OK, I just tried this version and it loaded first time.
Visually at least I'm still concerned by the mix of sky systems we have at present.
- The new background sky itself, which houses the sun spot and dome colourings and intensity, is not editable with the TOD curves or special.ini settings. The only influence you can have upon it is the time/lat/long and the sun diffuse colour TOD curves. There is no way to impact the sky's three fundamental tunable parameters, rayleigh, mie and extinction amount (colour tinting, diffusion of the sun spot, size of the sun spot etc) This was possible in the old Racer sky. I assume these parameters are now hard coded elsewhere in the sky rendering shaders, and the TOD parameters are not yet tied to these new variables.
- The old TOD settings impact the scene object extinction and scene object lighting completely, but now you end up tuning the settings there to match the fixed sky appearance, rather than the other way around. Ideally you'd set how the sky looks (we're half way there, just need mie, ray and extinction controls), and then everything would cascade down from there naturally and automatically.
- The current extinction/fog for scene objects seems overly bright in many situations, or the incorrect colour tint to what you expect. It blends well with the new sky rendering however, but how this occurs when the sky itself cannot have the mie/ray tuned isn't clear to me right now. I'm still thinking (need to look over the shaders to clarify) that the old mie/ray system is present and used for scene object extinction, and then the new sky system is also taking some of these parameters but not others, and rendering itself independently over the top again. This behaviour was evident in past Racer versions with the new sky system. It seems better here but it still feels like scene object extinctions are too intense and oddly coloured to me.
Car flares also seem to be not working, along with the projected headlights causing some bugs. Since an entire new z-depth system appears to be in these new beta versions I'm assuming that some old hard-coded shaders or rarely used ones (such as flares and projected headlights?) haven't been updated to the latest specifications.
This new sky system does seem fundamentally good as a basis. Side by side with the old one, it looks much more vividly coloured and 'real'
However getting the scene objects to light in response to it properly still seems a struggle. The fact the new sky is not properly tunable via mie/ray and extinction, and yet the old system seems to be running underneath still, I'd probably say that is the cause of most of the problems.
With this new system cleaned up and formalised it'd be a definite upgrade. More so if we could automate TOD diffuse rgb and ambient rgb values from the final rendered sky dome values!
I'm not too sure about any other problems yet.
The ATI issue is a shame. Comparing the renderer folders for a working version and a non-working version would be interesting.
It'd be great for some clarity from Ruud on if this is an accident or purposeful omission, and why.
Cheers
Dave
