Racer v0.8.30 released!

Ruud · Jan 6, 2011

A relatively small update, as I've been busy with lots of things.
v0.8.30 is availabe at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0.8.30.zip (75Mb)

*NOTE* The Carlswood track looks very color-corrected - probably just a one-time thing to demonstrate color-grading.

Changes:
- Car selection would crash after a race
- Car flare light blending modified - alpha,1-alpha (was alpha,one)
- Menu images were sometimes dark - was a 'linear vs srgb init' problem
- F1 stats scaling corrected vertically
- standard_xtree_f.cg didn't use 'sunny' parameter
- Made the menu image a bit more transparent to see the slideshow
- Added color grading per track; see http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/colorgrading.htm

(also added standard_xtree_scale_f.cg, but that should collapse into standard_xtree_f.cg probably as the only real change is that scale is used, and with scale=1 they should be the same).

mdbobbo · Jan 6, 2011

amazing shadowing and tire smoke

WoW thanks Ruud I feel humbled being first on the block to down load after just installing 0.8.29 about 30 mins ago here we go again.
tested on Vista home premium 64 bit works fine, here smoke and colours amazing.
asw I driver down the road with tree shading in front o the car I notice that the car lights attach to the shadding of the trees on the road and when I've driven past the tree shadows perfectly darken due to no car lights shinning on them .. sorry it's not quite noticable in these following photos yo just have to try it for your selves.

Not sure if the cars tire smoke should do this or not but it also looks great.
as I drive with helicopter view I noticed the smoke is being blown away from the initial appearance point.

so realistic I'm scared of crashing in case I actually damage the computer ...

arty:

Alexander Knoll · Jan 6, 2011

hmm...not sure if i like the "New" look....i mean lightning...

new....

old...

...it looks more as a old picture?! or not...?

Ruud · Jan 6, 2011

Yes, as said, it's a temporary example of color grading. It indeed gives an old look, not meant to last for Carlswood, but shows off a bit of what's possible.

It seems to have a problem with light colors (the sun); my current ColorGrade() function from data/renderer/common/utils.cg is now:

Code:

float3 ColorGrade(float3 color,sampler3D tex)
// Colorgrade using the texture as a basis
// See http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/colorgrading.htm
// Bugs: G and B are mixed, B is negated; probably all due to DirectX type axes directions.
// Perhaps fixed in the future by preprocessing the 3D map to flip some axes.
{
  // Avoid sampling in borders - should offset & scale
  // See also http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter24.html
  const float limit=1.0/16.0;
  //color=clamp(color,limit,1-limit);
  const float lutSize=12.0;           // Size of each 2D texture in the 3D map, corrected for sun disc artifacts
  
  //half3 scale =(lutSize-1.0)/lutSize;
  //half3 offset=1.0/(2.0*lutSize);
  half3 scale =(lutSize-2.0)/lutSize;
  half3 offset=(1-scale)*0.5;
  
  color.b=1-color.b;
  
  // Pass through color correction map
  color.rbg=tex3D(tex,scale*color+offset);
  
  return color;
}

francomk · Jan 6, 2011

Ruud, same happens to me even in this latest version 0.8.30... :frown:

http://www.racedepartment.com/racer-problems-fixes/46201-0-8-29-clutch-problems.html

Cosmo° · Jan 6, 2011

There seem to be a few issues with (over?) exposure here, I'd say. If you look at the sun on the screens posted above, or if you check out the flares in v0.8.30 as well as the sky on garage1, they all go slightly crazy colour shifts/low bit colour mode.

Alexander Knoll · Jan 6, 2011

THX Ruud...its a little better now....
...but the tire smoke is great, only on gravel, sand or grass....on the road it moves to a unlogik direktion...in replays too, but there is no smoke at gravel, sand or grass.....

Tire smoke @ grass....verry nice!

and @ road....

...this is after a restart from Racer gone...but comes up from time to time....

öhm...one question, is it's possible to run Racer in server mod without any GFX?, will say like a dedicated server (witch LFS use)?
The background is, i played to day with my server and got the 029 in server mod working...and i can join from my main PC via the lobby to the (BOT)server...driving is fun, but only with one car...at the moment i add some ai's the server PC crash....i think its to muche for the "old" engine^^ ...is there any way to do this?

THX

Alexander Knoll · Jan 6, 2011

francomk said:
Ruud, same happens to me even in this latest version 0.8.30... :frown:

http://www.racedepartment.com/racer-problems-fixes/46201-0-8-29-clutch-problems.html

dude...do you try it with the mouse, clean and new installation from racer every thing by default?
I have always no problems with the DFP....

francomk · Jan 6, 2011

Yes, new clean instalation in own folder...

Alexander Knoll · Jan 6, 2011

francomk said:
Yes, new clean instalation in own folder...

try the control ini i postet in the problems tread...

Ruud · Jan 6, 2011

Dream Factory said:
THX Ruud...its a little better now....
...but the tire smoke is great, only on gravel, sand or grass....on the road it moves to a unlogik direktion...in replays too, but there is no smoke at gravel, sand or grass.....

...this is after a restart from Racer gone...but comes up from time to time....

öhm...one question, is it's possible to run Racer in server mod without any GFX?, will say like a dedicated server (witch LFS use)?
The background is, i played to day with my server and got the 029 in server mod working...and i can join from my main PC via the lobby to the (BOT)server...driving is fun, but only with one car...at the moment i add some ai's the server PC crash....i think its to muche for the "old" engine^^ ...is there any way to do this?

THX

I know about the wind, I've spent a few hours already but failed to reproduce it. I've seen it in v0.8.29 on a colleague's machine, but hard to debug there on the fly (read: impossible). I think it's the wind that keeps on increasing (too bad it doesn't have an effect on the cars themselves, or aero).

On server installs, read http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/multiplayer_server.htm
You can't kill gfx but you can run a NoCg version which doesn't clog up things too much. Also, turning resolution way down should help to avoid being the bottleneck.

I'll have to check out the AI in server mode...

aadilf1 · Jan 6, 2011

im online racer server lobby thing

Ruud · Jan 6, 2011

Ah, finally caught that wind bug, I think. Could never really reproduce it, but it seemed that a wind variance variable could get stuck, twitching and slowly creeping up. Depended on framerate varying a lot.
Fixed for v0.8.31.

Alexander Knoll · Jan 6, 2011

eh..THX
i already tried the no cg...but here makes no difference...maybe it's a sys error too...have to look for it....
I reduced the resolution to 640x480 and disabled all "nice" stuff.....will see...THX for help...

Mr Whippy · Jan 6, 2011

Why not have no wind?

We have no wind influence on trees or grass or physics or anything, so just have some turbulence and leave it at that for now?

Dave

camsinny · Jan 7, 2011

Just spent about half an hour playing with shadow settings... Most of the smCor settings are too low resulting in the acne. Also, it seems just changing the shadow map size impacts the effect of the smCor too - perhaps we need to have a couple of settings for different map sizes.
That fix you posted for the HDR values messing up colour grading works, thanks.

Mr Whippy · Jan 7, 2011

smCor need to be low to get things like shadows onto the tops of tyres in cars wheel arches though.

It's all a bit of a compromise on the raw numbers I think.

I've gone up and down from the current settings and it's a great deal of just meeting new problems when resolving old ones.

What shadowmap sizes are you experimenting with, bigger or smaller?

Hmmm

Dave

boomer541 · Jan 8, 2011

Bug:
This appears after running carlswood in tracked and making no changes. Tracked appears to change Newton version. After running carlswood with 1 lambo ai car the Qlog is:
(INFO): [racer/3616] Loading track 'carlswood_nt'
(WARN): [racer/3616] PNewtonGeom:LoadTree; 'data/tracks/carlswood_nt/cache/trackcollision.bin' was generated by a different Newton version. File: 2.26 RacerNewton: 2.29. Load fails.

Also have to press a different car camera key before key 0 will work on ai 2nd car, and if in track camera mode and focus on "The Driver" car the track camera switches back to car 1-key camera. driving back onto track switches back to track camera.

Bug: Can't see the slide show images in the GUI, just fix the menu_overlay.tga image alpha so it is more tramsparent, also why is it not a 24 bit compressed .tga image.

Bug: Tracked changes "Alternative with light sky" variable in special.ini file to bright white!
sky=8.076190 8.076190 8.076190 0.000000

All of the above was posted in the 0829 thread twice but got lost with all the problems others kept posting about.
Tracked tracks are all black. IT NEEDS FIXING, PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Color grading works with Paint Shop Pro as well as Photoshop, adjusting the colors is a bit tricky as everything is affected. To make Carlswood like it was in 0829 just comment out the color grading in the special.ini file.

I posted my shadow settings, I think it was back in ver 0.0828, and they give me very good shadows with a mapsize=2048 which doesn't lower FPS. if anyone wants them I'll post them again.

Mr Whippy · Jan 8, 2011

Ruud, I managed to get my Snowden Moor splines minimap working (some entries seem to have gone corrupted with odd position data (no idea how as I'd just copied/pasted the track to a new folder but the file seems to have been altered in TrackEd maybe (does trackEd do naughty saving when you don't actually press save explicitly?!))

Anyway, the minimap is working ok here, but even with the base road mesh I used to create the splines from (same length segments, just using one width polygon), and no mesh hits, the trackEd keyframe cameras, nor AI recording, will see my splines.

AI will drive on the splines, mesh hits on fine, just somehow Racer isn't detecting them... no idea why.

spline.ini has a few enties.

Count
Paint start
Paint end

I have 1784 spline entries, 0...1783

TrackEd changed my count to 1783, and paint is and always was 0 > 1783

Why is TrackEd seeing count as 1783, when there are 1784 splines? Is it assuming a non point to point track? Or is it reading from point to point in special.ini?

Worse still, any selecting of splines in trackEd seems to be driven by the mesh that generated them, or the mesh points that act as the spline coords too. Mine don't do that, so I'm wondering if it's impossible for me to actually select splines and that is my problem!?

Racer is far too optimised for making pan flat circuits. Even then that is bad for circuits which have complex surfaces in real life. Is there any way we can have trackEd be able to look at the splines coords rather than object verts coords, when dealing with things that are bound to the splines?
If I hide my road surface, I can't even select a spline.

I'd do all these things elsewhere (like 3DS Max), but the cameras and splines just seem to be something you need to resort to TrackEd for, eeek!

Thanks

Dave

Mr Whippy · Jan 8, 2011

Arghhh trackEd!

OK, so I set a point to point track, and a timeline ahead of where I spawn.

TrackEd then changed my timeline to across the first spline. Why does it do that?

I know it's a legacy hang over from Racer of old that everything is a circuit, is dead flat, and thats cool.

But today I don't want to be constrained by flat tracks that start where they finish. What if we want to make a rally track, or point to point roads, or free-roaming with multiple routes or something (like NFS 5)

It's also annoying not being able to even select splines in TrackEd because the polygons I generated them from don't exist.

Splines should literally be floating in space guides, but it feels like they are still tied to so much in trackEd's UI it's actually impossible to author with trackEd.

Hmmmm...

Dave