The online racing simulator
Progress Report, December 2020
(67 posts, started )
Progress Report, December 2020
Hello Racers,

Since the September update we have kept working hard. Eric has continued with South City, which is now a very open town area with many connecting roads. There are car parks, squares, back streets and new roads. It has taken longer than any of us expected because of the size of the area and amount of detail. My work has also taken many turns, supporting the new open city area as described in previous reports. Eric will now be starting on Fern Bay although there are still things to be finished at South City and Kyoto. I decided to present this progress report as a cut down list of updates from a few development versions since September. It gives a little insight into the process without going into too much detail about many other minor changes that there are in each version. Be warned, although cut down it's still a list of technical changes! It may be best to scroll down and look at the screenshots. Smile


23 Oct - Lighting updates

More accurate baked lighting render for artificial lights. Drawn at higher resolution which allows more accurate results from small, bright lights in the middle distance, but with changes that allow it to run faster. Other track editor improvements. Some changes so that the apparent brightness of lights corresponds exactly with their actual lighting effect. Improved automatic exposure quality by analysing a larger texture in the compute shader.

30 Oct - Turbine updates

Wind turbines now use static vertex buffers, similar to the way a car is drawn. This allows higher resolution turbine models. The turbine code was generalised to allow 3D clock hands for city buildings.

02 Nov - Editor updates

More editor updates to allow easier positioning and alignment of objects.

13 Nov - Updates for sections

Physics enabled for the triangles on sections. Sections are the cross-sectional objects between the segments which are used for most physical surfaces in LFS (e.g. road, fences, walls). Some sections have their own surfaces (e.g. at the end of a wall) but previously they were non-physical. Editor updates to allow easier selection of objects. Slight changes to ensure that triangles on some types of connected objects are in exactly the same place, to avoid light bleeding through cracks.

20 Nov - Various editor improvements and fixes

Doubled the speed of the offline occlusion render by use of batched rendering. Enabled lights on turbines and clocks. Shader optimisation, using 4x3 matrices instead of 4x4 where possible.

18 Dec - Updates for collision with unmovable objects

Updates to the physics of unmovable objects (e.g. buildings, grandstands, smaller objects). Previously, unmovable objects used the same system as as movable objects. Now they have a more compact mesh which saves memory and CPU usage. They are now stored in the same map square system as the sections and segments. The map square system has been upgraded, to reduce the CPU time for detecting nearby objects. A discontinuity in the trunk physics calculation has been removed.

A new visualisation for the track editor shows the physical world clearly, including the physics meshes and trunk objects. Objects now have a 'surface type' that was previously only available for segment surfaces. More surface types have been added, such as rubber (tyres and some barrier linings), wood (several fences) and plastic (various barrier signs and temporary barriers). An intermediate scrape sound effect has been added for wood and plastic, avoiding the soft impact sound and the metallic scrape. The calculation for the stereo effect of the scrape sound has been improved. The colour of dust kicked up by tyres is now either white or beige depending on the surface, instead of taking on the average colour of the surface.


Eric has sent some screenshots of the latest version of South City. We hope you like the pictures.

Remember to check out the LFS calendar for racing events and follow us on Twitter.

Have a good holiday!
Attached images
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GG.

Please readey next patch test! WE WANT PLAY THAT!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Lighting system looks amazing, looking forward to trying in VR
Good Job! When we can expect release?
Drums fingers until Degats posts the comparisons...

Thanks for the new screenshots, happy holidays!
Damn this is epic, looking more and more like a real city. Definitely beating Long Beach in iRacing for the looks Big grin
Scirocco when?
Looks great, hope for test patch soon Smile

@Scawen, could you please post a few screenshots of the new editor? I'm very curious.
Also when you are into adding more surface types, could you please make these available in the object editor? (so we don't have to live with the concrete blocks only)
Nice work!
Quote from Scawen : Other track editor improvements.

Is there a chance we'll see the track editor release after this update?
And after the release, how the player-made tracks will be distributed?
Amazing Devs, keep going!
Since 2002 i follow the progress,
you're a rockstars for me ^^

Kind regards from belgium Smile

Maybe kartcross??? and Hillclimb can be implemanted later?? ^^
Transparent windows for buildings... that seems new Smile
Appreciate the Christmas gift Smile
Very Nice !
On a different note I still have to say SC looks a bit abandoned / too clean. No people, no grafity, evening / night shots feature black windows making it look like nobody is living there. And everything looks brand new.

It might not be a high priority at this point or may not be even an issue at all when racing, but it's a bit of a weird contrast to having position lights on wind turbines and moving (illuminated) clock handles.
Wow, impressive guys !!! Wish you all the best for the year to come, and a merry Xmas to you Thumbs up
Thank you Degats for the comparison shots Smile
Looks great! Thanks for the update.
Hello !

Nice type of update, feels like dev notes, really makes me discover the complexity of the engine and tool set, love it !

On a more artistic note, Eric you are rocking it ! Your texturing work is impressive ! Na-na
I feel like you are using hard edges everywhere though, any reasons you don't have some nice bevels on the edges of buildings or sidewalks for example ? I feel like it would create a better surface for the lighting to "catch on", and create a smoother, less video gamey feeling Smile
Also like three_jump said just above, I really feel like everything is just too clean, older building could benefit having some grime and dirt applied on them

I found two small things in a screenshot, see the attachements, it looks like the occlusion is a bit too strong, maybe it isn't aware that the mesh for the fence is transparent and creates and occlusion like an opaque mesh ? Uhmm
And a small shadow light leak, like you already fixed tons of already Big grin

Anyway, as usual, keep it up guys! Na-naLFS
Attached images
feedback_01.png
Looks great, good job guys.
basically, these is just new textures which we can download from the internet by ourselves meh
@killmeimgod, basically, what you wrote is a nonsense. Big grin

Nice report, looking forward to see Fern Bay. Wave
I hope it becomes available as soon as possible

Progress Report, December 2020
(67 posts, started )
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