Hello. It has been ages. Errr... Help?

[loungekid]

Greetings, i haven't been in touch with Racer for a long time. I signed in using my old username from RSC, but i don't know if anyone will remember me, it has been so long.

I see that it is all the way up to v0.8.33 now! Looks like lots of new fiddly bits to play with.

My question in a very basic sense, is just how much trouble is it going to be to get the cars i built back in the day, to work properly in 0.8.33? The last version that i had updated to was, i believe, v0.5.3.beta5, though most of my other cars were i think 0.5.3beta2 or so.

I have not yet even looked at the new car.ini or shaders. Or any of the documentation for the new bits. When i do look, what should i note, and what should i expect to have to address to bring my 0.5.3beta5 cars in?

Thanks for whatever info you can provide!

-chris

 

[Harey]

Wow, I recognized your name like instantly. Is good to see an old user returning though.

Well the car.ini shouldn't be that hard to bring up to speed, but the car.shd might be a bit fiddly. I think the new CG shaders are a little easier to understand then the old ones, but that's just me.

ps. I remember your Jag Mk2, used to drive that thing a lot, wouldn't mind seeing a new version of it.

 

[loungekid]

Howdy!

Man, that Jaguar was the first car i made from scratch. Someday i would love to make a nicer one.

Probably i would start with trying to get this one working though, as it is probably the closest to graphically complete of all my old cars:



That is of course, if i can actually figure out how to make it work right in the new version!

-chris

 

[boomer541]

In the car.ini file there was a change for COG. Can't remember exactly what it was now but will look at my files.

Look in the http://www.racedepartment.com/racer-physics-technical/ thread for some good info on updating to ver 0.090.

And I do remember you, welcome back!

 

[Alex Forbin]

Greetings, i haven't been in touch with Racer for a long time. I signed in using my old username from RSC, but i don't know if anyone will remember me, it has been so long.

I see that it is all the way up to v0.8.33 now! Looks like lots of new fiddly bits to play with.

Thanks for whatever info you can provide!

-chris

Hey Chris, welcome back.

I remember you as well, hopefully we will see more of the old gang show up.

There is indeed a lot of new toys to play with in Racer now, here's a few off the top of my head...

1. New pacejka 5.2 compatibility. (feels great)
2. New HDRI shaders (awesomeness) a bit of a learning curve if you want to make your own cg shaders. But otherwise easy.
3. The COG is now truely independent of the cars point of origin. (long standing bug killed)
4. New physics engine (Newton) it really made a difference in collisions AND we have some new options.
5. Cars now need a collision hull which is just a VERY basic, super low poly shell (.dof) that tells Racer your cars impact zone.
6. Projecting headlights (night racing is a lot more fun when you have lights) you can define your own pattern and colors too.
7. Reverse lights are actual models now.
8. Scripting which allows us to make some really cool add-ons ourselves e.g. auto-trans, opening doors, pop-up headlights...
9. New particle system. smoke/sparks/debris...
10. Tires now have low/high speed damping.
11. Dampers now can be defined using a curve just like the torque.crv so you can have non-linear dampers.
12. The same applies to wheel rates as well.
13. True IK characters. No more frozen fishsticks behind the wheel. (still very new, so examples are coming, ask Quadcoremax)
14. Interactive objects, so now you can send the haybales flying.

There's a lot more but that should get you started, it's really not as bad as it sounds.
One thing you really need to know is you need to update your car.ini to show that the car is ver 090 compatible or it just won't
load at all.

Alex Forbin

 

[aadilf1]

(Slightly off-topic)

Wow not even i knew Racer had all those features O.O, Is anyone planning on making a car that has body deformation?

 

[foxo]

Welcome back, mate! Pleasure to see, that people still don't forget racer

 

[dangar]

(Slightly off-topic)

Wow not even i knew Racer had all those features O.O, Is anyone planning on making a car that has body deformation?

Well, there are several cars that can include damaged meshes (all from San Andreas, or Forza), but... how can we activate in racer, when collision occurs?

Any hint will be welcome!

 

[Alex Forbin]

The only part we really need is what is called "soft body deformation" there has been talk about including it in Newton which is what Racer now uses for it's physics engine. I've been asking for this for literally years (about 6 or 7), we DON'T want "canned" damage where the car is modeled at different levels of damage and then the models are swapped out depending on how hard it hits something, this simply looks awful.
The only way to do it right is to let Racer calculate the force of impact and move the affected vertices appropriately based on material/angle/force.

Alex Forbin

 

[loungekid]

Ah! Sounds like lots of things i have to read about!

Thanks for the detailed breakdown Alex, and thanks everyone else too!

I don't have as much time as i once did to do this stuff, but i will try to get back into it a bit anyhow!

-chris

----------------

Another question. What are typical poly counts up to these days for cars, wheels, etc.?

When i left i was still keeping them 8-10k for bodies, but the trend was seeming to climb considerably above that, even then.

-chris

 

[aadilf1]

Cant wait, Rigs of Rods has awesome soft body

 

[Mr Whippy]

Poly-count, I'd still say as low as you can get away with is best

Basically, when you can't tell you have added more polygons, then they are still a waste.

I think 50k for a car is tops, maybe 5k for an interior that you see from outside, and maybe 2k a wheel that LOD down quite quickly. Remember you see a car mainly in replays only, and generally quite a distance from the car. Nice to have lots of up-close details for screenshots, but then if you don't have a nice looking model for 'normal' replays and exterior game-play, it's just gonna cost you fps and memory still.

Interior, about 50k too, since you turn off wheels/exterior in this view, and are very close to it all the time, may as well look very nice.


I'd much much rather see more detail go into tracks, than much more into cars, and that goes for all games.

Just my 2p anyway, interior view and the track are where investment needs to go these days. NFS Shift2 for example has really nice interiors, but the tracks are a bit poor, and the outside views of the cars are actually rather pants!

Your old 911 looks better in replays imo

Dave

 

[loungekid]

Wow, 50k is a massive amount. One could do quite a bit with that many. Though, i suppose that if realtime soft deformations of the mesh are planned/possible, the more polys available, the better, to some degree, for a more realistic crumpling result.

And thanks for the compliment on my 911. From certain angles(and about twenty feet away!) i do feel that it looks better than perhaps it really is! You have a copy of that one, from the old days still? I vaguely recall sending you one? Did it have the DR DRIFT interior pasted in and the blurred wheels on at that point?

You know, it just occurred to me that i actually have no idea if Zmodeler will run under Windows Vista. That might make things interesting!

Also, it looks like i am going to have to learn an awful lot about the new shader system. It may just be that i am out of practice, but the old one made lots of sense to me; the new one somewhat less so, so far anyhow.

 

[KS95]

The new one (shaders) is a lot simplier, I find, you just have to understand how it works in comparision to the old system.

Zmod does work under vista, although for me it doesn't display properly when I draw polys (polies?)..

Welcome back

 

[Alex Forbin]

Cant wait, Rigs of Rods has awesome soft body

I agree, the '49 ford is the best. Truly impressive.

Alex Forbin

 

[MitchBomcanhao]

this is my kind of thread old timers asking for ways to get back on track heheh after a while without even having a computer that can run racer, I feel tempted to get something going again...

 

[Alex Forbin]

this is my kind of thread old timers asking for ways to get back on track heheh after a while without even having a computer that can run racer, I feel tempted to get something going again...

Welcome back Mitch! You'll find a lot of new things to play with but feedback from Ruud has pretty sparse for a couple of months now. If you get stuck on something just give a shout.

Alex Forbin

 

[nuvolarossa]

Hello, I'm another old user back from racesimcentral days. It's nice to see how racer has gone forward and it's still nicer to read some old names around here.
I see that racer.nl website is offline, this is because they're moving to the new facility?
By the way I find difficult for a new comer to understand something in this nightmare of old cars, usual different download source and you'll find different ini, a lot of the cars aren't ready for betas or cg. I remember there was a shader thread in rsc where all updated shaders were posted. Is there something like that?


Another question, I remember a forum section with tutorials, it was in rsc or it was here too?
I remember good tutorials about track building!

In the old times I liked to work on .inis (I love mechanics, I'm more a "realistic feel and reaction" guy than car's looks) and I did some car conversions (with permissions) in past but lost all the work in a HDD crash years ago, now I would like to build one or two real road tracks...
could someone point me to the right direction? especially since I never built something for Cg shaders, I missed all this

I'm importing GEarth data (layout) into BTB, and I can use 3dsmax too, but I need info on the racer's specific stuff, settings, conf files etc. because the site is down.

I'll need a bit of time to read about these new betas and their new "hidden" settings too!

 

[Mr Whippy]

For a good car (in my opinion anyway) check the Lambo Murcielago I updated for the latest betas. I originally imported it into Racer from Deyan's original artwork, so it's had a really good (within reason) update.

Unfortunately it hasn't made it to the general Racer releases yet (to replace the old Lambo Murcielago which is really pants now)

You can grab it at:
gowhippy.com/racer/lamborghini_murcielago_v2.0.zip


Opinions will vary, but it gives you a nice idea of minimum expectations for Racer now. Has a nice layout for colour changes, a nice layout in the car.ini, uses nested settings for the gearbox so you can easily swap to different gearboxes, uses the ini.exe to great use for configs and stuff.

I've tried to be as innovative as possible within the time I had.

My next car/track will be even more awesome... but it'll be Christmas before I can get them out due to other commitments.



I also think the Tatra is a good car to learn from, very 'complete' from a 'what is racer now capable of' point of view!

Dave

 

[Alex Forbin]

Hello, I'm another old user back from racesimcentral days. It's nice to see how racer has gone forward and it's still nicer to read some old names around here.
I see that racer.nl website is offline, this is because they're moving to the new facility?

Welcome back nuvolarossa
Yeah, it would have been nice if Ruud had given us a heads up that the main site would be down, and possibly for how long.
I'm a BTB user as well, it's a great tool even if Racer support is somewhat lacking. Tracks are something we can't get enough of.

Alex Forbin