Quote from Xenix74 :

...
Scawen once said something like:
"Lfs does not make your life better".
...

Hmm, I wonder what I really said. That doesn't sound right, because LFS is supposed to be a form of entertainment. That *should* be a small part of "making your life better" just as watching a good film or reading a book can do.

Definitely we all should relax, have fun and play around a bit and that is a good thing and this is my intention for LFS.

There is also an educational aspect to it, in the sense that a lot of people have learned more about driving, physics, racing and so on. As it becomes more realistic, the educational aspect improves. On my side with the physics and on Eric's side the structure of race tracks, roads and so on. This is also supposed to be a small part of "making your life better" if you want to put it that way.

Of course, if it becomes an irritation or a frustration, you should move on. We have an email notification system so we can let you know when there is an update.

In no way is LFS supposed to be a thing which people sit around for years waiting for updates and becoming increasingly angry. Anyone who does that is bringing it upon themselves.

I tried to describe why things take a long time, for Eric and me. I wouldn't be able to go into much more detail without listing every detail of our personal lives.

Some people do understand and some will not. There is also life outside of LFS, we have families and so on. Things happen, it's not just a constant uninterrupted 50 hours per week on LFS.

But just to clear up one myth: Eric and I do not have any other jobs. I'm not sure why people sometimes get that idea. As you can see, we are working hard on Live for Speed and there has been a lot of progress these last few years. But it's not always plain sailing. There is life outside LFS, and within LFS there is experimentation, research, trying and testing, following unexpected avenues, backtracking, trying again, and so on.

I do say occasionally, if our aim was to make the most money possible, we should have chosen another job or way of working. But that's not the aim here. The aim is to develop something we like, working in the way we like, get paid for it and enjoy life as well. It's a great thing to be able to have some time to spend with the people you love. Some people do miss out on that part of life through working too hard, and I'm really happy that we have avoided that mistake. You don't have a second life to come back and do all the things you forgot to do in your first life. So you need to make sure you have time to do the things you like to do.

I don't suppose it does any harm to let you know where we are with the tracks, as I think you can work it out anyway. The South City and Fern Bay are not yet done. Kyoto has taken longer than expected because Eric is working to a high level of detail, and the track covers a vast area. He wanted to create interesting buildings as part of the job because as an artist he wants to create good looking work.

It's similar on my side, things have taken longer than expected and one thing leads to another, so I end up working on things that were not planned in the first place. Maybe if we had a project manager they could keep us to timescales and limit our work accordingly. But I think it's a good thing that we can experiment by going down unexpected paths of development, although it does take longer, the end result can be more interesting.

I know people may say "if you don't release it quickly it will become irrelevant and obsolete" and so on but I don't really mind about those kind of opinions. We're trying to create a nice game that we are happy with, and I know a lot of people will be happy to have a go when it's ready.

Hello Racers,

As many of you know from the forum and Twitter, Eric has been working on Kyoto and I have been working on a new lighting system. In this month's progress report we would like to show you some of the work in progress and talk a bit about the lighting.

Read the whole report on the Graphics Progress Report: Kyoto and lighting page.

Thanks for the offer. I really want to have karts in LFS when possible, and Eric does too as you can see with the kart tracks at Westhill. He likes to work from reference material when possible so your offer is interesting.

It's absolutely impossible to do it before the new tyre physics is working, for two reasons.

1) We can't add another delay to finishing the new tyre physics and graphics, for obvious reasons.

2) Karts don't work properly with the old tyre physics. I have some test karts in LFS and I use them as a test case for tyre physics. In reality, tyre physics works on a range from karts (or smaller) up to giant lorries, but the old LFS tyre model breaks down a bit when you go to those extremes.

So maybe we can talk again when the time comes. I can't give any estimates about when that might be.

The only sort of deal we can do is to put a car (or kart) in LFS without payments either way. We receive the reference materials / photos / drawings / 3D files / a lot of information about the setup and permission to use a real vehicle (without time limit). The vehicle provider gets some exposure in return, and that's about it.

We can't commit to anything at the moment, but it's an interesting thought.

Dear Racers,

Sorry but we aren't ready for a progress report this month.

Eric has been working on Kyoto and I have been working on the lighting system.

Progress is good and we are really on the case.

My head is quite scrambled from the work so thanks for your patience!

Scawen


EDIT: See below a video of a lighting experiment at Aston.
https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/1947087#post1947087

Last edited by Scawen, Mon 1 Apr 2019, 09:57.

No, sorry. But it is OK to have an old version on your hard drive and you can use that any time for old time's sake.

It's not really possible for Eric to update old tracks with new textures, while also updating the track to how he actually wants it to be now.

And we can't have the old tracks just there with old textures either, as some kind of historical museum piece. Actually the old tracks don't even work properly in the new graphics system, which is why Eric has to go through all the tracks doing a big overhaul.

But the "museum pieces" are still there, you just have to run the old version. https://www.lfs.net/archive

Quote from three_jump :

As it came up a few times now. When you talk about CPU loads (or hardware requirements in general) and optimisation / performance considerations, do you have a specific plattform in mind?
Of course having lean and fast code is always a plus, but with the new lighting system (and tire physics) I would guess some people might to upgrade their PC.

No, I don't have any specific requirements in mind. It's really hard to say, without having loads of computers to test on. That's where the community will come in and we'll have to see how it goes when it goes into public testing. Anyone who struggles with the current LFS version will definitely need to upgrade as the shadow maps are quite heavy and the textures with shine level in the alpha channel take more memory. Also the higher mesh details are becoming a serious graphics card memory consideration. You can't reduce that by selecting half texture resolution.

I think LFS would be completely dead as a business if we only targeted the latest graphics cards. We earn an income from many customers in countries where the latest super gaming rig is just too much to afford, so I really hope that LFS will be able to run well with a lot of cars on track on computers with a few years old performance levels.

On the other hand Eric is using the new features and trying to get the graphics up to a certain level so the graphics card and CPU requirements are increasing.

Quote from 5tag :

Okay this looks awesome and all but *for now* can you please limit it to static daytime? Give us the updated tracks to play with first. Dynamic lighting and nighttime opens a whole other can of worms that would push this patch many months further away.

You seem to think Eric already has all the tracks finished and we are just waiting for me now. But that is not the case.

Quote from Bass-Driver :

@Scawen:
Did you do something to make it harder to crack this game?
especially after this big update.

Not yet but that is another project on my list.

Lighting, tyre physics and the master server protocol are my priorities.

Eric does want to update the interiors. It's obviously important. It's not as high a priority as finishing the tracks, because they don't have any particular problems with shadows.

The existing tracks have issues with the new shadow system because some geometry needs to be rebuilt to cast shadows correctly. Basically if they can be viewed properly from above then the shadows cast properly. But some tracks are so old there are buildings without a roof, and single sided geometry that looks wrong in the new system. There's also the new lighting system and the tracks can be improved to take advantage of that, e.g. shine on surfaces.

That means we can't release the new graphics until all the tracks are updated. The cars don't have this problem so they aren't as high priority. It's not a matter of opinion, it's just logic.

Yes, you can blame me for the UF, not Eric.

Hello Racers,

We have decided not to do a graphics progress report this month.

On Eric's side, things are going well as you have seen in the progress reports. But it does take a while because of the level of detail. There are still two tracks to update after he finishes the one he is currently on. We plan to show you some more pictures in December.

On my side I was working on sharing the lighting between tracks, but recently got diverted onto improving the sharpness of the text for the interface which then led to sharper dashboards and number plates. I was aware that it wasn't really necessary for the release, but I got an idea for a slight improvement that would take "a couple of days" and ended up doing a few weeks' work because of the improvements it led to.

Some people might be interested to know how one thing leads to another and can cause apparent delays in development. Warning: Technical details in the following paragraph! Feel free to skip to the before and after screenshots!

In fact this started from an improvement in the editor. Recently I had removed the software-based render for ambient lighting so now the images for the ambient lighting are rendered on the graphics card. After that update, which was important to help improve the graphics, there were just a few software-based drawing functions remaining. They include the editor text and guide lines, which were drawn by locking the back buffer and setting pixels directly. I converted these functions to use the graphics card's version of line drawing and the texture-based text as used in game. This finally allowed anti-aliasing to be used in the track editor which is helpful for Eric. But it did require some improvements in the accuracy of the in-game text. I decided to go through the font characters, thinning them a little, which took a couple of days once I had been through all the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. Then I realised some of the character drawing wasn't really under control and I went through making sure it all made sense and upgraded the resolution a bit. This included visiting all places in the code where text was drawn, including the dashboards, so I doubled their resolution while I was at it. Also I noticed the number plates were looking quite bad so their resolution has been doubled as well along with more accurate text positioning. One more thing I implemented was "kerning" which is when you move some characters closer together for visual reasons. For example a classic case is A followed by V. The gap looks too big unless the characters are moved together. I had added a small tail onto the small L and this was causing a particularly bad gap between the l and t in "multiplayer" so I finally succumbed to the temptation of implementing kerning which I had wanted to do for years.

Here are some comparison shots to demonstrate some of the improvements.

Yeah I know what you mean, I see those roads too and wish I could drive on them.

There are similar things at Blackwood. I don't know what the future holds for the external roads. I know Eric enjoyed doing that massive update at Westhill but it takes so long to do the main racing areas, there isn't really time at this point.

The trouble is all the tracks must be updated for us to be able to release the new graphical system at all. To do all the external roads can add months per track.

I hope some tracks might get a sort of Westhill treatment one day but I'm guessing it might be more important to do some car models first and then it might be time to add a new track. I'm just making this up though and this sort of prediction is usually wrong!

Hello Racers,

In the August and September progress reports we talked about the new shadows and lighting system and showed pictures of the updates on the Blackwood and Rockingham tracks. All our tracks must be updated to use the new lighting system and some older tracks need more changes to bring them up to date. Aston is one of them and is the subject of this month's report. Eric has made various adjustments to the track and tightened some of the bends while keeping the original flow. We hope you enjoy the pictures!

Aston screenshots: https://www.lfs.net/report-oct2018-as



NOTE: For comparison shots, Aston has been raised by 2 metres so 131072 must be subtracted from the Z coordinate.

Quote from theodu69 :

My bad, I don't usually check the forums, but thank you for taking the time to respond, the new graphics are amazing

Thanks! I need to remember that every time someone asks the same question, for each of them it was the first time!

I do know what you mean that although the cars don't look any worse than before, and in fact look better now with the self-shadowing and improved lighting, they can start to stick out when everything around them is up to a more modern standard.

Anyway I am sure that Eric is very keen to update cars when the tracks are done. I believe he could update some of them and we could do another patch some time after the tracks release. It shouldn't be necessary to update all cars at once. Ideally the oldest ones would be done first. But I'm not saying that's what will happen, because it depends what comes up and what seems to be the best thing to do at the time.

I keep getting that question.

It somehow seems a bit of an annoying question, because it is quite obvious that many of the cars need to be updated (have a look at the RB4 for the most extreme example) but we are on the tracks at the moment. There is only one Eric. He does one thing and then another. Not both at the same time. It is obvious that he would not have failed to notice that the cars and drivers could do with an update.

What I do keep saying, every time I get this question, is that the tracks MUST be updated before we can do a release of the new graphical system, because with the new system, the graphics and shadows are broken unless the tracks are updated. So if we released now, you would have a game full of bugs. But the cars are no worse than they were before. Therefore they do not stop us doing a release.

This means, the cars have a lower priority than the tracks. There is no reason to delay the release by several more months in order to update all the cars. It is a separate subject, though it is quite obvious that they need an update.

Last edited by Scawen, Sun 23 Sep 2018, 16:28. Reason : stay calm

Obviously I'm not just sitting here waiting for Eric to finish the tracks. I'm working very hard every day on all the things that need to be done, and I believe that once a month I might be able to think of one or two interesting things to say, maybe something I thought of or something I've been working on.

I'm just saying, although each progress report will be mainly some pictures of a track, I should hope to add a few words about something else, occasionally.

Quote from Chunkiegg :

Scawen, you mentioned that Eric has been doing some rebuilding parts of the tracks due to changing how the worlds are lit/shaders, when Eric's work load lightens up (if it ever does), would it be possible to get a run down of what and why the new bits have been rebuilt?

When we load an old track into the new lighting system, it does an auto adjustment for the light colour to try and look as close as possible to how it did before, though it does look a bit different because of the gamma corrected lighting. In most cases that is a better look, even without any manual adjustments.

But the new lighting system cannot be released with tracks in that condition, mainly because the shadows don't work properly with all the buildings. Some of them were built long ago when there was no free view mode and they would only be seen from track level. In those days we saved polygons and a bit of work by not always bothering with a roof. Now it turns out that doesn't work with the shadow system. The shadows are only cast from surfaces that are seen from the sun's direction. So every object needs a top surface. For example South City looks good with the shadows, but there are many places where the shadow is missing or there are various shards of shadows around.

So that means every track must be visited to do some fixes. The next thing is that we have shine on roads on some tracks now, and it would be quite inconsistent if there isn't any shine effect on road surfaces at another track, so it always makes sense for Eric to go and sort that out. But he is not comfortable with just updating a few textures here and there on an old track. He wants to do a better job, updating barriers and walls to have the right shine effect too. Then he sees old construction methods and things he wants to do a better way. Also he sees corners that need some adjustment, maybe they were too wide or there isn't enough detail or it's a corner that has caused problems while racing over the years. Sometimes things can be improved a bit for the open configuration support as most tracks were built before we had that system. All these things add up so he ends up doing at least several weeks on each track.

I think most of the questions in the thread have been answered by other readers.

Quote from nacim :

So Scawen, your technical description is still a bit vague for me.. you used a specular workflow right ? I can't see any metallic surface on theses screenshots, does Eric has a control on the specular color per pixel ?

Usually the specular reflections are not coloured. So I suppose that is a specular workflow though I'm not really sure about the terminology. Currently we do not have control of specular colour per pixel. A specular colour can be set for a whole surface and that can be used for a metallic effect (or another kind of coloured reflection, for example a window covered with a film of coloured transparent plastic).

Quote from nacim :

And looking at the road, I don't really know if your specular factor is normalized depending on the specular power, or if it's up to Eric to tweak it. I suggest you check this out if you haven't seen it already: https://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/hello-world/

In all cases, I know I have to look at your BRDF once the update is released

I'm not really sure what a specular factor or a specular power is, but the BRDF naturally reduces the brightness of the shine and increases the spread if the roughness is increased.

Our shaders are using an approximation to a Cook Torrance BRDF with optimisations discussed by various authors. After quite a bit of experimentation we came to one that Eric was happy with and felt he had enough control over to get most of the effects he needed.

Quote from nacim :

Oh and I remember you talked about exponential fog one day, is implemented or still on your backlog ?

I was forced to implement fog in the shaders when I needed to move to shader model 3 and it doesn't do fog otherwise. So I went for exponential fog. It's nice because it allows fog to have some effect in the middle distance without reducing far distance pixels to 100% fog colour.

Quote from MicroSpecV :

Also, for the layouts created in Aston sky/Autocross here
https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/90485-Nova%27s-really-good-circuit-layouts ,
Will I be able to transfer the track file and placement direct into the new environment? Or will it be another Blackwood situation where the coords will be different?

The layouts at Autocross should be compatible, though some of the areas are a few metres wider. So some changes at the edges may be needed.

At Aston there are quite a few adjustments, various corners have been improved, tightened up a bit in some cases, but most things are pretty much in the same place so I believe most layouts should work with a few adjustments.

I think I should be able to make old Aston layouts load with the extra 2 metres added automatically.

Quote from Evolution_R :

..."LFS "runs" at 100 Hz, so you're going to end up with a little stuttering if your display is locked at 60 Hz."
...
So my question is this going to be improved somehow with the new graphics / physics update? Thanks!

It's a good question. If I can get the graphics ready to a condition that is suitable for this release and could then get back on the physics so that is suitable in time for Eric to have finished the tracks, then this opens the possibility of working on separate physics and graphics threads. That would be a great help and the plan would be to combine this with some means of producing visual frames at the correct visual frequency for the monitor. That would either be by using a high frequency physics update that can be interrupted at any point for a graphical frame, or by using a lower frequency physics update that can be interpolated to produce graphical frames.

Obviously the graphics needs to be done then that would make it releasable, even with the current physics and it's possible this may happen. But I really hope I can sort out the new physics so we can move on.

Quote from pasibrzuch :

Do you suspect a negative feedback because of ugly screenshots of preview of a beta test patch?

Yes!

We want to show some nice pictures. We noticed some flaws and thought I might as well work on them. It's a way to get things done. It's part of the development process, in just the same was that it was a good thing that Eric took a few days off the track he is currently on, to go over the already updated tracks to fix a few things.

It's a good thing that we are brushing up our work for the screenshots, not a bad thing!

I mentioned in the first post of this thread that we planned to release images of the graphical updates this month. Since then we have been brushing up the existing updates to be ready to make some screenshots.

It has been a useful process as Eric visited the already updated tracks to fix remaining issues, while I got back into looking around the tracks and noticing things I could fix.

As we looked around with our thoughts on the screenshots, we noticed there are things I should work on to improve the screenshots. I will do some of those. So as it turns out our plan has changed a bit to release screenshots in August rather than July.

I wanted to tell you about that change of plan. Also I can say a a few more words about what we are doing and why.

The new shadow system requires an update of every track before we can release it. Some scenery objects were not built in a way that works properly with the shadow maps. For example, every building must have a roof so that shadows are cast correctly. Some of the tracks were built so long ago that they were never designed to be viewed from above. At that time there was no real Free View mode, so things like that were invisible. It's an opportunity to visit every track and bring them up to date, also making the roads and a lot of other scenery make use of the specular reflections, 3D kerbs, better scaled scenery, improvements on some corners and so on. There will not be a "full Westhill" job done on every track. Some tracks will change more than others. We need to remain focussed on getting the updates done, not letting the job expand out of hand, although it is fun doing so many updates. We look forward to showing you some screenshots in August.

We don't have any predictions for other things. The graphical updates are really important and I still have some more work to do on them. Eric still has some tracks to update. Depending on the timing, maybe I can get the tyre physics updated to a good state in time for the graphical update, although it is possible to release the new graphics with the old tyre physics. The long awaited tyre physics update is also really important because we'll be able to move into the future and consider car updates and so on. We'll see how the timing works out.

Quote from brunosmartinho :

Não entendo.... Façam algo de jeito! Estamos fartos de migalhas por ano! Foi mais de um ano para isto? Estamos bem, estamos

Quote from Google Translate :

I do not understand .... Do something! We're sick of crumbs a year! Was it more than a year for this? We're fine, we're

We are working on new things. This test patch is something I was forced to work on due to the attacks in April. I added some autocross and InSim updates while we were at it.

A couple of weeks after the release of this full version, we plan to show some images of the new track updates Eric has been working on using the new graphics system which supports specular lighting and a new shadow system.

Hi there. Sorry about the long delay. It's nothing exciting. There were some more possible developments for the test patch, but they were not very interesting and other things came up. At this point we've decided not to go on working on the test patch. Better to release it as a full version and I can go on developing for the new version that Eric has been continuing to work on.

For the test patch, I did add the key to temporarily hide the object outlines. I went with ALT. CTRL+SHIFT seemed to interfere with other things and was confusing. I expect to release this minor test patch update in a few hours.

We are getting very near to the end of this series of test patches now as I must get back to the real stuff I have been working until interrupted by the attacks.

Quote from DANIEL-CRO :

Looks like IS_CIM packet isn't sent while online only in single player. Talking about LFS client to local InSim application.

I'll have a look at this, which is almost a bug, and see if I can implement those sub-mode states mentioned in your other post.

Quote from chucknorris :

I'm actually quite happy with the new version, so I'm carefully raising my view to the horizon. Skins and PNG have been a recent thing, how about combining those two ?

In the new graphics system that Eric is using to update the tracks, we have textures that use the alpha channel to control the shine level. So that would seem like a nice thing to consider on skins of the future but definitely not in this version.

Quote from valiugera :

I still do not understand why after selecting an object that has already been placed I do not see where I move it with my hand.

You can press CTRL+C if you want to copy the objects.

Why this is, I have tried to explain in a special thread: https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/92152