Racer v0.9.0 RC4 released

[Ruud]

Another version... get it at http://www.mediafire.com/file/p79inu8n3mhani8/racer0.9.0_rc4.7z

The changes:
- Passing of scale and dt in motion blur done directly to motion_blur_f.cg
- 'graph delta ...' command did not seem to work. Fixed.
- 'show carpoints' now also paints the warp matrix (initial position/rotation)
- Task priority not set higher anymore; it can conflict with ethernet drivers apparently
- 'reset car' (or Shift-F/Shift-R) now also takes into account the initial roll angle (banking of the surface)
- lighting.cg could generate NaN when shininess was 0 (specular maps can do that)
- Onyx execution speedup by around 50% with function tables.
- Modeler now has a 'Unify materials' button to let the model use only the first material.
- Automatic transmission now accepts curves for better shifting; see http://www.racer.nl/index.php?jump=tutorial/gearbox.htm#automatic_transmission
- Onyx now supports equalities between ints (int i,j; if(i>j)...)

 

[Mr Whippy]

I kinda agree.

But look how long it too Niels to make the Vette handling any good for rFactor, he had to write all his own tools just to do the kind of work you would do in Racer via debug readouts and built-in logging, and that was rFactor 1 designed for modding.

rFactor 2 has no tools yet for really modding and getting the power from it.

Even a dedicated paid team using rFactor 1 engine for the BMW V8 game had horrible data in it for the suspension... not great.

So I have my eyes open on rFactor 2, but I'm not holding my breath. Why would they make modding really nice later when people have already bought it... and might buy DLC type content later that they can make/sell.

pCARS does look AMAZING, but it's only shaders/content guys working to a set target. Racer has that potential right now, it's totally open CG environment to write shaders in.
If Racer had more guys like Mitch, Stereo and GTPBDIZ or whatever his name was, doing more work, Racer would no doubt look better than it does! (again something the community has to do and work towards more than Ruud giving it us on a plate)

Not played it myself, driving around circuits in cars that sound like different sized/angered wasps isn't my bag so much these days. Give me rallying, off-roading, road-racing, all the stuff no other genres really do very well in a sim way these days, or ever?!



AS does look great too. I just wonder how modder friendly it'll be. They say a lot about modding, but haven't shown any specifics at all.
Maybe it's something for after release, but at that point will they just think "hey, why give them tools to make stuff when we can make it for them and sell them it?"

Making games that people can mod themselves isn't really very sensible business and I struggle to understand why they will do that.
Maybe their official content add-ons will be really nice and a reasonable price, and STILL leave room for mod content?
Maybe mod content will be compiled for use at their discretion?



SimBin stuff is usually good, not heard about that so far. I do have to say though that good physics is just a word they use and we have to trust them.
I remember GTR2 being paraded as super-accurate, and they have all detailed car suspension kinematics etc... really nice... but then to fake bumpy zones on tracks they had bumps 20cm high!
In Racer you take off when you hit them hehe... so if GTR2 was so realistic how come they did that?

Again, not saying it's bad, but we have to trust them when they say stuff is good and accurate a lot of the time.



Racer can often be seen as not great, but it's because it's honest and shows all it's bugs and ugly sides openly that we feel that way.
A well made car, track, physics and sounds in Racer can match a LOT of good modern games in all the key areas in my view...

What is missing is a years worth of bug-fixing and polishing!


Yes, horrors probably do lurk in the programming all over the place...

But I bet they do in plenty of commercial stuff!


Remember the fantastic FWD power-oversteering from a stand-still cars in GT4? That doesn't look right... ah well, who stops and dumps the clutch with full lock from a standstill?
I shudder to think of the fudge factors that are in games like Gran Turismo, Forza and the like... we just can't find out about them like we can in Racer!



Racer could be great, I think Ruud has neglected some core elements and it'd be nice if he fixed some up a little.

Mainly multi-player support/streamlining (ie, getting a game going easily without arsing around for hours), and also making content work elegantly over multi-player (ie, one car folder that can share multiple configs for colours and wheels and sounds between users, rather than 10 folders that each user has to have to see each other user driving the right coloured MINI or something!)

If we could just log on and go for a drive with our friends easily without hassle and copy/pasting/renaming folders and car.ini/shd tweaks it'd make more people stick around and then want to make content.

Hmmmmm, thinking TDU, but without all the TDU junk, just the important bits


Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

The other thing I wanted to comment on as I've been working on cars recently is the generic model section. Scripted models can have an offset that's not based on from/to, but I can't find any syntax that does the same offset without having to run a script with the car. Is there syntax to move/rotate a generic model from car.ini? It's a little awkward to have a script move them around compared to being directly set up.

I'm not sure on this.

Documentation and examples are not the best kept things. I believe ALL the data exists somewhere, but it's spread all over here, racer.nl, emails, pm's, cars we have in our folders.

I just spent 1hr earlier looking for the right syntax to edit 'system' params.

The other day I was looking for the sort_offset explanation stuff again for about 1hr haha!


But then some stuff might not be answered and just needs Ruud to reply on those specifics in a nice clear way. Perhaps a community centred 'questions for Ruud when he comes here' thread so we agree what to ask between us then he can fire through the list...

I dunno, but I think we can work better to make Ruud work better for us and for Racer's future.


As for the RX7, that sounds great. I have a car here nearly finished, Cam has his F458... I'm sure Some1's Vette could be fettled up by Cosmo (car.ini handling) pretty quickly, and right away we have a few really nice modern cars possibly with movable example parts, interiors, whatever else.

Racer isn't dead so much, just we have lost interest a bit... it's to be expected, I had gigs of working tracks/cars that are all just QLOG kings or cause Racer to crash

That move to CG was hugely costly but in the long run it's been worth it I think because the entire industry of RT graphics has gone shader based and if anything it gives us as users more freedom than ever before!

Dave

 

[Stereo]

Mainly multi-player support/streamlining (ie, getting a game going easily without arsing around for hours), and also making content work elegantly over multi-player (ie, one car folder that can share multiple configs for colours and wheels and sounds between users, rather than 10 folders that each user has to have to see each other user driving the right coloured MINI or something!)

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing can eventually be done via onyx script - depends where Ruud's going with it, but it seems to be working on a deep enough level to potentially affect graphics of multiplayer vehicles (and to receive/send files over the network, even, so as long as the base vehicle has scripts running it could dump new textures in a skins folder or something)

Would be nice to have it as an official part of the program, but if Ruud wants to work on other things he just needs to give us a few hammers and we can make it work.




I'd like to put pop-up headlights on the RX7 but the script languages seem to be in a bit of flux so if I did, it might not survive to 090f (headlights aren't in system parameters yet, I wouldn't want to put a half-working version based on the L key in a release version). It could probably do with the ABS script too, once that's been refined.

 

[boomer541]

Stereo,
I have a car with very nicely working pop-up headlights. Let me know if you want the info.

 

[luthobu]

<snip>Racer has become the platform where I test my models, but I don't really use
it for driving anymore.</snip>

Did not mean to start any Racer-bashing, it is just the honest truth. My hope
is of course that a 09-final catches up and that content matches the final in
quality. If not, well.. then Racer remains in the messy state in which it now is.

 

[Some1]

Did not mean to start any Racer-bashing, it is just the honest truth. My hope
is of course that a 09-final catches up and that content matches the final in
quality. If not, well.. then Racer remains in the messy state in which it now is.

Well, this is pretty much what I use Racer for as well...

 

[Mr Whippy]

Racer can drive nicely, it can look great, sound great, just generally be great.

I can only think the reason people don't bother so much is the multiplayer has got pretty bad and there is lots of other nice looking stuff around these days, wheras back in 2001 ish Racer was pretty damn good looking against everything else out there!

In many ways Racer was pants back in the old days too, and then around the time of Snowballs little figure 8 track and the Gallardo by TTR, multi-player came along and started to work really well, as in your could enjoy driving with several other people without cars flying through mid-air and doing other weird stuff!
The blast into space bug was fixed, and generally we had some great days around 2003-2006 ish... good graphics for the day, and a MASSIVE load of content being made all the time... getting cars in Racer before any other game had them, scratch made, not just converting what F4 or NFS had to offer a year after a car came out...

That was a massive boost at the time in my view... and with the oodles of nice ish content people actually used Racer to just cruise around on nice tracks in nice cars before any other game had em!


But when CG came along it made a load of content go to the wall, and since then it's not really got back to where it was. Content now takes a different working approach to make work.
It's different, but no harder...

Even old content that was good, tweaked for the new CG stuff, can look great. Look at Stecki's MINI, RX8 and 350Z... they still look good now with CG shaders.




I guess what we are missing is some nice looking AND fast running big tracks, both a nice circuit for racing, and a nice road for cruising around?

Then a decent multi-player system to make running games easy!

Oh and some optimised cars... it's surprising how slow a 50 material (shader) car is to start with, but when you get two *different* cars on the same track at the same time it's literally another 25% FPS gone... eeek!

Dave

 

[Cosmo°]

Is it that time of the year again We seem to have these crisis of faith scenarios pretty much every time Ruud has been too busy to post much for a couple of months.

Content creation is in our hands. So if the lack of quality content is bothering you, the first thing you can do is to have a go at it. Of course it's sometimes harder to get things rolling when features are added or changed and we all struggle here and there.

However, if I had stopped working on content because I'm "waiting for the final", I'd be nowhere now, because we have been "waiting" for nearly four years now, but Racer has still moved on even without that random tag attached to the version name.
I would have no idea what's good and bad in the current version, how to use features and work around issues, I would have done much less of the specific research on content types and components, wouldn't be able to assist others when they ask about things.
Instead, just as those I know of and enjoy working with, we keep going and we keep giving feedback to Ruud and the community. That's how Racer and it's content gets better, through practice, experience and communication.

In that sense, maybe when the C7 has been officially unveiled, we can see Some1's model in Racer a short while later, ready to be set up and go against Cam's Ferrari or McLaren, endo's GT-R I've been working on for nearly five years now... you know, just like we always have in Racer

 

[Mr Whippy]

Well, my claims to fame for Racer are Manutius M5 conversion, Dunsfold, M3, Deyan's Murcielago import/maintain, and that is it

Yet I have about 100 car.ini's, sounds, physics set ups, scripts, track WIP's, car WIP's, gah, oodles of stuff

So I'm not Mr Perfect here by any means...

But as Cosmo suggests, we are all the weak links as much as Racer is.


Not to say it's our fault, making content that matches modern stuff today is hard, takes a lot of time and more than ever a lot of disciplines and knowledge.


With a pack of 10 cars, a UI re-work, and a set of 10 tracks, all made really nicely in Racer, I think you could box it up and call it a 'game' and generally have people consider it pretty good!
If you have the vision to see that right now it could do that, then in my view Racer is worth sticking with.


As time moves on and on, anything with commercial interests won't provide you with the tools you need to make your own content for years to come and to a high standard!

Dave

 

[Some1]

With a pack of 10 cars, a UI re-work, and a set of 10 tracks, all made really nicely in Racer, I think you could box it up and call it a 'game' and generally have people consider it pretty good!

Some of that we could do already. For example, the default Racer installation has awful default values and initial setup. We could clean up racer.ini, remove or relocate deprecated or old configuration stuff to the back of the ini file. Better yet, we should create a new racer config tool that would enable to set all the nowadays relevant racer.ini values in a nice and clean UI.

Also, we can customize the racer menus a bit, change the backgrounds or fonts...

Actually, I hate the menus in Racer, the car selection screen is very lacking and buggy and the menu system isn't very nice either. To be honest, with my current programming skills (C++, OpenGL, GLSL etc.), I could create a complete replacement UI front end for Racer. The new front end could have completely customizable menu system down the color, position and function of each button. It could have a nice rotatable 3d showroom for cars and why not even tracks. Probably I would need to get familiar with Cg, but as far as I remember, Ruud was in the process of migrating to GLSL.

So, we could start by making the default Racer installation/release as well setup as possible... and then work from there.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yeah, stuff like that would be nice.

Cosmo and I re-worked the Lambo a fair bit so the layout of the file was better for people referencing for their car.ini files for example, and I added my own UI/config tool to kinda represent a 'nicer' front end for Racer.


Carrying that through to Racer proper would be nice... if you do try do anything make sure Ruud see's it and implements it his end before he then re-exports a new release, that way it makes it's way into the regular releases and doesn't get lost each time


I guess for cars we can load them, but tracks can be heavy duty, so just a nice image might be better for tracks, or perhaps even a large background video taken in-game ala GT5 previews?

I suppose designing everything else is easy too, just plan out all the screens you need and then get it all coded in (the harder bit, but if you have a nice design to work from it's not really hard, web people do that every day from designs > final html/css etc)


Garage is easy too really... just needs to be made haha

It'd be nice to have a special track that is all baked with HDR emission values and a single light so it looks super real with radiosity and all that stuff, but obviously no TOD ability etc...


My main thing for UI stuff really is having a way to select car colours and options in the menu's ala rFactor1... we can just write car.ini/shd fragments for mods.

The Lambo approach did that but in flash/batch obviously, but in theory it's not a waste as all that data is sat there ready to just copy/paste to whatever system we do eventually get...!
All I wish in that regard is that we could nest all those things so the car.ini/shd don't change except for the nested references...
That might make multi-player car differences easier to see and apply as all car.ini bar the nested references will be identical... perhaps sync the references per player?

I dunno, just thinking out loud


Dave

 

[Ian Strom]

Making games that people can mod themselves isn't really very sensible business and I struggle to understand why they will do that.
Maybe their official content add-ons will be really nice and a reasonable price, and STILL leave room for mod content?

Original Ghost Recon and it's expansions still sell new copies today, after ten years, because it is a damn good game and there are damn good mods for it.

Mods help long-burn sales but nobody likes that anymore because everybody is too impatient. They want their billion sales NOW. they want to not have to work to get those billion sales. they want things to be disposable, etc.

GT Legends still sells new copies. It too is a damn good game and has damn good mods. It also helps that they stripped out the DRM and started selling it online though.(convenience and compatibility with modern OS)

GTL may not be perfect, but it sure is fun.
It does however lack some things that Racer could be filling. (trucks, offroad, you know)

Interestingly, someone ported the GTA Vice City map to the Race series... That is kinda neat and there was a community doing a cops&robbers sort of thing on it.

 

[luthobu]

Is it that time of the year again We seem to have these crisis of faith scenarios pretty much every time Ruud has been too busy to post much for a couple of months.

Heh, well observed. It does seem to resurface at Ruuds absence. Still, it does not
change the facts. When Ruud releases a new (beta) version we get all worked up
with anticipation. So we try it again and again for a while untill we return to our
"usual" sims (some of us at least). I speak for myself of course. And as I have
said before, Racer has the means, the tools and the potential.. it just never seems
to come together. I am getting way too old to hold my breath for too long a time

 

[Stereo]

Some of that we could do already. For example, the default Racer installation has awful default values and initial setup. We could clean up racer.ini, remove or relocate deprecated or old configuration stuff to the back of the ini file. Better yet, we should create a new racer config tool that would enable to set all the nowadays relevant racer.ini values in a nice and clean UI.

I bit the bullet, said those magic words, "how hard can it be?" and started writing a config tool in Python.

After some hours of wrangling pyparsing into working with racer.ini I have it about 99% correctly read and can pull arbitrary 'resolution.width' type paths for their values. The one section I'm not handling well is

  live_track=1
  {
    ; Number of cubemap sides to update per frame (less=faster but more jerk)
    sides_per_frame=1
    ; Frames per update; each update, 'sides_per_frame' sides will be rendered (!). Default is 1.
    frames_per_update=1
    ; Use an offscreen FBO? Faster, better
    fbo=1
    ; Number of FBO bits; 8 or 16 (HDR)
    bits=16
    ; Size of FBO (width & height)
    size=512
    ; Render once? This will generate a nice map, but never update it. Very fast
    render_once=0
  }

And of course it's a useful section. The problem is that live_track is both a section and a variable name. For 1, if I duplicate it, then it's harder to search (since there will be 2 live_tracks in the path), or for 2, if I give it a number and a set of subitems, how do I know when only the number's wanted? Probably will have to make some kind of exception for this kind of thing, since some variables do have a list of values.

This is where I'm at - it lists out the comments before, the name of the variable, the value, and the section following it. (there's no actual way to choose which variable to look at atm, I just hardcoded it to go for envmap.live_track)


Currently the plan is to use ini.exe to do the actual editing, so I don't have to worry so much about nuking the racer.ini. Parsing racer.ini directly to start made more sense though. Once I have something usable, I'll stick it on Github so other people with Python can try it. Maybe later on I'll look up a way to get it into a standalone .exe.

In the future it would be nice to make it compatible with Raven config files, and then maybe something a little more flexible, like running the car's batch files.

 

[Some1]

I bit the bullet, said those magic words, "how hard can it be?" and started writing a config tool in Python.

After some hours of wrangling pyparsing into working with racer.ini I have it about 99% correctly read and can pull arbitrary 'resolution.width' type paths for their values. The one section I'm not handling well is

  live_track=1
  {
    ; Number of cubemap sides to update per frame (less=faster but more jerk)
    sides_per_frame=1
    ; Frames per update; each update, 'sides_per_frame' sides will be rendered (!). Default is 1.
    frames_per_update=1
    ; Use an offscreen FBO? Faster, better
    fbo=1
    ; Number of FBO bits; 8 or 16 (HDR)
    bits=16
    ; Size of FBO (width & height)
    size=512
    ; Render once? This will generate a nice map, but never update it. Very fast
    render_once=0
  }

And of course it's a useful section. The problem is that live_track is both a section and a variable name. For 1, if I duplicate it, then it's harder to search (since there will be 2 live_tracks in the path), or for 2, if I give it a number and a set of subitems, how do I know when only the number's wanted? Probably will have to make some kind of exception for this kind of thing, since some variables do have a list of values.


Currently the plan is to use ini.exe to do the actual editing, so I don't have to worry so much about nuking the racer.ini. Parsing racer.ini directly to start made more sense though. Once I have something usable, I'll stick it on Github so other people with Python can try it. Maybe later on I'll look up a way to get it into a standalone .exe.

In the future it would be nice to make it compatible with Raven config files, and then maybe something a little more flexible, like running the car's batch files.

Nice!

I have created a pretty robust Racer-style INI loading library in C++, which can handle the above situation well (and also inheritance, using the '~' style!). I used that library for my own projects, which use similar configuration files.

I think you should treat the Racer-style INI as a tree, where each node can also have a value and child nodes.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Good work!

I have to admit I use Raven still which shows how even those extra added features are so valuable vs the Racer menu system (only use that to access the host/join multiplayer buttons)

I'm not a fan of Raven variants, I prefer the config approach where you move stuff around and edit files rather than have piles of duplicates. But for the time it did work well.



So, who is up for the UI design

Maybe we should start a thread with pictures for how it might look?


Hmmmm

Dave

 

[Stereo]

Hmm, did not handle inheritance. I can see where it would fit into the structure but it just didn't come up, for racer.ini. Once I got it more like a tree, things fell into place.

Right now the roadmap to a usable program seems straightforward, but I'll have to work on it as time permits. UI-wise my plan is to have buttons that pop up windows with specific purposes (Graphics options, Multiplayer options, etc.) each of which will bring together all the most used values in racer.ini, and hopefully make it more obvious what the actual options are. I'll stick it online once I've got the basic tree navigation running (click 'race', click 'car' to get a popup that lets you edit the string value) and then go to work on the more restrictive stuff (click Car options, get a dropdown with all the currently available cars by folder name, etc.)

I was thinking how it wouldn't be so hard to save an ini file full of multiplayer servers, labeled, and have the config bring them up as a list. Just needs something to bring the two together in an easy to use fashion.

 

[Some1]

Hmm, did not handle inheritance. I can see where it would fit into the structure but it just didn't come up, for racer.ini. Once I got it more like a tree, things fell into place.

Right now the roadmap to a usable program seems straightforward, but I'll have to work on it as time permits. UI-wise my plan is to have buttons that pop up windows with specific purposes (Graphics options, Multiplayer options, etc.) each of which will bring together all the most used values in racer.ini, and hopefully make it more obvious what the actual options are. I'll stick it online once I've got the basic tree navigation running (click 'race', click 'car' to get a popup that lets you edit the string value) and then go to work on the more restrictive stuff (click Car options, get a dropdown with all the currently available cars by folder name, etc.)

I was thinking how it wouldn't be so hard to save an ini file full of multiplayer servers, labeled, and have the config bring them up as a list. Just needs something to bring the two together in an easy to use fashion.

Btw, as far as I know, Racer can be started without the menu altogether, so you can just configure everything in the new UI, save to racer.ini and then start racer.exe and go straight into the track... right?

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yeah there is a menu toggle.

I use Raven directly to Racer. The only time I turn the menu on is to access host/join m-player.


In theory you can config everything in your own app and load in directly to racer, possibly with multi-player too, but I'm not sure on that part...


Dave

 

[Stereo]

From looking through the options - been a while since I tried multiplayer manually - it should work the same as launching single player without menus, just need to change the host address and possibly the port. But since I haven't tried, I can't say for sure. I'll do some experimenting on my LAN when it comes to that.