Racer v0.8.34 released

[Ruud]

Racer v0.8.34 is out! Get it at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0.8.34.7z (48Mb, note the 7z extension; you'll need 7-zip from http://www.7-zip.org ).

Enjoy!
Ruud

Changes:
- Bugfix: Director cam didn't work
- Bugfix: Rain didn't affect grip (snow did)
- ENet upgraded to v1.3.3 (small change to avoid unreliable packet regression, and disconnect fix)
- Added input limiters for Pacejka curves for slipangle/ratio/camber/load (see data/cars/default/car.ini)
(wheel<n>.pacejka.slipangle_min/max etc); see http://www.racer.nl/reference/pacejka.htm#inputsoutputs
- Bugfix: Replay was never painted; no camera was defined.
- Bugfix: particles in replays were not animated in reverse mode. Now they are (although not entirely correct)
- Turning AI on while offroad would cause a crash.
- Added ai.spring_factor in car.ini to add some magic forces to keep the car on track (use 'ai scale' for example
to add some speed to the AI line; check out 'ai save' and such).
- CurvEd import of ASCII txt and CSV added.
- CurvEd imports were buggy (zero) if more than 50 points were imported.
- Added textures.stub in racer.ini to optionally load a single texture for every loaded shader; useful
when testing mipmapping (if you're using mipmaps effectively, see http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/stub_textures.htm)
- Added data/images/texture_stub.dds as a default images for the feature above
- Added dev.fast_fade in racer.ini to allow quick fades while developing
- Added wheel roadnoise filtering to simulate rubber; see http://www.racer.nl/reference/wheels.htm
- Added ai.rc_factor in car.ini to be able to help AI if you give it a high grip_factor as well. See http://www.racer.nl/reference/carphys.htm#ai
- Added ai.cg_factor in car.ini to lower effective CG height to help AI drive faster through turns without flipping.
See also http://www.racer.nl/reference/carphys.htm#ai
- susp_implicit_integration now set to 0 for explicit physics. It seems stable for F1 cars with tire_damping,
and the implicit method creates buggy load values in the tires.
- Added ghost.update_if_loaded (defaults to true) to determine whether to update the ghost lap (if you're faster),
even if you've explicitly loaded one with ghost.load.
- Materials without names in DOF files used to get the exact texture name (ie 'body.tga'). The extension is now cut, so it'd become 'body').

 

[Mr Whippy]

Nice updates there...

I like the stub texture to see mip-mapping level, will be clear now if people are running huge textures for no real reason most of the time!

Also like the tyre filtering for Fy due to contact points vs patches is nice... I'm hoping that this has been the missing link in FF feel being more natural feeling and damped rather than very 'quick' when utilising more bumpy surfaces... (ie, realistic)


Look forward to testing, in a few weeks... last thing I need is a distraction right now!

Dave

 

[AMGfan(BPM)]

I never used body.tga in dof material names. BTW, it worked fine

thanks for update, I will try it later!

 

[Ruud]

I never used body.tga in dof material names. BTW, it worked fine
thanks for update, I will try it later!

Indeed, normally you wouldn't; I found my Fer312 (I still use it since it loads so fast) had empty material names here & there. As a result, it would take the name of the first texture (body.tga). In that case, your shader would be shader_body.tga, which I'm not sure is even possible (with the '.').

 

[Raphael Buthmann]

Ruud , why racer don't use all the cores of my core quad ? This is the fourth time that I asked lol.

Thanks , Buthmann

 

[QuadCoreMax]

I like the stub texture to see mip-mapping level, will be clear now if people are running huge textures for no real reason most of the time!

It depends what's your perspective, sometimes you may pack single textures/UVs into a grid of textures to boost time & files amount...Could be useful for further custom extended Cg shaders programming.

Ruud , why racer don't use all the cores of my core quad ? This is the fourth time that I asked lol...

It should work & here's my racer ini 0.8.32 settings :

process
{
  ; Dualcore/multicore options (Windows only)
  ; CPU affinity mask; 0=all CPU's, 1=CPU 0, 2=CPU 1, 3=CPU0 & CPU1 etc.
  ; Setting this to use only 1 CPU may help on some fast machine that give (s)low framerates
  cpu_affinity_mask=0
  ; Main thread affinity mask; must be a subset of 'cpu_affinity_mask'
  ; The main thread does controls, basic timing, graphics (although the graphics driver may spawn its own thread)
  ; When using physics.async=1, you can control the cores directly using the thread affinity masks
  ; If you don't understand process and thread masks, it's better to stay away from these settings
  main_thread_affinity_mask=0
}
physics
{
  ; Run physics asynchronously? (multithreaded).
  ; Only works nicely on multi-core systems.
  ; Single processor machines may experience fluctuating performance.
  ; Do not set this to 1 for multiview slaves (enforced in software)
  ; Alpha functionality; not be to be trusted yet.
  async=0
  ; Run on which cores? (a subset of process.cpu_affinity_mask) - 0=all cores
  thread_affinity_mask=2
  tracks
  {
    ; Use road_noise from special.ini? (default 1, which means it is used)
    use_road_noise=1
  }
}

===============================

The AI improvements will be surely much useful since most of the time, one of the best debugging method still remains AI driving the whole on 'splined' tracks & checking manually/visually the debug screens for some errors in physics calculations.

The director cam fix is welcome & I do hope, it works as excepted.

Cool updates on racer.nl official docs !

 

[QuadCoreMax]

Plus :

- tyres marks/skids seems to be improved (visually)
- fps increase ~ 5 fps / +10% on async => smoother playing
- editors update => faster loadings

Minus :

- minimap when tweaking minimap y position in racer.ini => car(s) aren't aligned to the spline/minimap
- movables issue => doesn't seem to work anymore ? same for replay ...
- some debug screens not calculating in replay mode
- disco cam fix ? still that weird behavior...=> too fast interpolations keyframes / sometimes it doesn't even focus on the car...
- tod / light / cg changes ? atmosphere doesn't feel like the 2 older versions...

@Ruud :

Please check Racer on surround systems, there's some little fixes to do :

- in garage, the black transition effect occurring doesn't happen on all 3 screens, only the middle one
- the painting of text with fonts via scripts duplicates the whole 2 times on 2 different screens

Thanks

============================
Surround System ~
4 MegaPixels / 3 x 19" screens
G25 / G15
XP Sp3
2x ATI 4670 ~ 1.5 GB

 

[Raphael Buthmann]

When I play with 4 ai cars at carlswood and I open Nvidia Inspector , my gpu has just 26 % of GPU Usage , and CPU ~35% .
Racer is bottlenecking my CPU and My GPU. /=

 

[Cosmo°]

Thanks for the update Ruud Still testing things, but I'm wondering: the wheel noise filter only applies to road noise, ie track surface definition and not 3D mesh information? I can see where this is significant on sensitive high end platform hardware and when users mainly work on flat race environments. For us, I think we're often driving over speedbumps, potholes and doing the odd experiments driving vehicles over rocks or up a set of stairs - so mesh detection/wheel collision would possibly be preferred in those cases.



edit: Two more things - thanks a lot for letting us move the camera in pause mode, finally That's very useful for setup work indeed.

Then, I wonder what you think is missing from Dave's updated Murcielago to be included as the default car in Racer? The original version is quite outdated and not as accurate, whereas the new version can actually be used as a guideline and reference since it uses up to date parameters and techniques.

 

[boomer541]

Worked quite nicely right out of the box, but as usual I've found a few bugs.

no dust in replays from dirt/grass and the color of dust is bad on carlswood.

I drove the Lambo over to get a closer look at the trees on carlswood and they are the worst trees I've seen. Very poor textures. I also noted that there was bit of dust coming from the Lambo wheels with it stopped. Closer inspection showed the rear whell rotating foward and the front wheels rotating backwards. WTF.

Making an avi video works ok.

I also had problems with movables in replay, ran over a cone that was no longer there. hmmm.

Background avi fails to run and gives Qlog error.

In the racer.ini file - what is texture damage?? Are we about to have damage on cars/tracks?

What about info about using traffic?

Thanks Ruud for the update

 

[Alexander Knoll]

hmm....THX Ruud for the Update....feels over all well.
öhm...what is this **OVERRUN DETECTED** witch comes with near all cars i try on top of screen? There is no QLog with any infos...
and what is wrong with the brake balance?

Sat Jul 09 13:17:50 (WARN): [racer/5504] Car 'Lamborghini Murcielago' braking factor of all the wheels don't average out to 0.5 per wheel (now: 1.0000); brake balance is not correctly setup like this

@Cosmo° the "standard_hlight_f.cg" (you need it for Daves Lambo) is also not included.....

 

[EngineOfDarkness]

I guess i found out when the racer process doesn't close on my system (Windows 7 x64, all current updates including SP1):

Start Racer -> End Racer (process closes)
Start Racer -> Start Free Race -> Exit Race -> Exit Racer (process does not close)

Now when I switch from cpu_affinity_mask=0 to cpu_affinity_mask=1 it closes correctly every time, even after I stop a race. Maybe theres a thread which doesn't stop correctly?

Haven't changed any physics related settings or thread related settings (other than the one I mentioned above from the default 0 to 1)

Reducing racer to only use 1 core doesn't seem to be a problem for me as long as I drive without any AI (or something else which would cause more cpu power to be utilized), cause the first core barely reaches 50% of actual usage and Fps doesn't suffer for me in this situation.

 

[Raphael Buthmann]

I guess i found out when the racer process doesn't close on my system (Windows 7 x64, all current updates including SP1):

Reducing racer to only use 1 core doesn't seem to be a problem for me as long as I drive without any AI (or something else which would cause more cpu power to be utilized), cause the first core barely reaches 50% of actual usage and Fps doesn't suffer for me in this situation.

Try to play racer with high polycount and you'll see my point. lol

 

[boomer541]

Ah, yes dds images! Something I understand Microsoft came up with but doesn't supply an image converter!!!

Tried downloading a couple of converters using Google but they didn't work! Does anyone have a link to a good simple converter to go from various image formats to dds and back?

 

[camsinny]

What are you using to alter/author the images that you want to convert?

Pretty sure GIMP has a plugin of some sort to do it and I know Photoshop has one (from NVIDIA)

You're best to use something in a program like either of them as opposed to a standalone that'll just dump out a tga or png. My 2c anyway.

Gimp: http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/
Photoshop: http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop

 

[Alexander Knoll]

Ruud Tracked give me a error when i try to split a track....

OS-Version: 6.1.7601 (Service Pack 1) 0x100-0x1

0x76FE34F6 [ntdll]: (filename not available): RtlImageNtHeader
0x76FE3472 [ntdll]: (filename not available): RtlImageNtHeader
0x74F414DD [kernel32]: (filename not available): HeapFree
0x00617CED f:\dd\vctools\crt_bld\self_x86\crt\src\free.c (line 110): free()
0x00507793 d:\source\trunk\dev\src\libs\qlib\qstring.cpp (line 288): qstring::Free()
0x005085F6 d:\source\trunk\dev\src\libs\qlib\qstring.cpp (line 367): qstring::operator=()
0x004392DD [tracked]: (filename not available): TrackSplitter::FindMaterials
0x00439F50 [tracked]: (filename not available): TrackSplitter::Split
0x0043A218 [tracked]: (filename not available): SplitTrack
0x0042B712 [tracked]: (filename not available): event
0x005D5ED3 d:\source\trunk\dev\src\libs\license\qapp.cpp (line 931): QApp::Run1()
0x005D5FA8 d:\source\trunk\dev\src\libs\license\qapp.cpp (line 969): QApp::Run()
0x0042CE65 [tracked]: (filename not available): Run
0x00425148 [tracked]: (filename not available): main
0x00425223 [tracked]: (filename not available): WinMain
0x00616402 f:\dd\vctools\crt_bld\self_x86\crt\src\crt0.c (line 263): __tmainCRTStartup()
0x74F433CA [kernel32]: (filename not available): BaseThreadInitThunk
0x76FE9ED2 [ntdll]: (filename not available): RtlInitializeExceptionChain
0x76FE9EA5 [ntdll]: (filename not available): RtlInitializeExceptionChain

 

[boomer541]

I don't use gimp, Paint Shop Pro instead, but thanks for trying. Just a simple converter would satisfy me. I had one a long time ago that worked ok but lost it when my computer crashed. Got an external hard drive for backups to prevent that sort of thing again.

Noted that generic suspensions is still not fixed to allow trailling link suspensions with two forward mounting points as is used on the Hillman Imp. How about it Ruud?

Modified the info page for stub dds images. I first tried a tga and got strange results, finally reread the readme and noted the .dds image in the image folder. Attached is the page for anyone that wants it and Ruud can use it also.

 

[Alexander Knoll]

I don't use gimp, Paint Shop Pro instead, but thanks for trying. Just a simple converter would satisfy me. I had one a long time ago that worked ok but lost it when my computer crashed. Got an external hard drive for backups to prevent that sort of thing again.

Noted that generic suspensions is still not fixed to allow trailling link suspensions with two forward mounting points as is used on the Hillman Imp. How about it Ruud?

Modified the info page for stub dds images. I first tried a tga and got strange results, finally reread the readme and noted the .dds image in the image folder. Attached is the page for anyone that wants it and Ruud can use it also.

here you go^^
Stand alone tool, freeware....

http://eliteforce2.filefront.com/file/DDS_Converter;29412

 

[Alex Forbin]

I also had problems with movables in replay, ran over a cone that was no longer there. hmmm.


In the racer.ini file - what is texture damage?? Are we about to have damage on cars/tracks?

What about info about using traffic?

Thanks Ruud for the update

Confirmed on the movables, they don't move or reset in the replays.

I'm curious about the damage textures and traffic too.

Alex Forbin

 

[boomer541]

I found two dds converters, irfanview and x2y. Irfanview only converts from dds but x2y converts in both directions along with many other formats. Both don't convert dds images with alpha channels, the DXT format dds images with alpha. Both can be found with Google, took me a couple of hours trying to find one that worked.

I'll try the one linked by Alexander Knoll. My opinion of dds images can't be posted!! Thanks for the help guys!

I tried converting a 12000 tga image used on Mugello down to about a 2000 dds and found no change in fps. I guess the only advantage of using them is to save graphics card memory. That is the reason you need a gpu with a lot of memory so you don't need to use those dumd dds images. Just my opinion!