Racer v0.8.14 is out

[Ruud]

Is it Friday? Yes, so v0.8.14 is here.
Get it at http://www.racer.nl/dl_beta_win.htm

Changes:

• Shaders fixed for ATI cards again, so it should run again on that. No shadowmap filtering though; the ATI path doesn't support for-loops, nor PCF for depth filtering. Cg shaders are compiled with '-DATI' when running an ATI card (#ifdef ATI).
• Tracked & Modeler recompiled for new fmodex.dll
• Modeler/DOFFix's model optimize now also try to optimize submaterials (Multisub materials where only 1 submaterial is really used). Needed for Swiss Stroll's .dof files.
• CSM now uses PCF correctly (nVidia only, ATI doesn't seem to support free PCF)
• Flares reworked a bit regarding visibility, which was with respect to the camera direction, now a view vector from camera->flare. Billboarding keeps normal and direction, to avoid wide flares (like for a 3rd brakelight) to rotate wrt the underlying brakelight geometry.
• All shaders now render into 1 render target (RT). This had an effect on bloom though, so the bloom brightness pass was modified (in data/renderer/fullscreen_shaders_hdr/bloom_bright_f.cg).This also fixes problems with blending materials, although the shaders will all need to output the base texture's alpha to work correctly when blending.
• AI didn't reset correctly with Shift-R (it would try to start driving immediately)
• AI throttle playing before the start is improved
• Fixed standard_bump*.cg shadow generation, which was non-existant
• Added 'graph step' variables: susp0.piston_velocity, damper_force, arb_force and length to visualize damper behavior.
• Sky shaders now 'stick' the Z coordinate to the far plane. This alleviates the need for an internal very far projection matrix, so no projection matrix switching takes place while rendering the scene.
• Using 2 layers for sky shaders with both layers set to 'depthfunc=always' didn't work correctly and was drawn in 2 passes instead of 1. Fixed (and used in Carlswood_NT).
• Added shader 'cast_shadow' global option. If set to 1, any geometry with this shader is skipped during the shadow generation phase (so it won't cast a shadow in the final render).

 

[QuadCoreMax]

@boomer541

Thx for precising the replay issue + the sparks/crash sounds. Would be perfect to record replays with 3 screens on, still I know what it means it terms of HDD space.

Like you, I would like to know if something like in Crytek is doable ? I mean the shader needs to be tweaked for sure, but what about colliding with it ?

We should theoretically dive & some after/post-process effect should be then triggered & rendered into screen space. Maybe Ruud could code the whole as a new object which has its own properties & functions, giving us more control over it. One way could be introducing fluids or blob meshes into Racer, but I doubt it will easy to implement, since they using complex solvers...Been doing some dynamics experiences with custom made hydro-turbines in Maya, so could be fun....

This could be also used with rain, where we would have nice animations on the windshield simulating the water moving realistically...In my mind, there's no limit, everything is theoretically possible.

Thx for the Baja file !

 

[alex2thedeath]

I have an older 256mb ati radeon 9600 (pixel and vertex shader 2.0) when i play the cg versions all i can see is a black screen, but the rear-view mirror works fine and i can see all the textures through it...ironically...and i get about 40fps...what should i do to make the textures appear. Thanx for your time and, I would appeciate if you could give me an answer.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Hmmm, well my decals seem to receive shadows on the track now.

Just the standard_tree_v/f doesn't seem to be working now, my grass planes appear to be lit depending on their facing normal, with one side a different illumination level to the non-culled side... is that to do with the normal, or something in the culling process?


Ah, cast_shadow=0 disables shadow casting, I think the changelog is misleading there




No FPS boost here for me, and the shadows look less sharp, and seem to have artefacts all over the surface of my track when the car is a long way away from a track cam, like a fine mesh pattern. Not massively noticeable but it's there and looks odd!

Imo, for all round nice looks and no weirdness, the last version that looked best out of the box was 0.8.12... smooth split blends and no odd effects etc... hmmmm


Thanks

Dave

 

[Alex Forbin]

Does anyone know if engine smoke has been enabled yet? I know it is in the particle.ini, but I haven't seen any documentation on it yet.

Alex Forbin

 

[cepwin]

Thx QuadCoreMax!! I looked at the ini files and the logitech stuff and yes, what I needed to do is create a logitech profile as I do for ISI and SimBin products. That seems to have solved the problem. Also I've gotten into and out of the sim a number of times with no problems so it messing up my 'puter must have been a one-off. The only issue I'm having is add-on cars without "ghost" cars seem to crash the sim when I get out of a driving session. The lambo has no such issue and goes back to the menu as it should.
Thanks again!

 

[luthobu]

Managed to get mirrors and light to work, somewhat. Attached is an image
and a "basic" ini that should work with both cg and no-cg. If it does not
work for you, then tweak it. Flames and comments are ignored, it is just
a possible solution for those who are not too good at tweaking Racer.

EDIT: Optimized for ATI x600

 

[2o6]

 

[Mingus]

Managed to get mirrors and light to work, somewhat. Attached is an image
and a "basic" ini that should work with both cg and no-cg. If it does not
work for you, then tweak it. Flames and comments are ignored, it is just
a possible solution for those who are not too good at tweaking Racer.

EDIT: Optimized for ATI x600

Hey luthobu, I tried your ini and it works. I can now play the cg-version, thanks for that. But as you can see on the pics, the quality is horrible... The model is far far from smooth. I tried to tweak it a bit, but I don't know if I can change that, if i can. Any ideas? I have an ATI X1600 128mb...

I also got another error about the audio (see pic) I have to disable it before I can play. But playing without sound isn't really playing...

Btw: does anyone know if it is possible to open racer using wine without Terminal on mac?

 

[luthobu]

@mingus: glad it worked for you. Don't know why your graphics looks messed up.
It took me several hours to tweak the ini to get it to work without looking bad,
so all I can say is don't give up. The default ini, and even my 0813 ini were
useless, and this is so far the best I have been able to do. Sky is still wrong,
but camsinny suggested that "CG skies need a certain skydome to work properly"
so I can't really fix that in the ini. Also the environment rendering is absent for
some reason.. anyway.. good luck with your tweaking, it might just be a matter
of settings..

EDIT:

A great HURRAH to Ruud for 1. fixing tracked, 2. making the default track shaders
compatible with lvl2 GPUs. Also I apologize most humbly for claiming that 0814 is useless,
it is all in the tweaking.. (though no-cg is basically and partially broken).

I updated FTT with the latest tracked to CG and adjusted the shaders a bit,
and copied the sky dof/textures/shaders from carlswood. Works fine.

See attachment for (my) first stage / first attempt to do CG shaders (yeah, yeah..
it is not top notch.. but give me some time will'ya.. )

 

[boomer541]

I forgot to add the water cg file in my post on page 2 for those interested. It's there now.

My Surfaces and Sounds track is in the download thread with good sky. There are two or more ways to make good skies.
You can make a box and texture it with a panoramic image either .jpg or .tga, both work.
A better way and the way I did it on S&S was to make a hemisphere and texture it with a panoramic image. A .jpg day photo of the actual area. I should post a pcture of the U/V. Then in racers shaders I set up to use day/night and it worked.

If using only the carlswood shader there will be no darkining of the night sky.

Oh, Hell why don't I just update my sky tutorial that I posted on RSC a long time ago!

Done, it's in the download thread! Enjoy!

 

[Mr Whippy]

From what I remember, Ruud said a dome is ideal, since the verts are used for something, rather than a 5 sided box (ie, a cube with no bottom)

I prefer the cube method with a more efficient UVW layout personally, since you can improve the pixel count and get a sharper sky for the same max texture size (4096x4096)

However, I'm thinking now that using a dome with no texture is best, then have the clouds textured onto polygonal planes, and thus have much nicer detail in them... not tested it yet, but it'd get those really nice quality clouds like GT5... right now even a 4096x1024 hemisphere texture is far from enough pixels to have a really nice looking sky it seems

Dave

 

[Some1]

Fixed standard_bump*.cg shadow generation, which was non-existant

No, you didn't. I'm not getting any shadows on materials using dyn_standard_bump_speca_v.cg and dyn_standard_bump_speca_f.cg.

 

[2o6]

No cg for me still means no shaders.

 

[FiftyOrange]

Time of day settings seem really bad in these recent versions (well, the two I've tested) and some seem to have no effect on the light that's being reflected on/from the car at all.

 

[boomer541]

TOD is really a mess as it does not reflect the real world that we see when we look outside at various times. Late/early in the day the lighting is too dark and the middle of the night the view lightens up, not real!

Perhaps if we had a curve file where we could set to light levels for time 0000 to 2400 would help.

Mr. Whippy, A dome with no texture will create a Qlog error! The use of cg shaders will allow a different texture image to be applied to the sky dome. That's how I did my S&S track sky.

 

[Ruud]

Just a question though, does any of this impact the shadow recieving capabilities of decals on track surfaces?

I think that should work, as all shaders now don't need to save alpha in the destination Render Target anymore, but rather calculate shadow on the fly and apply it there & then. Do you still see problems?

 

[Mr Whippy]

I think that should work, as all shaders now don't need to save alpha in the destination Render Target anymore, but rather calculate shadow on the fly and apply it there & then. Do you still see problems?

They are working great here now Ruud, thanks!

Just the tree shader now, "up normal" doesn't seem to give even lighting with cull=0... hmmm

Dave

 

[Mr Whippy]

TOD is really a mess as it does not reflect the real world that we see when we look outside at various times. Late/early in the day the lighting is too dark and the middle of the night the view lightens up, not real!

Perhaps if we had a curve file where we could set to light levels for time 0000 to 2400 would help.

Mr. Whippy, A dome with no texture will create a Qlog error! The use of cg shaders will allow a different texture image to be applied to the sky dome. That's how I did my S&S track sky.

I think the problem is that TOD is set by Ruud and is fixed, but if we had curves we could define this ourselves.

A current issue is that it is neither using a high dynamic range and using exposure control to even it out, nor is it using normalised values because there is still some day time procession intensity change.

I'd either like to see normalised values (so overall intensity looks the same over the day, ie, a white matte ball is just whiting out all the time the sun is up in the sky), and have a second value to suggest the "intensity" at that TOD for the use by shaders such as headlights and their flares (so their intensities are scaled back in the 'bright' daytime, and intensified on a night time)

OR

have more real values, so the night time is an intensity of say 0.1 > 1, and the sunniest summer day is say 50,000 as per real life!


All that really matters is the contrasts and relative levels, so we get the right scene balance between sun/sky/clouds etc, and of course, the flares/headlights issue which will have to scale if we use normalised values... I was rubbing down my white/grey/black balls at the weekend, and doing some test shots.

It's interesting to see the colour and light balances with respect to the appearance of the sky/clouds/sun etc... so I'll be sure to start posting them up in a new thread as reference and also show me trying to match the real to the virtual ones in Racer

Downsides are it's gone all cloudy and overcast here in the UK now, and we need sunny skies for Racer

Dave

 

[Some1]

A summary of issues/bugs I have found in beta 14:
- I can't really change the brightness of the light flares. They are always a little transparent even if the alpha is all-white? If I want bright flares I have to add one more flare at the same location.
- Setting the ambient/diffuse in special.ini doesn't affect the lighting if TOD is activated. They are just the initial settings. WE NEED CUSTOM TOD CURVES (or whatever way of defining the lighting at a specific time of day)!
- The shadow frustum doesn't follow SMD cameras. If the car has a fixed chase cam, the frustum is following the direction of the camera, but if the car has a SMD chase cam, then the frustum is fixed at some direction and often a lower res shadow split dist is too close to the camera.
- Shader "dyn_standard_bump_speca_f.cg" doesn't receive shadow.
- CSM: Blending between cascades would be nice.

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'm still fairly certain that reflections are being added incorrectly.

Since it's not sunny here I can't get some decent imagery, but I will do (fixed camera settings so ignoring exposure), and prove that it looks wrong

The dark side of cars seem to have darker reflections, even of equally evenly lit things on the floor for example.

Ie, the floor is evenly lit around the car, yet on the dark side (1030 am TOD), a black reflective car is showing the floor about 3-4x darker than the lit side. Surely that shouldn't happen on a black car, as the sun will have no influence on the illumination of the black, so it is pure reflection of the environment (which is equal around the car)


Hmmmm

Looking at fresnel.cg it feels right, maybe the default fresnel values are bad?!

Dave