The online racing simulator
February Progress Report
(140 posts, closed, started )
February Progress Report
Hello Racers,

We aren't ready to do a full progress report this month. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about some experimental work I have been doing.

DISCLAIMER: This work is unfinished and there are many issues left to solve. At this point it is not certain that it will be released. This must be taken in the spirit of a progress report, showing experimental work that sometimes takes place behind the scenes.

The story behind the experiments:

- Because of the way the new lighting works, it should be possible to share lighting configurations between tracks and have realistic sun directions. There is no longer a need to have a limited number of lighting setups per track.

- In a test version of Live for Speed I can set date and time and the sun direction is calculated from that info, along with the latitude of the track.

- The problem then becomes how to limit the time settings to the times of day we can support. One possible answer is to allow all times of day and night, which in turn would allow the lighting to change through time. That led to this experiment with headlights.

You can click here to see a 6 second animated GIF of a 24 hour period in the summer at Aston. Please bear in mind it's just a work in progress. The sky doesn't change and is simply darkened after sunset. The changing sky and sunlight is very roughly done in this quick test and is something that needs to be worked on if this experimental work is to be released. Other work includes making the cars receive light from headlights, improving the floodlights, etc.

I hope you like these early shots of work in progress.
Attached images
SO_night_1.jpg
SO_night_2.jpg
SO_night_3.jpg
AS_night_1.jpg
oh my god
Big grin
Great night races. Wonder what suprice next.

LFSThumbs up


edit: This experimenting does that means tyre physics are done?
That's a nice surprise, something I dreamed of, when there were the first informations on updates of the lightning system, but never dared hoping of.
Years later we will be satisfied first. wow
Awesome! But i don't think that we need a full cicle, we just want the abillity to change to night, maybe some more prefix weathers and times will do.
Quote from carabate :Awesome! But i don't think that we need a full cicle, we just want the abillity to change to night, maybe some more prefix weathers and times will do.

+1 Just add night mode no matter how it will be look like. Im sure everyone will be happy.
Next comes driving in rainy conditions Big grin.

Nice work!
Quote from carabate :Awesome! But i don't think that we need a full cicle, we just want the abillity to change to night, maybe some more prefix weathers and times will do.

For endurance races the full cycle is quite nice. Even when you start in the late evening and race 3 to 6 hours into the dawn and night or starting in the early morning and finishing in the sunlight, Let alone 24 hour races.
Quote from carabate :Awesome! But i don't think that we need a full cicle, we just want the abillity to change to night, maybe some more prefix weathers and times will do.




Anyway - looks cool,most of the racers around community have been hoping for this since... Well,since they joined racing. Big grin I really hope experiment turns out successful and can be added as soon as possible.
I hope there will be some server setting,that configures how daytime works - either steady or dynamic. Either tied to actual track location or delayed. Not sure if sped up would be good idea for proper sim,but somehow would be cool to have full 24h cycle in 1h race. Shrug

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TC Server + Cycle = GG


woaaw
Top work! Do you think there's a possibility of being able to add in light bars for us COP's on cruising servers? I don't see how the current strobe lighting system we have would work with needing to have our headlights on constantly. Hopefully this is something you could look into Smile

Nice work so far anyway keep it up Smile
Nice proof of concept, Scawen!
Do you realise, you are opening a pandora box of dynamic lighting with this?Big grin
You're gonna need a dynamic(probably procedural) sky system, HDR support for proper lighting, light texture support for headlights, dynamic light probes for non static objects and hella lot of other things to make it look good as your daylight static lighting.
I mean there a lot of stuff to cover, so if you want, I can give some links to technical papers and Siggraph/GDC presentations about this topic.
Will be possible to change the time with insim without ending the race?
This is a fantastic development and opens up LFS to some amazing races. Can you picture a full Blackwood 24 hour race? Cannot wait.
holy sh*t
Woww! :O Thanks for sharing your experiments with us, looks great!

...I immediately imagined an endurance race at night, with all the cars having their own headlights, shining through the darkness... even F1-track-style track status LED lights, blinking yellow at involved sectors during a yellow flag event, which all blind you a little... okay, seems like my imagination went too far, haha! Excited to see what comes out of these experiments! Nod
Oh my...

*Screams internally*
I liked it!
Night time with like a touge layout = ??? oh man this is some good stuff.
This thread is closed

February Progress Report
(140 posts, closed, started )
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG