet, carlights Z/far.
- 'rewind' commands for live rewinding (if RTD logging is on)
- Default font made a little bigger again
- onspeedlimiter.rex gets executed when the speed limiter is turned on.
- Shadowmapping tweaked for director and other cameras.
- Fuel consumption reset to 0 when standing still (was 99.9 L/100km).
- A missing controller (defined in a controls file) would crash Racer
- Using something other than default.ini in racer.ini's ini.controls now works (can be saved)
- 3 profiles available in the controller setup screen.
- The names above the cars were black - fixed with floatingname_*.cg shaders.
- The wheel blur models would show in the car selection garage.
- Added grass smoke particles
- Select car/track screens sped up by loading only part of the car.ini/track.ini files. Assumes 'car' is at the top though (!).
- Selecting a car, then exiting would crash.
- When cars stood still, too much was damped away and the differential wheels would rotate a bit.

 

[boomer541]

Qlog problems:
QInfo(data/cars/baja_class1/car.ini); brackets don't match; still 1 closing bracket(s) expected at end of file.
QInfo(data/cars/imp/car.ini); brackets don't match; still 1 closing bracket(s) expected at end of file.
QInfo(data/cars/lambomurcielago/car.ini); brackets don't match; still 1 closing bracket(s) expected at end of file.
Didn't have these with ver 0.0826 using same car files!

Mirrors on car still a bit too bright, but I can live with it for now.

Tracked changes "Alternative with light sky" variable to almost bright white!
sky=8.076190 8.076190 8.076190 0.000000
Makes it almost impossible to see vertex points!
Also the buttons don't fit properly when using width=1200, height=800 in the "resolution" section. See attacment.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Oh yeah thats another point.

I run 1920x1200 here, my first 16:10 screen after my old 4:3 jobby.

My dials are slightly stretched horizontally. I've tried all the racer.ini tweaks to square things back up again, but the dials still render a bit wide... shouldn't these be perfectly round (if the dials were round?)

Will take screenies/post settings if needed? Or are others seeing this issue?

Thanks

Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

yup, same here, if i use 1920x1080 the dials lokking like eggs^^

 

[Silver Ranger]

I run in 1600x900 and my gauges have been egg shaped forever. Just go into the racer.ini and tweak the pixel aspect ratio.

; Pixel aspect ratio; normally 1 (pixels onscreen are sized 1:1)
aspect=1.333

This works well for me in 16:9. I think setting it to 1.6 fixes it for 16:10.

 

[Cosmo°]

Anybody getting NaN when hitting the guardrails?

Yes, I got crash behavior similar to what we had a couple of months back. When hitting the armco, the vehicle gets stuck instantly and the NaN errors bring Racer to a crawl, forcing an exit.



With the standing still bug fix for tyre forces I seem to be getting buggy differential behavior more often now. A simple three point or u-turn that gives the differential something to think about often triggers uncontrolled acceleration of the wheels that are connected to the differential, in opposite directions. Most of the time this wheel spin can't be stopped with the brakes and resetting the vehicle is the only solution.

During one such situation I also got reminded of the fact that ground particles are being drawn even though the spinning wheels are merely above the surface, not actually touching it.

Backfire particles still don't respond to the likeliness_percentage setting at all - as long as the engine speed range is within the defined limits, only every second lift-off will trigger the animation regardless.

 

[boomer541]

My shadow settings for constants.cg in the attached file and racer.ini settings in the attached image. Works very nicely for me.

 

[camsinny]

WOW!!
There's a major flaw in the new controller profile thing...
If you still have your wheel plugged in (on your desk say...just don't want to have it setup properly because you're not really driving) and you start driving with say the mouse THE FFB STILL WORKS ON THE WHEEL!!
Caught me by surprise. Any way to fix this?

 

[luthobu]

@camsinny: I think you can just remove the joystick entries (or set to 0) in the file racer0827\data\controls\default.ini. Not tested though.

 

[camsinny]

I'll give that a go...but ideally we should really need to. I set profile one to be for the mouse and profile two for the g27. Had the g27 hooked up and selected profile one (which hadn't even seen the g27 before) and started to play. I don't see why FFB should be being sent to the wheel :S

 

[DavidI]

I just found something very weird. I've been playing with Gravediggers Susp settings, running GD on Swiss Stroll, Mugello & a Monster Truck track with jumps. On Swiss Stroll & MT Arena if I get GD stuck, bottomed out, with one wheel in the air & free spinning, some strange things can happen. shifting into reverse and full revs, I can get the engine rpm to 20k+, redline is 6900rpm. sometimes it happens from reverse into first, and just then when I was in neutral, I got the wheel to 1500kph, even though i was standing still beached on a jump (which I should have been able to pull off from, but I'll point out this weirdness first) GD is setup as 4WD, front wheels driven by diff, rears faked 4wd diff. front wheel was spinning fast even in nuetral & responded to the throttle, I could brake it down to 1000kph & throttle it back up to 1500+, while in neutral.

 

[Alexander Knoll]

yup, i know this bug...but its only with "heavy" vehicles?!

 

[DavidI]

I've scaled values down so it's the equivalent of being 1.5tonnes, so it isn't really that heavy. I've noticed (& noted before) that the handling of GD on inclines has changed adversely. GD just isn't able to climb around Swiss Stroll like it used to. Its ini isn't perfect, I'm no car tuner, much less racing truck tuner, but theres something not right with low speed handling & grip on inclines thats changed somehow. Don't know when, but it has.

 

[killbill10]

I've noticed something regarding the stuttering issue due to the auto-exposure feature - the stuttering disappeared for me when setting the "time_per_sample" to 10 instead of completely turning auto-exposure off. Maybe this could be helpful for others affected by this issue.

My machine:
Core2Duo E6600 @ 3.2 GHz
HD4890 @ stock
4 GB ram, Windows 7

 

[DavidI]

Also, could we please have some sort of a 50:50 split 4wd mode? the current faked method just doesn't work right (as advertised in racer.nl docuentation), and I need a 50:50 split for GraveDigger, with an LSD or locker on both axles, happy with a locked centre diff as well. Is this at all possible?
I think the oddities I experienced above are related to the faked 4wd system.

 

[Mr Whippy]

What we need to be careful of is not having bad physics tweaks added at this late stage, that are not thoroughly checked/developed. The last thing we need is them in v0.9.

I think the latest fix for the wheels when stationary is dangerous, because it's just wrong in a different way to how it was. No one has tested it thoroughly, so we have no idea what other weird issues it might have on things.

Leave the physics stuff for v0.9+ betas. At least any physics issues that are evident now for v0.9, are ones we are all familiar with and can work around right now, or are ultimately, imo, not THAT important (even the CofG issues were avoidable really)


Just my 2p. The graphics have been the issue for Racer for so long, lets get those solid then call it v0.9. Starting to sneak physics tweaks in at this stage is a recipe for a v0.9 full of unknown physics oddities that are not spotted!

Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

Also, could we please have some sort of a 50:50 split 4wd mode? the current faked method just doesn't work right (as advertised in racer.nl docuentation), and I need a 50:50 split for GraveDigger, with an LSD or locker on both axles, happy with a locked centre diff as well. Is this at all possible?
I think the oddities I experienced above are related to the faked 4wd system.

hmm...50:50 is hard to get it right...thats the point why i stopped working on 4wds....only some with higer splitts...like the insignia is nice to handle...

 

[Stereo]

I just found something very weird. I've been playing with Gravediggers Susp settings, running GD on Swiss Stroll, Mugello & a Monster Truck track with jumps. On Swiss Stroll & MT Arena if I get GD stuck, bottomed out, with one wheel in the air & free spinning, some strange things can happen. shifting into reverse and full revs, I can get the engine rpm to 20k+,

Yeah, noticed this behaviour one my 4wd truck also. Has been around for a while. (speaking of that truck, finally got a chance to pull it from my old HD)

 

[camsinny]

Ruud, I'm trying to clean up my car directory a bit - but I've run into a problem.
I've got my images in a /img/ directory, dof's in a /dof/ and sounds in a /wav/. Sounds work fine, models work fine BUT shaders are all black.
QLOG reckon's that it can't find all the materials and stuff.

Currently my .shd's are in the car's root dir. Should they be in with the dof's, materials or both?
Do I need to re-think my folder structure? Cause I'd really like as little data to be in the root folder as possible. It just makes everything cleaner.

 

[Stereo]

In 0.8.7 I tried to clean up the Lamborghini's ghost car - at that time, images and some (all?) sounds could be referred to in different folders, but trying the same with .dofs broke it.

The result was the ghost folder being only about 400KB (reduced from 22MB), with the car.shd entries looking something like

shader_gloss~vf_ghost
{
  compression=0
  reflect=0.5
  specular=1 1 1
  shininess=50
  layer0
  {
    map=../lambomurcielago/lambobody.tga
    ;blend=src_alpha one_minus_src_alpha
    blendfunc=blend
  }
}

Shouldn't be different to have map=img/lambobody.tga and similar.

 

[camsinny]

Solution: archive the dofs using buildar. Then there's only one file in the root dir instead of about 20 or whatever (depends on the car). You can then add .crv's, wav's and images to their own sub-dir to clean up the root a bit.

Caveat: (that isn't mentioned in the racer.nl docs) the archive needs to be called data.ar
I tried calling it dof.ar but then it wouldn't load. Ruud, surely you could just search for *.ar on load and unpack them or whatever it is you do on a load?