grammatonfeather: Account freshly created by a troll or a Oculus member to defend his product.

Seriously, for me it's Vive all the way for VR, simply because Oculus = Facebook + Oculus exclusive title + closed standard = shit, and there is nothing that would make me accept a this technology and market to be exploited by closed standard for once. You don't have to buy monitor specific titles, and that's the same case here. Just my two cents here, and I seriously hope companies like Oculus will never be on the monopoly of VR, it will just kill this promising technology, and continue to hurt gamers, just like season passes and preorders did.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Post with a lot of sub-quotes

You don't need to quote the whole posts and sub-quotes you know...

Quote from Scawen :

I would say that omnidirectional environment mapping has a lower priority than a better shadow system, reflections on roads and some methods of blending textures that Eric has been waiting for. Along with the shadows I am interested in going for physically based lighting if possible and perhaps a generated sky which paves the way for changing weather. Aside from graphics, I am keen to get the tyre physics done so I can escape the curse of working with two separate versions and merging the changes. That will allow the possibility of separate graphics and physics threads and so on which would be inconceivably complicated to implement into two separate versions.

That's very nice to hear, and you can be sure that I'll be waiting for it!
And I agree with you, I have no problem in seeing full sphere reflection added to the "main" car (or more if you give us the possibility in the graphics settings) added later on when some cascaded shadow mapping is implemented for example.
And you should really experiment Subversion software, it will really change your life and open your development to other people if you want (be sure to call me if you need a graphic or UI programmer ).

And a small reminder, this alpha sorting bug is still not fixed, can you take some time to look at it (see attachments) ?

Last edited by nacim, Mon, 7 Dec 2015 19:55.

Quote from nacim :

It's maybe a problem with Optimus, the game is trying to run with the IGP instead of the discrete graphics. What GPU you have ?

Are you serious ? That was the first thing I posted !

Quote from Scawen :

It would be nice to have a full panoramic environment map but they are massively more expensive. These hemispherical maps use a single upward facing render of nearby objects for each car. Usually there are not many objects to be rendered in each of these, so we keep the high frame rate.

I thought you were trying to future proofing a bit more LFS on the graphical side while you catch up with modern graphical engines ? Most racers around here have computers that are easily capable to render a full 256x256 cubemap each frame.
I really don't think that some full sphere mapping with a low draw distance will eat performances. And don't forget that it's a graphical option, people with lower-end computers can disable the effect (and the full sphere could be replaced with a static one on the dds folder), or enable it only for their own car for example.

Adding expensive options does not mean losing your player database if you keep the minimum settings low enough so people can just enjoy LFS on a low-end computer, but you'll have more potential buyer because there are a lot of people just ignoring LFS because it's not "modern looking".

Last edited by nacim, Fri, 4 Dec 2015 23:03.

Quote from pasibrzuch :

Distance fog option disappeared in this patch or earlier?

It needs to be recoded in HLSL since this update converted legacy assembly shaders into HLSL.

Quote from Keiichi_Tsuchiya :

You don't really need to render environment for every car. One single map rendered for active\nearest to camera car and shared with other cars is enough. It's better to use resources for higher draw distance. For example gran turismo 5/6 uses single env map for all cars. Assetto Corsa renders one single map from camera position.

And both games produces a weird result when you are in a tunnel while the car in front of you isn't for example, GTA V has the same problem. It's a nice suggestion though, but I guess it's better to have the options in the graphics settings to be future proof or to let people with high-end rigs have more accurate effect (and it's does not cost much time to add a button on the options and some if/else conditions).

Very nice update, thanks Scawen!

However, I find it very disappointing not to have road reflecting on the car, maybe a Dual Paraboloid reflection mapping will give a better and more accurate result while using only 2 passes. Anyways, sound promising, keep it up!

Quote from Flotch :

Seeing how long we (old people) played and enjoyed Blackwood with the GTi, GT and Turbo (in the time ...) ... nothing is surprising me

I remember that... I spend almost 5 years on demo, and I did not wanted to upgrade to 0.5Z just to keep my beloved XRT lol (0.5X FTW). And then my father bought me a S2 license and it was the best gift of my life at the time!

Quote from Ped7g :

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/

I read it too, it's a very interesting blog post which I recommend you Scawen.

About the skin format, if you really want it to be future proof, maybe a custom file type could be nice.
A file type that contains diffuse/albedo, specular, normal and occlusion map, and would pass them to the shaders to be correctly used by the game. And this new texture format could also be used by track textures.

Thanks for your answer Scawen, I'm really waiting for this test patch, and news about Cascaded Soft Shadow Mapping.

About skin new format, I'm more up with .DDS, because LFS already converts every skins in .DDS before usage, so it will skip this step and use less disk space and will also reduce the online stutter when downloading someone's skin.

I'm fine, thanks, and you ?

I think the idea of dividing trademark for different categories can do the trick, and that would be better than having every trademark "screwed" on road cars.

I think that the tyres that need a bit of rework are the slicks. I don't know if it's wanted, but it seems a bit less seamless than the normal tyres(we can feel too much repetition IMO), and it's doesn't look as good as expected when the wheels are spinning.

Quote from Scawen :

Anyway, now all the shaders are written by me and in HLSL, it allows the possibility of writing new shaders to allow new types of shadow and of course many other effects in future.

Finally! I hope you made a lot of different kind of shaders, depending on which type of object it is (grass, road, cones, tires, glass, and wall for example), that will be nice to edit or create future detailed materials later.

Did you noticed a performance improvement after converting shaders to HLSL ?

Very nice start! But if sidewall textures are aimed for single seated, will you do 2 versions of the pack so that there is a version aimed for road cars/GTRs ? That'll be nice if you could make something that works in the best way possible with every cars (I know it's not possible to do something perfect, but come on Lynce, I trust you! )

Nice to read this! I'm already hyped for this!

Finally, a longly awaited graphical update!
What about soft shadow mapping ? Have you done some researches about it ?

My guess is that's it's a LFSTweak saved profile, which means it can be opened with LFSTweak.

Quote from iceman_n :

all your layouts are sick

Too bad you can't use them, right ?

Quote from Lynce :

Dear Nacim.

Sorry for the mistake.

My condolences to your country and to you.

I'm sincerely touched by your condolences, but life needs to continue and we should not show or feel any kind of fear from people like this. I hope people will be smart enough not to judge people from theirs origins (I'm from the Maghreb, as many of my friends are).

Anyways, I hope you are going well too, and I would like to thank you for your hard work that is still a joy to install on LFS.

No one even sell single core CPUs nowadays, the few people needs to upgrade at this time, even more if they uses their PC to play.
I don't find reasonable to try to game in 2015 with a single core CPU and a SM2.0 card. Buy the cheapest laptop or prebuilt desktop out there, and it will still be faster that that!

Last edited by nacim, Sun, 22 Nov 2015 10:56.

Quote from Scawen :

I don't think it would be fair to say yet. I think the Oculus one is simpler but the Vive one allows more freedom.

Thanks, that's the answer I needed, thanks!

Quote from Scawen :

I suppose not. I don't really know about all that.

If you suppose, I can surely say that it isn't implemented.

Quote from Scawen :

I don't think we really talked about things like that in the past. I think that sort of thing becomes important if you get into physically based rendering with High Dynamic Range, which I am interested in but have not studied enough yet.

You guessed right, and I really think PBR and HDR would be a really nice graphical improvement (less than soft shadow mapping and realtime reflections).

I really hope you'll give us more update (and screenshots maybe ? ) about (near ?) future graphical improvements patches after you finished OpenVR implementation (which I'm really interested in, since I may be buying a HTC Vive once consumer version releases).

Nice !
Now that you start using OpenVR API, which one do you prefer between this API and Oculus's one ?
And, talking about gamma, does LFS uses Linear Space Rendering ?

Yay ! Keep it up Scawen, I love to read this small dev blog

Stunning! Keep it up my friend!

Here are some DirectX 9 games, so you can see were we can go before been "limited" by the API:

Trackmania² Stadium:


GRID Autosport:


And much more.

So don't worry, going to D3D12 will only reduce user compatibility (with OS and hardware) and improve performance. But actually, we don't exploit GPU and CPU enough to claim to need more performance and less overhead (LFS is single threaded, don't forget about that).

We can hope for official Linux support, but only after S3 and all other major update done and when the Linux user base will be big enough to worth it, and this is only up to ScaViEr to say.