Racer v0.9.0 RC5 released

Ruud

RACER Developer
Get it at http://www.mediafire.com/file/zdn8i0kntl3h579/racer0.9.0_rc5b.7z
[URL edited at 16-11-2012, 17:07 for some bugfixes]
Get a racer.exe/pdb bugfix at from http://www.mediafire.com/file/ny6a8gju5oaracb/racer090rc5c_exe.7z (which fixes that braking with locked wheels would give extra force instead of less).

A note about the audio: a bit more is planned to add to audio. Mainly an extra 'noise' sounds for each surface when going off the AI line. Then there's also an idea to use understeer & oversteer values to select samples, instead of taking skid values per wheel, since understeer sounds different from oversteer. Experimental a bit though.

Enjoy!
Ruud

Changelist:
- Ctrl-I now inverts debug readout colors (it used to roll through the debug readout views)
- Onyx compiler improved with bugfixes, type-casting.
- Onyx pointers (hm).
- Onyx now supports float const ('const float x=0.5'), while, for and do-while.
- Onyx supports basic yielding of scripts (coroutines, triggered each frame).
- Onyx internal function abs(), sqrt() added.
- A default Cg shader is created for materials without an explicit shader. To avoid black materials.
- car.ini's now accept wheel<n>.pacejka.negate_camber. Some TIR files/coefficents out there
seem to reverse camber (inverting influence on Fy tire forces). This option inverts camber sign
as it goes into the Pacejka formulae.
- lighting.cg no longer adds Ks (specular) to the ambient term.
- .f32 file support for textures in .shd files; future development for sky colors.
- Added $water_reflection texture map for shaders, in the same way $mirror exists. This works with renderer.water.*
to render a mirror image of the scene into a 2D reflection map, which can be used for a water shader.
See also water_f.cg/water_v.cg in data/renderer/shaders.
To be elaborated.
- The default debug text color is now white again.
- Timing is passed to the Cg shaders in TrackEd for some animations.
- Explicit low LOD steering model removed; use the model LOD available for the regular model (steer.model) (in car.ini)
- Car cameras can explictly turn the steering wheel on or off (camera<n>.steering_wheel=0 or 1). The default is 1 (added to data/cars/default/car.ini).
See also http://www.racer.nl/reference/carphys.htm#campos
- Number of materials in a track raised to 6000 (from 4000) for some nasty import tracks.
- TrackEd's generate template shader generated '<unnamed_QObject>' for unloaded textures.
- Added engine.shifting.cut_ignition in car.ini; instead of cut_throttle=1, you can leave throttle open and cut
part of the ignition instead. A value of 0.5 for example will output 50% of engine torque to the clutch/gearbox/wheels,
so is smoother while shifting.
- Autoclutch during shifting linearized; it was now squared, making for a less smooth experience.
- New combined slip method for tire forces; #7. From Pacejka's book, the Similarity method. Does not require
optimal_slipratio and optimal_slipangle anymore. More info on http://www.racer.nl/reference/wheels.htm#tireforces
- When the tire left the surface, slip angle and ratio were reset to 0. This was not realistic for a bumpy surface,
since you lose a lot of traction when the tire is bouncing a bit. Now it keeps on tracking slipAngle/Ratio.
- Different fonts (Eurostile)
- Added dyn_standard_bump_ao_f/v.cg shaders for ambient occlusion map (much like the mix shaders really).
- After all these years, on Win7/64bits with 32-bits Racer, got PerfKit working with PerfKit v2.2.0.12166 from nVidia ('debug 6 1').
- Added 'float serverTime' uniform for Cg shaders to get (an estimate of) the multiplayer server time. To sync vertex shader effects across multiple PC's.
- Added active differentials basics using Onyx. See http://www.racer.nl/tutorial/differentials_active.htm
- Added a global 'lowpass' DSP option. Mainly used for testing for a future 'muffle' parameter per car to soften incar sounds.
- Added track audio per surface (in special.ini). If not defined, the default global surface type audio is used.
See http://www.racer.nl/reference/tracks_surfaces.htm

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

Bugs (currently known specific to RC5)
  • Gearbox shift times not working properly, step from 0 > 1 clutch position over the time rather than smooth linear transition.
  • Water reflection not rendering, needs clarification on functionality.
  • Qlog discrepancies (I'll let Boomer clarify those.
  • Odd console readouts about tyre slip angles or something popping up (same goes for gearbox manual/auto setting, doesn't need to be console displayed imo)
  • PerfSDK not working as advertised, broken?
  • Multiplayer joining to IP's seems glitched, the person joining has their brake stuck on and are unable to shift
  • The Multiplayer Lobby does not let you connect, and subsequently let you host, despite the right ports being forwarded. (Anyone else experiencing this bug?)
  • The particles pop-out of existence at the end of their specified lifetime instead of fading away smoothly. It would be nice to have some better control over the fade-in and out over the lifetime of the particle since tiresmoke starts out thick and opaque then disperses and becomes more transparent over time, while gravel or dirt fades in a bit at first then eventually fades away.
  • Smoke flickers in the reflections, as though it's missing every other frame.
  • Replay bugs: No smoke effects, ghost car is left on track.
  • The starter sound plays all the way to the end of the sample instead of stopping when you let off the starter.
  • Ghost doesn't work on endless tracks.
  • track special.ini: timeline.point_to_point=1, timeline.auto_return=0 - The auto_return setting doesn't seem to work here. I have a point to point track and the car resets 3000ms (3s) after crossing the finishing line, but I don't want it to.
  • No reflection in the Racer garage when selecting a car.
  • The unsprung weight apparently applies a downforce, try making a 150kg rear axle with the front
    suspension lighter and the car will act as though it has high downforce when jumping off of a ramp.
  • If the wipers are set to rotate in opposite directions then the intermittent position does not rotate back and forth smoothly. It snaps back.
  • In RC5c at least, the camera bug is still evident, and on Carlswood (spline based cameras) you can often get stuck so you can't get back to the in-car camera view which is really annoying! - Courtesy of Dave
 
There's a lot of problems indeed, Ruud should ONLY release stuff that is sufficiently debugged...I got weird issues, graphically talking...

Only cool stuff I discovered yesterday, on ATI machines, you will increase your FPS, if you update with the newest drivers. I have +20% FPS increase, which comes with some higher GPU temps as EVEREST ULTIMATE indicates me...+103°C on GPU & + 73°C on CPU, so be careful with your laptops, you might fully destroy your hardware. That's why monitoring 'everything' is such of importance nowadays.

Finally, I don't get exactly where's Ruud main goal is, Racer is ALREADY 'perfect' as it is NOW, only thing, would be to fully fix all known issues as we all have been all experiencing until now...Allala, I hate to repeat myself, it's non-sense, absurdity, WTF....
 
Hehe, if Ruud debugged it before release we'd never get a release, as he's always adding to and improving Racer.

We are the people to test it, which works both ways. We get to request cool stuff too, and lots of interesting stuff does make it's way in over the years!


I'm pretty happy with this version now, as usual, it just needs a round of fixes here and there really...
Ie, some shaders haven't been updated as time has passed, and the panorama shader clearly is a bit broken or something :D

Little details but nothing major.

Dave
 
Anyone else having this A problem with ver 090rc5d?
Lambo on carlswood using V 090rc5d - what is this in the console and how is it fixed.
w3 'u2' changed sign from -0.000101 to 0.00106; SR=-SR
u=-0.00. rotV=0.01, sum=-0.00
...
Yes, it's some diagnostics that Ruud put in for troubleshooting the tires. We should have some way of turning this (and other unwanted) messages off, the change in shift status is another one I don't need.

Bug:
Flag #2 doesn't work for trackcams, it is supposed to give a fixed camera but it ALWAYS follows the car no matter what else I do.

Alex Forbin
 
There's a lot of problems indeed, Ruud should ONLY release stuff that is sufficiently debugged...I got weird issues, graphically talking...

Finally, I don't get exactly where's Ruud main goal is, Racer is ALREADY 'perfect' as it is NOW, only thing, would be to fully fix all known issues as we all have been all experiencing until now...Allala, I hate to repeat myself, it's non-sense, absurdity, WTF....

ATI cards have Opengl compatibility issues, that is the main source of your problems
graphically, the target platform is for Nvidia cards and it doesn't even need to be the latest to work great.
As for Racer being perfect, it is very good but I remember some people were happy with
the old 0.5 version. Look at how far we've come since then...
HDRI,
Head-tracking,
Nice shadow casting!
Animated characters (we are the fail here :O_o: )
A more advanced tire model,
Damage (well.. sort-of)
Enhanced suspension,
Scripting,
and more I can't think of right now. The point is while Racer is great right now, it is a continuing effort and I look forward to what's coming.

Alex Forbin
 
Audio Alex!

Remember 050 still had one sample for engines... it was the beta post 050 that added multi-sound sampling :D

As for that track cam flag issue, it's never worked afaik. Annoyingly. Having a fixed track cam, or even a track-cam with limits to it's rotation, would be nice. That way you can strategically place a camera so it doesn't pan over empty/low detail areas of tracks that you otherwise wouldn't see from the car cameras. Ie, good for making tracks look better generally!


Dave
 
Bug:
engine.shifting.
time_to_declutch=100 ; This SHOULD smoothly disengage the clutch over the time shown, currently it just pauses for the time shown then slams the clutch down.

time_in_neutral=100 ;currently just pauses the engine at the RPM for time shown:O_o:

time_to_clutch=100 ;Should smoothly engage clutch over time shown. Currently just pauses for time shown then dumps the clutch, all the while freezing the RPM.

Currently these parameters are simply delays between actions, just as they always were, these parameters are pointless unless they actually do what they say.
I ran into this due to trying to make a autobox with a shiftkit, the shift curves work great but
there's nothing else you can do without these parameters working right.

Alex Forbin
 
Audio Alex!

Remember 050 still had one sample for engines... it was the beta post 050 that added multi-sound sampling :D

As for that track cam flag issue, it's never worked afaik. Annoyingly. Having a fixed track cam, or even a track-cam with limits to it's rotation, would be nice. That way you can strategically place a camera so it doesn't pan over empty/low detail areas of tracks that you otherwise wouldn't see from the car cameras. Ie, good for making tracks look better generally!


Dave

Yes, audio is MUCH improved. I'd forgotten about that.
The stationary track cams worked only one time that I know of, it would be nice to have a camera like you see on TV where the camera is stuck to the wall and the cars are flying by.

Alex Forbin
 
Just thought I would say that after me and Silver tried some different cars, he was still stuck in place as before with multiplayer, so we just use RC4 for now. (and plus that debug for the tires is quite annoying and makes it hard to see chat messages). I also noticed that when trying to do doughnuts in a car, the inside rear wheel seems to suck up to the min restlen, and cause the car to go into a rather crazy doughnut.

I say Ruud should add in 4wd, or make it work (as opposed to faking it), since we have the ability to use a count for the differential (and plus Ruud pretty much forces it now, or else you get a nice Qlog about it). And maybe a curve for autoclutch_rpm (to better simulate a torque converter on automatic vehicles).

Personally didn't see the point in addition of an active diff, but I don't really work with cars that would have that, as they are either too old, or cheap.

I am great that Ruud is still updating Racer, but it seems he's adding new things without debugging what we have (granted I do realize that sometimes when you add something in it screws something else up)
 
I thought the clutch gearbox change time curves were made, err, linear, rather than square... but it sounds like they are just instant now?

I tried graphing the clutch torque, clutch application and everything else but it seems we can't graph anything except a clutch pedal input?

Either way that is broken badly as said!





Just trying the water shader. I'm not sure what it was designed for, but I'm having trouble making it look like water here.
The last texture input is not even used for depth in the shader.

Is the envmap used in slot 2, and the water map in slot 5 (ie, $trackenvmap and $water_reflection entries respectively?)

I had imagined this was a true ground plane reflection so you could see a car reflected in the map (so you could make a car visible in a puddle etc), but even having my car hovering over the fully constructed water the effect was no different to just using the envmap any way (ie, I swapped between the two $trackenvmap/$water_reflection entries) on a generic plane and the result looked identical.

Is there some special trick to getting the $water_reflection to work properly... it's turned on here in racer.ini.


It'd be really nice to have an example shader that is just like any generic trackenvmap shader... just a basic material with it applied that works, that we can use as a base to make our own materials such as wet pavement etc.

Right now the best I can get it either a pink area, or nothing, or something that looks identical to using $trackenvmap any way.

Given up after about 3hrs of tinkering with values.





The Nvidia PerfSDK doesn't seem to work. I've tried lots of combos of things, made sure it's all running, tried different versions etc etc, and Racer never even shows it's running in the debug screen (6.2), never mind shows the overlays.
Considering the other issues in Racer over the last few versions (ie, fixed bugs reappearing etc), I wonder if this is just broken too? I've given up after 4hrs of messing.




I also seem to have issues with some car scripts not running, so I have ended up having to put reload scripts into the oncar.rex file...
If I do 'reload car' at any point I then seem to have a situation where scripts won't reload or work at all for a car until I reset Racer (ie, menu, then back in, or quit out)
I can't work out if this is just my install or not, but it does seem to just occur sometimes but not others.


Clutch = broken.

Water shader = needs clarification, what actually can it do and should it do?

Nvidia PerfSDK, would be nice to know if this is Racer broken, or we are missing something?

Scripts not working right??



Looking forward to these last few a/b/c/d versions being wrapped up/bug-fixed into a decent RC6 that incorporates all the latest features in a working fashion, and nothing else new... I think if it can do that it'll make a nice stable modern-ish release!


Dave
 
It'd be really nice to have an example shader that is just like any generic trackenvmap shader... just a basic material with it applied that works, that we can use as a base to make our own materials such as wet pavement etc.
I've seen no signs of the 'foam' map or water_reflection map, but the general principle seems to work. You can't see in a still image obviously, but the waves are moving, and the polygons are actually waving up and down over time.
UZQQK.jpg

(this one's with a control normal map on layer0 and layer1, which is just (127,127,255))
axmZ4.jpg

Code:
shader_water02~vf_newwaves
{
  tangents=1
  diffuse=0.0075 0.025 0.04 0.32
  reflect=1.0
  
  scale=0.1
  layer0
  {
    ;map=water02.tga
    ;blendfunc=src_alpha one_minus_src_alpha
    map=water_test/normal_small.tga
    mode=linear
  }
  layer1
  {
    ;map=water04.tga
    ;blendfunc=src_alpha one_minus_src_alpha
    map=water_test/normal_large.tga
    mode=linear
  }
  layer2
  {
    map=$trackenvmap
  }
  layer3
  {
    map=water_test/noise_map_1.tga
    mode=linear
  }
  layer4
  {
    map=water_test/foam_map_1.tga
  }
  layer5
  {
    map=$water_reflection
  }
}
normal_small/normal_large.tga: normal maps for 'waves', the small one being finer scale. I just pulled these from somewhere online; the small one is a 4x repeat of the large, so it's got less random variation than would be ideal.
noise_map: just random rgb pixels
foam_map: can't see any effect this has yet. I would imagine this is cause there's no height map in the normal maps' alpha channel.

diffuse= is used for the water's "colour" (it doesn't seem to be transparent at all), reflect= is used for the reflection strength.
 
It's very similar to an ocean shader I worked with for a while from the Nvidia developers site, I had no luck with it as well.
My water shader works well enough with the exception of a depth map to make the water get darker with depth but it's geared more towards lake water.

Alex Forbin
 
That AO shader is just using a texture to shade ambient pass isn't it. I made my own version of that a year ago hehe.

As per water, yeah looks ok but the reflection is car pov envmap generated isn't it?
Ie put a green box to the back of the car and that screenie would show mainly green water?

I had been hoping for a true mirror map for wet roads etc but it just never seems to work that way... Possibly a bug? Till Ruud clarifies what it really is I'll not spend time trying to make it work, possibly doing it wrong too?! (Ie, we have no specific example to be sure how it works)


Would be nice to get a water shader like battlefield 3, that looks nice and afaik it's mostly procedural wrt foaming etc.
 
As per water, yeah looks ok but the reflection is car pov envmap generated isn't it?
Ie put a green box to the back of the car and that screenie would show mainly green water?
Yeah that's entirely the trackenvmap, I couldn't get the other map to work at all (enabled in racer.ini and nothing shows up, turn debug on and it just draws a black rectangle)
 
Made a nice tree with a leaf texture that had a "-" in the image name, made a shader for it with the same name as the image.

In racer the leaves were red/blue and there was no Qlog error with Ver 090rc5b. tried everything I could to fix but couldn't figure out what was wrong.

Put the track into ver 090rc4 and lo and behold, there was the Qlog error that the shader had to be made with the image name WITHOUT the "-" and the map= to the image name with the "-".

Suspect that this is another bug!

Qlog errors that arent and no Qlog error when there are, WTF is going on with Ruud's updates.
 
Yeah that's entirely the trackenvmap, I couldn't get the other map to work at all (enabled in racer.ini and nothing shows up, turn debug on and it just draws a black rectangle)

Ah I didn't think to check the debug thing to see what it was actually rendering.

That is a shame it's broken (like lots of things this time it seems haha)


Hopefully Ruud will be able to clarify and fix these latest bugs (while avoiding adding anything new) for an RC6 version.



Is it worth us adding a list of bugs to this thread, see if KS95 will put a nice post under Ruuds first post with current bugs?
  1. gearbox shift times not working properly, step from 0 > 1 clutch position over the time rather than smooth linear transition.
  2. water reflection not rendering, needs clarification on functionality.
  3. qlog discrepancies (I'll let Boomer clarify those.
  4. odd console readouts about tyre slip angles or something popping up (same goes for gearbox manual/auto setting, doesn't need to be console displayed imo)
  5. PerfSDK not working as advertised, broken?



Feel free to copy/paste that list above, edit it or add to it, and then KS95 can get it into the first or a subsequent underlying post (currently known bugs specific to this version I suppose)


Cheers

Dave
 
Multiplayer joining to IP's seems glitched, the person joining has their brake stuck on and are unable to shift (someone else can confirm that its not just me). The Multiplayer Lobby (at least for me) does not let me connect, and subsequently let me host, despite the right ports being forwarded.
 

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