Can't get Racer to look right anymore!

Bumper · Jun 13, 2013

Hi... Some may or may not remember me from the "old" days of Racer...

Anyways, I've been having some trouble with Racer lately - I can't seem to get the game work properly. It looks acceptable enough, but I'm missing some rather important bits such as mirrors and interior views on cars... And it might, or might not look a bit dull otherwise as well. Included a couple of screenshots to show off my problem.

So the question is: Is my 275 GTX too antique, or can I fix this madness by some ini tricks? My FPS seems okay, so it would seem that the card has enough power, maybe it just can't do some of the latest trickery? The drivers are up to date in case any of you were wondering.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

edit: Got the mirros working, but in the Gallardo they are still flickering all over the place like shown in the 2nd picture...

Mr Whippy · Jun 13, 2013

Hi Bumper,

Good to see you back around on the forums!

The current version of Racer appears to have some problems with the z-buffer/depth mapping (I think Ruud is currently trying to optimise it), and that results in shadows and mirrors and stuff z-fighting a lot.

Try RC5c version, it's the one the Gallardo was released for and appears to be the most stable one for now for using/developing content for etc.

I run a GTX275 here and imo it's a very good card. It's old now but still has good specs for reasonable resolutions. Ie, stick around 1600x1200 type resolutions and it's fill rate is ample for plenty of visual quality.

FPS are limited by many things, but for me the GTX275 seems to perform better if I overclock my CPU (2500k), so currently Racer seems limited for me by the CPU.

I think again this is an area where Ruud has been having problems getting multi-core processing working reliably so in the last year or so has reverted to one core for all processing which obviously puts a bottleneck on the rate at which shader jobs can be sent to the GPU!

As per the dull bit, can you elaborate?

I'm currently working with Stereo on some new shaders for Racer that try incorporate the energy conservation, but also proper ambient and ambient specular responses using gloss/IOR maps alongside diffuse and normal maps.

Currently most of the Racer shaders are pretty flat looking. Many people avoid specular for example because although there is an energy conserving mode, the specular don't currently obey fresnel properties so they can look good one minute, but at the next minute look too powerful or vice versa.
Since we also have no ambient specular on any shaders yet, then when we are not driving into the sun with our incorrect specular currently, we have no ambient reflections which further hurts the apparent realism.

Hopefully with these new shaders we can get things looking right and get that extra sparkle that seems to be missing in current Racer shaders/materials

When the Racer graphics engine all changed a lot of techniques were still all new in the real-time rendering realm but in the last 3 years or so most game developers have really refined good processes and systems for lighting and that is what Stereo and I are trying to implement here really.

Obviously Racer isn't THAT bad. Racer is very good imo. Roggel is generally a very nice little track. All the ingredients are there.
Hopefully with just some shader updates and extra texture information it'll look even better and add that sparkle you feel to be missing

Dave