Thanks for the other replies that I haven't replied to!
I'll be keeping an eye on mine when the lighting changes next time I drive. If mine does it, it must work very well because I've never noticed it. I do notice the radio volume adjustment and the self-levelling headlights, in my BMW from 2003 which my mechanic called an 'old' car.
2000 Celica just dims dashboard a little when switching lights on. '01 Colt also if I remember correctly. '91 MR2 has dashoard unlit normally,it's lit with lights switched on,has manual dimmer though,probably like most 80ies/90ies japanese cars. Have no other experience.
Yes, manual dimmer in 90% cases. ( little twist roller under the wheel or driver's left side. Also to switch on/off...
Usually have 1 bulb on each main gauge... and any kind of warning indicators are so bright that with poor eye sight you are unable to see what actual icon it is, unless you know it of course lol. Perhaps main purpose of having them so bright is simply to notify driver instantly. I like it that way. Big and bright icons. Matter of taste.
( EDIT: Of course, the dim switcher can also be on at gauge clusters, usually there where you set digits of time, which is shown in 12 hours. )
Phew, just generated the realtime sky on the graphics card after a power coding session. Converted the Hosek & Wilkie sky radiance function code into an HLSL shader. Now it is generated on the GPU instead of doing it in the CPU on a separate thread then downloading it, as I was doing up to now. It's just the sort of thing that graphics cards are good at and now there's no need for a little glitch as the completed sky texture is sent to the graphics card. Few more things to update but for now... relax!
The shadow maps, more detailed shaders and higher resolution textures will require a more powerful graphics card than is currently needed.
I really can't give any kind of figures or estimates but I'm sure it should be lighter than most of the big modern games, although a lot heavier than the old LFS.
On minimum spec I can't be sure either, but we have moved on to shader model 3 / DirectX 9.0c at the moment. I don't think that can be a problem for many users, as DirectX 10 came with Windows Vista. I'm not expecting to move over to DirectX 11 yet, though I'm not giving any guarantees. So I don't expect the DirectX version to be a problem for anyone but I guess shadow maps and high resolution textures could be more of a problem. I think bloom could be switched off (at the moment I'm planning to keep supporting the SDR mode) and there could be some options for lower quality shaders for less powerful graphics cards. I don't know what is needed, but I guess we'll see when it comes to public testing. No-one should upgrade their hardware yet purely for LFS as we aren't giving any estimate about when it will be ready.
Please don't stop communicating. I think it is better and far more interesting to know what is being worked on, some of the problems and their solutions.
I do not remember at all about next one I am posting and asking, so, sorry in advance if someone done already before in some cases but...
I am assuming all the work has been done so far... and we do have some few aspects of water ( Blackwood and Fern Bay )... Water gets another update? Last time I remember was DirectX 9.0 update and water reflected sun.
I find it more appealing to have news out of nowhere after silent moments... or just moment.
No, like I explained, the E46 has this light switch with dot (at least the LCI had). The E60 has it too, the dot is on the left side of the switch. Could be a E39 where the light switch is directly next to the dail area. Whatever you do, do not switch car or car brand before at least 150 times thinking if the seats are OK for your back or not. The Passat killed my back and it took sadly way too much time before I realized it was coming from the car. It never fully recovered and I am very sensitive for soft seating now. Rather sit on a floor then on a soft sofa. So I can understand why sticking to an "old" car can be beneficial. If it drives and sits good then it drives and sits good. Although 300.000 km (188.000 miles) was getting too critical for the E46 at the time and had to let it go. All these trips to Wales/Newcastle, Norway, Croatia and now St.P (The Great ) are not really helping to keep the mileage down but car > plane. Quite safe to say after so many months that I am the only western license plate in the city so if you see me driving just wave hello and think ah this is this ass***e from LFS .
I still refuse to buy a VR headset but I think the dashboards in VR can be very aggressive for the eyes and he is investigating this ambient light auto adjustment feature for this reason.
Skawen, about the taillights. The most realistic option in my opinion is to make a HDR cubemap inside the rear light in the on mode, on the map of which the spot from the lamps will be clear, and make the glass transparent, multiply it by the color of the texture.
In other cases, the reflector will be chrome plated.
The only question is how to get HDR-cubecmap ...
In the interests of explaining how development goes...
Warning, totally technical and not interesting for most people!
Most of the day was on restructuring the generated sky system a bit and removing some old code that is no longer needed so that yesterday's test has now become proper code to stay instead of being rapidly hacked in for test purposes. Although generating the sky on the GPU instead of the CPU, which is much faster, there was still a quite perceptible glitch long enough to cause a click in the sound each time a new sky was generated - that can be about once every 20 seconds around sunset / sunrise. The click was in my debug version of LFS and might not have happened in the release build but it's best to make it glitch free in the debug version, then it's sure to be OK in the release build, and also won't annoy me all the time while developing.
The glitch turned out to be because I started a new thread to generate the sky each time. A 'CPU sky' still needs to be generated for reasons related to lighting (in addition to the GPU sky) but now the CPU sky can be much smaller in size because it is not for direct display. Still, it's good to use a separate thread to do it to make use of our multiple core CPUs. The solution to the glitch was to have a sky generation thread running the whole time, just waiting for the command from the weather system to generate a new sky texture when required. It turns out that starting and stopping threads is quite expensive in debug builds.
While testing the updated sky I was driving around South City at sunset and started looking into the remaining white pixels, now that the worst offenders were cured by bounding the fog exponential. I applied the _centroid interpolation modifier to various inputs to the pixel shader until I located the one that was causing the white pixels. It turned out to be the ambient lighting data from artificial lights. Now I can drive around South City or visit those camera locations at Blackwood without seeing any bright pixels at all.
So, a good day's work, though not the sort of thing that sounds very exciting to most people.
But I must say I don't know many