Racer v0.9.0 RC3 released

[Ruud]

Get it at http://www.mediafire.com/file/67b1mep0z1evvbh/racer0.9.0_rc3.7z

Changes:
- Reverted SMD camera up orientation, since it sticked to up even if the car was rolling.
- Added 'uniform float2 resolution' parameter for Cg shaders. Used in the motion blur shaders.
- Added theoretical sprung mass weight distribution under Ctrl-9, see also http://www.racer.nl/index.php?jump=reference/carphys.htm#bodymass
- Motion blur on by default; improved by detecting non-moving objects better.

 

[Alex Forbin]

SwiftPL,
It looks like your card does not have as many registers as the Nvidia cards and is failing on the shader compile. I like Radeon cards, they're very powerful for the price, but Racer is targeted at the Nvidia cards since they are much better at OpenGL support (as we see here).
You can try switching the "bloom_shadows_blur_f.cg" with "bloom_shadows_f.cg" in Racer.ini and see if it
helps.

Alex Forbin

 

[camsinny]

DDS textures don't work if you generate them without mipmaps.
Is the only way to get textures to stay sharp using DDS to use the same method as tga's and force the mipmap bias ridiculously low/high?

Also, wrote a quick shader that'll let you use another map channel.
In max you copy the map channel 2 into the vert colour channel and the rest is done for you.
It might be possible to have yet another map channel, but I don't see much point since I don't know where you'd possibly use it.
If you guys see a use for it let me know and I'll post it up. I'd use it for high quality buildings where you use your high quality tiling textures for bricks and stuff then in the 2nd map channel you could bake a nice AO. But you could apply the same technique to car interiors and have a nicely mapped interior with high quality stitching and leather then have a smooth AO over the whole lot.

 

[Mr Whippy]

That is the main benefit/purpose of the 2nd channel of UV's, so you can throw a baked AO over the whole thing and not worry too much about now 'neat' it is as it contains only shading information.
SSAO kinda removes the need for it but it's still worth having imo, for oodles of uses.

In theory you could also use it for mixing between materials nicely. That second set of UV's can just blend across materials perhaps with a higher res mask... nice for stuff like mountains and mid-distance terrains etc... where polygons are ideal but you don't want to invest in loads of textures/shaders... hmmm...


As per DDS, just generate the mips manually. That is technically the whole benefit of DDS in lots of areas. You get unbiased normal maps which look better as they mip down (tyres for instance), you can re-size the base texture with more sharpening and drop it into the mip location.
You can even do clever stuff with the mips like store different textures in them so if you know object X will never get seen with mip level 4 + you can use mip level 4 > 8 for different data.

Iirc Ruud made a shader that rendered the current mip level onto the cars so we could see if we could use more or less texture size for different items really easily.

So Cam, I'd just use DDS sharpening on the mips (either manually add it, or rescale the big textures with a sharpening resize down for better accuracy)...
Forcing a larger mip when an item is further away is just a bad fix to the problem as the re-sampling is done badly vs you doing it with full control via mips

Dave

 

[Adamo90]

Hello,
when I start racer I got error message:
[IMG=http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/7407/59201496.jpg][/IMG]
Graphic card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 512MB
I got this error since few racer versions but never asked, I thought it will be fixed, but still it ocuurs even in 0.9.x version, what is annoying, so if anyone could help, it would be great.

 

[Some1]

Hello,
when I start racer I got error message:
[IMG=http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/7407/59201496.jpg][/IMG]
Graphic card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 512MB
I got this error since few racer versions but never asked, I thought it will be fixed, but still it ocuurs even in 0.9.x version, what is annoying, so if anyone could help, it would be great.

Obviously your graphics card cannot handle Racer at the moment. Perhaps there will be a fix in a later version...

 

[Adamo90]

Maybe turning off some shaders, or some modifications in racer.ini will help?
Or my card is just not supported, "end of story, do not even try bro"?

 

[Some1]

Maybe turning off some shaders, or some modifications in racer.ini will help?
Or my card is just not supported, "end of story, do not even try bro"?

Well, which Racer version was the last one that worked for you?

 

[luthobu]

Maybe turning off some shaders, or some modifications in racer.ini will help?
Or my card is just not supported, "end of story, do not even try bro"?

Try this: Open racer.ini with a texteditor
Go to envmap{} (line 956)
set live_track=0 (line 963)
set fbo=0 (line 970)
Go to renderer{shadowmapping} (line 1026)
Set enable=0 (line 1030)
Go to bloom{} (line 1102)
Set enable=0 (line 1105)
Go to motion_blur{} (line 1126)
Set method=0 (line 1130)
Set ati=1 (line 1220)
Go to mirrors{} (line 1254)
Set fbo=0 (line 1273)

Start Racer, select tack and car
Once loaded, press SHIFT+~
Type time=2000
Press RETURN then ESC

 

[Adamo90]

luthobu, it didn't help :/ still the same problem when I try to run the game.

Well, which Racer version was the last one that worked for you?

ahh, hard to remember. One of 0.8.xx, of course with medium settings, definetly bloom, motion blur, liveenv mapping were enabled and it still worked.
Then problems started to show, I haven't got also time so I decided to put racer aside. Lately I tried back to racer, but it gives me some errors everytime I try to run it.
I think I have to wait just a little bit more for some compatible version.

 

[Some1]

luthobu, it didn't help :/ still the same problem when I try to run the game.

ahh, hard to remember. One of 0.8.xx, of course with medium settings, definetly bloom, motion blur, liveenv mapping were enabled and it still worked.
Then problems started to show, I haven't got also time so I decided to put racer aside. Lately I tried back to racer, but it gives me some errors everytime I try to run it.
I think I have to wait just a little bit more for some compatible version.

I would suggest thinking about upgrading your system. Can you run most of the newest games like Battlefield3, Max Payne 3 etc?
Racer is currently very sensitive about the system configuration...

 

[KS95]

After I changed my graphics settings (resolution and full screen) when I ran it I got a similiar error, only about 5 of them lol. Can't seem to fix it in the ini. :|

 

[Mr Whippy]

Just to check, DON'T use config.exe in the Racer folder, it's out-dated and breaks things iirc.

Have you tried racer_nocg.exe ?
It's not ideal but in theory you can get stuff to work with it.

Racer really does need a proper graphics card. Anything on-board or not fully specified is going to struggle or not work unfortunately.

I'm assuming if you can't run Racer you are not running much stuff beyond DX9 games etc?

Hmmm

Dave

 

[conster]

I have taken a break from Racer because I keep annoying little problems. Thought I would try this version out. I have better FPS on this version but it's more unplayable because the FPS fluctuates. It goes from 30FPS up to 50 and back down to 30 again in a few seconds so everything is very jumpy. And does any one else have pixelated jaggy shadows? I have had these shadows since version 0.8.15 Other than that loving the update!
EDIT: I have noticed that there's flashing text on the top of the screen saying *Physics running slower than real time* And also when I add a car there is no shadow? The map has shadows but the car doesn't.

 

[boomer541]

Conster, to get shadows with cars you have to add "cast_shadow=1" in the car.shd file for each texture that you want to cast a shadow.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Does any one know why we can't just run paint variables from the scripts in physics folder any more?

It's extremely frustrating from a development POV having to edit two files just to debug simple stuff by having the physics script and the paint script to tinker with each time, copy new variables to etc etc...
Yes optimise later, but during development it's a pain

Dave

 

[conster]

Conster, to get shadows with cars you have to add "cast_shadow=1" in the car.shd file for each texture that you want to cast a shadow.

Ah, okay thanks. Do you think the bad shadows are fixable? Or do all ATi cards have this problem?

 

[twister77]

EDIT: I have noticed that there's flashing text on the top of the screen saying *Physics running slower than real time*

I get this all the time, and my FPS is usually bad, but sometimes it jumps up to what it should be for my GPU. If anybody knows how to fix these problems, that would be appreciated..

 

[conster]

I get this all the time, and my FPS is usually bad

I found a temporary fix. Although it's not a brilliant one, it does work. Start recording with Fraps. Although I lose FPS I don't get *Physics running slower than realtime* And my FPS is constant. It's not jumpy or too low. And if Fraps is eating up your FPS set it to record in half size at something really low like 1FPS and no sound. Hope it helps

 

[DavidI]

You could also promote racer.exe's priority to 'above normal' or 'high' thru task manager, that might help.

 

[conster]

You could also promote racer.exe's priority to 'above normal' or 'high' thru task manager, that might help.

My Racer.exe priority was already at above normal. I put it to high but no difference. Tried realtime but it wouldn't let me. I got a message saying "Unable to set priority to realtime. Set priority to high instead. Fraps is the only thing that fixes it for me...