Two issues with tracks other than Carlswood

[Chronus]

Greetings.

It's been a while since my last incursion into Racer territory.

I downloaded version 0.8.33 last night and, as I expected, very, very solid and realistic experience (at least how I envision driving the Lambo).

Anyway, I downloaded more than a dozen tracks.

I tried Laguna Seca, Monza, Imola, Road Atlanta and Phillip Island - all with the same result:
- brilliant fog all around
- FPS varying from 1 to 8 or 20

At Carlswood, I get above 55 FPS, and no fog problem.

I have already changed several params in car.ini - AA, viewing distance, async (worked well), affinity mask (I normally run sims with all cores).

Is there anything else that can be done?

The system is not new, but is good enough to run GTR2/rFactor/GTRE/GTL, NKP, XMotor Racing, LFS, iRacing and Shift 1 and 2 almost maxed out (of course, no AA or occlusion) and still get anywhere from 60 to 160 FPS (depending on tracks and numbers of AI cars - 25 to 30 of them).

Thanks in advance, folks.

Cheers

 

[Some1]

Almost all of the content for Racer is currently out of date.

When the next Racer final comes out, I expect other content will be updated as well.

 

[Some1]

Anyhow, from your answer I take it that nothing can be done in regards to what I posted.

It's not that bad. Most of the content can be updated to be playable and look nice. It just takes a little know-how (I have the know-how, but I don't have the time unfortunately).

Please look around these forums, there are a few updated tracks and cars available, if I can recall correctly.
Also, there are similiar threads about updating old content. Just dig around a little bit!

Good luck!

 

[Chronus]

Will do, m8.

Thank you.


Cheers

 

[QuadCoreMax]

Hi Chronus,

Most of the time, it's how tracks were originally created & not really optimized. Even when Qloging Racer, sometimes it's hard to deduce what's wrong in the track, as Some1 said, with some Racer knowledge you should be able to fix it real quickly.

For example, using dds files as textures & setting the racer.ini texture tree accordingly & you should be able to double your fps instantly. Other stuff needs to be tweaked like shaders/materials params. I bet if you check your track textures, you will find some with over 16mb of size, that's bad for GPU calculations

Hope it helps !

Don't hesitate to PM for specifics problems you might encounter !

 

[Chronus]

Hello, QuadCoreMax.

Thank you for paying attention too. *thumbs up*

Though I have known Racer for years and have tried it several times in the past, I still know too little. Catching up, in the midst of the projects I have now will take time, I gather.

Anyway, I haven't seen anything serious in the logger. will look at it more, then.

As for textures...Laguna Seca, for instance, doesn't have files which I would consider really heavy - the biggest is less than 5MB, IIRC. However, it does have dozens of DOFs, many, many more than Carlswood. And then many other files too.

With the async tweak (to 1), collisions are off but I get a boost of 13 FPS, setting it at 21 FPS at the start. I edited some values related to ambient, diffuse, etc, and at least the brilliant fog is gone. But FPS wise, still no more than those 21 FPS.

I removed some objects (declarations?) from geometry.ini, but that gained me no more than 2 FPS. Also, tried some textures (similar in name and extension) from Carlswood, but that didn't help.

Using DDS (light DDS files, I assume) seems a good idea. Turning DOF files into DDS or finding textures as DDS is another matter, though.

Any advice you may give will be appreciated.

Thank you, m8.

Cheers

 

[QuadCoreMax]

The fact you have a massive amount of dof could point to a bad splitting in Tracked with too low distance, from what I've read on racer.nl, it shouldn't be below 300.

The shaders & materials settings could be also the reason, sometimes I struggle too, because nothing is output, It's time to have some special Cg debugger like the gDebugger or Fx Composer for boosting our Cg creations & ease the understanding, how it's all plugged with the OpenGL vertex/fragment profiles & Racer code.

Try to lower texture quality in racer.ini as follows :

textures
{
  ; Big hack for faster loads during testing
  enable=1
  ; Quality; 1=max, 2=halfsize, 4=1/4th etc. Must be power of 2.
  [B]quality=2[/B]
  ; Support texture compression? (default is 1 (on) unless shaders specifiy compression=0)
  compression=0
  ; Maximum texture size; useful to cut down on really big texturemaps
  ; or supporting ancient gfxcards that can only deal with 256x256
  ; texturemaps.
  max_wid=2048
  max_hgt=2048
}

You can try compression = 1, it depends on the track textures.

 

[Mr Whippy]

It's not that bad. Most of the content can be updated to be playable and look nice. It just takes a little know-how (I have the know-how, but I don't have the time unfortunately).

Please look around these forums, there are a few updated tracks and cars available, if I can recall correctly.
Also, there are similiar threads about updating old content. Just dig around a little bit!

Good luck!

Problem is lots of the content wasn't that great to start with, iffy conversions mainly, which are a nightmare to update as they have shader/texture names that we struggle to make sense of, which makes them harder to apply the appropriate new shaders to.


We'll get there with new tracks eventually. And nice ones. V0.9 should hopefully be around the corner soon and that might motivate people to get more content out

Dave