Paul Jeffrey
Premium
The continual development of Live for Speed goes on - this time with previews of the upcoming day to night transitions in development for the simulation.
As many of our readers are probably already aware, the now classic Live for Speed racing simulation is having plenty of love and attention lavished on it behind the scenes, with a sizeable graphical update having been in the works for quite some time - designed to breathe new life into one of the oldest active racing simulations currently in use.
As part of this bid to graphically overhaul the game, the Live for Speed Development Team have been busy working on something that I think it would be fair to say most of us never expected to see happen - day to night transitions!
From the LFS forum post:
Thank you for your patience as it's been a long time since the July progress report.
We aren't ready for a full progress report but thought we could say a few words and show you a few things. Eric has been continuing with South City. It's a long job and he has worked more on the roads than the buildings so far. At this point he would rather wait until more buildings are done before showing screen shots.
I've been working on the sky darkness, automatic exposure and white balance that became necessary with the use of the realtime generated skies. The lighting is now separated into lights that are always on and others that only come on at night. I increased the possible intensity of lighting to allow floodlights to work.
I worked on a system to allow us to use realistic camera exposure settings to allow comparisons with photographs from digital cameras. In a manual exposure mode I can now set the ISO, f-stop and shutter speed. It is interesting to see the massive variation in the brightness and therefore the exposure required for a night shot and a day shot. For example a shot taken in street lighting may require around 4000 times the exposure compared with a day shot. A more extreme example is the difference between moonlight and sunlight. The sun is 400 thousand times brighter than a full moon, yet our eyes can adapt to see quite well at those extremes.
I haven't had to make LFS adapt so much but it does have to deal with bright sunlight down to typical street lighting scenes. There is more to be done and the lighting is far from perfect. Anyway I hope you like the attached screenshots and the youtube videos.
At this stage, as with the overall graphical improvements, we are not yet sure exactly when these changes will be introduced into the public build of the title... but the current state of progress is certainly impressive if these preview images are anything to go by..
