Racer v0.8.36 released

[Ruud]

A good date for an update. ;-)

Racer v0.8.36 is at http://www.mediafire.com/?i6rnbmthb5sr3dh (52Mb)

I'm going to investigate the cameras; the location wasn't right when we modified them relative to the nullpoint, but I seem to have some trouble getting them right in the Lambo. I'm away for a week first though...

The changes:
- Bugfix: script parentheses could cause confusion: 'paint sin($a*0.8)+10 at float[2]{ 50,50 };'
would give numbers between -1..1 instead of 9..11 (priority conflict).
- Bugfix: the camera locations not relative to the nullpoint. This does mean
you should move your camera positions!
- Added 'terminal' console command; this opens an output window. Also added dev.terminal in racer.ini to open it at startup.
See also http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/development.htm . Useful for content development as well; seeing warnings quickly.
- Entering of console commands is now also possible in the menu screen (although not many commands work here).
- Added 'debug <path>' to show a subtree's values live, much like the Ctrl-1 to 9 screens.
- data/cars/default/car.ini contained a differential tree which was not used; now split into 'differential' and 'differentials' (the latter is preferred)
- FMOD upgraded to v4.36.5 (fmodex.dll)
- Added 'reload globalviews' console command to reload data/gui/globalviews.ini
- Added damage parameters to default/car.ini (damage is still very alpha functionality)
- Added views.ini type 'clip' (for example for a filling bar) - currently it stretches the image though
- If a car's view0 was empty, Ctrl-9's second subpage could crash
- Added 'get focus car' script command to retrieve the car in focus (unlike 'get local car' for example)
- 'doc scriptfuncs' now opens the file after creation.
- Pacejka player could not edit 'a0' in Pac96 mode.
- Pressing Ctrl-0 twice would crash
- racer.ini's collision.report_car_track_collision now shows collisions between objects in the console
- DOF_Fix had an endless OpenGL error loop
- Endless roads possible by defining endless.min.x/y/z and endless.max.x/y/z in a track's special.ini
See http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/endless_track.htm
- Newton upgraded to v2.34 (newton.dll)
- Movables initial state is now no longer to freeze; this to fix framerate issues (although it's a little slow at the first few frames).
- Added generic model align_axis property, to fix one of the axes of a generic model (to prevent rotations; only 2 endpoints are defined).
This was done for Boomer's IMP car, to keep a suspension model from rotating when moving.
- Added susp<n>.susp_y_change_per_rad (around 0.01 to 0.1) to dynamically move the suspension attachment point for geometric effects.
- Ini.exe would crash when adding a non-existing key
- Added 'show lidar' and 'hide lidar'. High-end laser scanned tracks only (alpha development).
- Added 'lidar movex <v>' plus movey and movez commands to translate Lidar data to match the track.
- Gearwhine sample now also uses jitter (similar to the engine).

Enjoy!

 

[DavidI]

On a good note, this is the first version I've been able to run somewhat playably on three monitors on my single GF460. I can get ~35fps @3480x1024 on Mugello with 3 ai cars. Admittedly I can't turn on some of the GFX niceties, ie I have to render_once, use shorter visiblity etc. but it's nice & immersive across three screens. Oh for three projectors & a GF590....

 

[Alex Forbin]

Can ANYONE turn off the $E!@#@ fog? I've tried everything I can think of, from disabling it in the special.ini to turning it off in racer.ini.
I get sick of feeling like I'm driving in a forest fire.

Alex Forbin

P.S. Never mind I forgot this is now in the TOD curves, I guess it's time for some parameter cleanup?

 

[Mr Whippy]

There is a shed load of legacy entries in default content for tracks.

Not sure if that is a good or bad thing. I guess if you are making a track with wide support for cg and non-cg versions of Racer you still need them. But ultimately, who does? The reality is ONE good track version is hard enough for a hobbyist to make, never mind tweaking settings for two versions!

Hmmm

Dave

 

[Some1]

There is a shed load of legacy entries in default content for tracks.

Not sure if that is a good or bad thing. I guess if you are making a track with wide support for cg and non-cg versions of Racer you still need them. But ultimately, who does? The reality is ONE good track version is hard enough for a hobbyist to make, never mind tweaking settings for two versions!

Hmmm

Dave

The No-CG support in Racer must be dropped! It's almost 2012 already. Also, backwards compatibility is evil.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Part of me agrees.

v0.9 of Racer should be approached now with the aim of it being fully CG.

That means the next few versions/betas should probably start looking at dumping any legacy stuff that doesn't need to be there, that includes car.ini entries and all that jazz too...


Racers development team, and hobby content people, are simply too small to keep supporting old stuff in my view. I want to make the best looking stuff that is gonna be enjoyed in 5yrs time still!

It's the only way we will get artists being serious with Racer again... it does have great potential right now, but it does need a tidy up and lots of t's crossing and i's dotting! (ie, the little details to really give a car it's final polish are still lacking, audio features and stuff for example)

Dave

 

[ammods]

to a certain degree, i agree withyou comments,^^^^^ but it would need to have something along the lines..of editcar and mtkit...for world racing 2, those tools made it rather simple for users to insert cars into the aforementioned game...i think i've mentioned this before quite a long time ago...basically with editcar, you have a basic template of what characteristics the car should have, ie suspension engine details etc etc...mtkit is the 3d equivelent of modeler..it allows you to convert the car from "lwo" format to it's native mox..you can set specular texture reflections etc etc..if need be i can post pics to show what i'm referring to..this for me would certainly make it simpler in respect to editing for racer..i have become a custom to racer a little bit..after learning and reading heaps...but something along what i've said here would help out alot impo

 

[Alex Forbin]

Has anyone had ANY luck getting vertex damage to work? I wish these new features were documented instead of us needing to reverse engineer Racer to figure things out.
I have the following...
;-------------------------
vf_damage
{
tangents=1
vertex_shader
{
file=dyn_standard_bump_reflect_damaged_v.cg
}
fragment_shader
{
file=dyn_standard_bump_reflect_damaged_f.cg
}
}
;------------------------------------------------------------------
shader_body~vf_damage
{
reflect=0.16
layer0
{
map=69z28hugger.tga
shininess=8000
specular=30 30 30
ambient=.1 .1 .1
diffuse=.5 .5 .5
mipmap=0
}
layer1
{
map=69z28huggern.tga ; the usual detail bumpmap
mode=linear
}
layer2
{
map=$trackenvmap ;reflection map
}
layer3
{
map=vert.tga ; a white texture
mode=linear
}
layer4
{
map=damage.tga ; a white texture / from what I've read this should be updated by the program
mode=linear
}

layer5
{
map=damage.tga ; a bumpy grayscale image
mode=linear
}
}
All I get is a car with general "dentyness" applied to it. Nothing changes when I hit something.

Alex Forbin

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'm pretty sure someone else mentioned it, but I'll mention it again.

texscale and texscale_s etc etc seem to no longer function within a shaders layer.

I'm guessing this makes shaders more streamlined?! Is it now better to specify shaders that allow scaling?

Ie, standard_bump_detail shader for terrains now has a hardcoded 12x detail level. I'm sure these should be set with a scale factor...


Just a few things that I think we have lost flexibility with recently (I think), that could do with being refined so authors have a bit more control again... otherwise we just end up with authors using custom shaders in their track folders again which just means content is gonna be hard to update again in future when things change (arghhh!)



Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

Good news though, I just added 1000 trees to one of my tracks (2 face quad X tree with X tree shade)r, looking up off a 2048x2048 atlas of 4x4 tree types (16meg 32bit TGA), and the FPS impact seemed negligible (98 > 97 fps when you pan so they are on-screen)

One big DOF containing them all, with one shader and one shared texture, means the GPU seems to see it and render it very very quickly!

More testing to come... just trying to work out the best way to get trees into my track without hurting FPS. Atlas layout/low DOF count/shader count seems to be the way forward

Dave

 

[Ruud]

Has anyone had ANY luck getting vertex damage to work?

I've added an example damage car (although it's just what is there now, really damage is unsupported) at http://www.racerdownloads.com/uploads_files/lambo_damage.7z

 

[Ruud]

Good news though, I just added 1000 trees to one of my tracks (2 face quad X tree with X tree shade)r, looking up off a 2048x2048 atlas of 4x4 tree types (16meg 32bit TGA), and the FPS impact seemed negligible (98 > 97 fps when you pan so they are on-screen)

One big DOF containing them all, with one shader and one shared texture, means the GPU seems to see it and render it very very quickly

The problem may be when you want to split them into collidable objects and non-collidable. Still, the GPU is indeed quite fast when doing batches, rather than a lot of separate objects. I'm doing some work on Lidar tracks and even there, I'm blasting 1-2 million points to the screen in around 50fps, which is quite ok.

 

[Ruud]

I'm pretty sure someone else mentioned it, but I'll mention it again.

texscale and texscale_s etc etc seem to no longer function within a shaders layer.

I'm guessing this makes shaders more streamlined?! Is it now better to specify shaders that allow scaling?

Ie, standard_bump_detail shader for terrains now has a hardcoded 12x detail level. I'm sure these should be set with a scale factor...

Just a few things that I think we have lost flexibility with recently (I think), that could do with being refined so authors have a bit more control again... otherwise we just end up with authors using custom shaders in their track folders again which just means content is gonna be hard to update again in future when things change (arghhh!

The texscale attributes are not valid anymore on Cg shaded materials (and they all should be Cg now). I will remove them from the docs. Some shaders allow texture scaling, but mostly for 2nd/3rd layers like detail textures. In that case, a global 'scale=...' works for the car.shd file.

Standard_bump_detail_f.cg now accepts a 'scale' parameter, so you should really set scale=12 in the material .shd file (or something like 9.5, it's better to go for relative prime numbers for overlays).

 

[Ruud]

The No-CG support in Racer must be dropped! It's almost 2012 already. Also, backwards compatibility is evil.

NoCG is there more to allow Racer to run on old laptops and such, mostly for development reasons. Perhaps I should take the non-CG exe out, since I don't think trying to make tracks that *look* nice for non-Cg is something worth going after. Rather, it's more to be able to develop cars on otherwise graphics-lacking PC's. Trying to get tracks to look good in non-Cg is just a waste of time; it will look like crap anyway.

 

[Ruud]

On a good note, this is the first version I've been able to run somewhat playably on three monitors on my single GF460. I can get ~35fps @3480x1024 on Mugello with 3 ai cars. Admittedly I can't turn on some of the GFX niceties, ie I have to render_once, use shorter visiblity etc. but it's nice & immersive across three screens. Oh for three projectors & a GF590....

Can you get 3 independent signals from your GF460? 2x DVI and 1x Mini-display port (or HDMI?). I thought the 3rd port contained a clone of one of the DVI ports.

 

[Some1]

NoCG is there more to allow Racer to run on old laptops and such, mostly for development reasons. Perhaps I should take the non-CG exe out, since I don't think trying to make tracks that *look* nice for non-Cg is something worth going after. Rather, it's more to be able to develop cars on otherwise graphics-lacking PC's. Trying to get tracks to look good in non-Cg is just a waste of time; it will look like crap anyway.

I see, but doesn't most old hardware support somekind of Cg, like very minimal functionality? So perhaps you could just override all Cg shaders in the development build with a very basic shader to get things going?

I still see requests for no-Cg cars and tracks here at the forums, and I agree with you that explicitly making content compatible with no-Cg is a waste of time and resource.

 

[Alex Forbin]

I've added an example damage car (although it's just what is there now, really damage is unsupported) at http://www.racerdownloads.com/uploads_files/lambo_damage.7z

Thanks for the response Ruud. I see what you mean about the damage being alpha, the damage textures look nice and I see that there is vertex movement. Are you considering some sort of change to the shape of the car to conform to what it hits? For example if I hit a wall at a 45 deg angle will it distort the body to match the impact angle? I was also wondering about relocation of the wheels for harder impacts, it used be a lot of fun trying to finish a race in the old "Insane Racing" with one wheel out of position and affecting the handling a bit.

Alex Forbin

 

[Ian Strom]

Need to change to 3D suspension and _then_ you can mess with the handling and whatnot with damage!

 

[Alex Forbin]

Here's a new particle.ini to try out. The only change is for rain mist around the cars.

Alex Forbin

 

[Pedro_Takumi]

interesting discussion, rain and damage, it will do miracles for racer , has for the cg i have to agree with Ruud, non-cg helps alot when making and testing new cars, especially for people like me that are doing it for the first time

 

[DavidI]

Can you get 3 independent signals from your GF460? 2x DVI and 1x Mini-display port (or HDMI?). I thought the 3rd port contained a clone of one of the DVI ports.

You are observant, I also have a GF6600gt tucked away in there running the 3rd monitor. Using nearfullscreen & border =0 get it across the 3 screens like its fullscreen, but using only the 460GT GPU for 3d.