The online racing simulator
October Progress Report
(381 posts, closed, started )
October Progress Report
Dear Racers,

Thank you for your patience as it's been a long time since the July progress report.

We aren't ready for a full progress report but thought we could say a few words and show you a few things. Eric has been continuing with South City. It's a long job and he has worked more on the roads than the buildings so far. At this point he would rather wait until more buildings are done before showing screen shots.

I've been working on the sky darkness, automatic exposure and white balance that became necessary with the use of the realtime generated skies. The lighting is now separated into lights that are always on and others that only come on at night. I increased the possible intensity of lighting to allow floodlights to work.

I worked on a system to allow us to use realistic camera exposure settings to allow comparisons with photographs from digital cameras. In a manual exposure mode I can now set the ISO, f-stop and shutter speed. It is interesting to see the massive variation in the brightness and therefore the exposure required for a night shot and a day shot. For example a shot taken in street lighting may require around 4000 times the exposure compared with a day shot. A more extreme example is the difference between moonlight and sunlight. The sun is 400 thousand times brighter than a full moon, yet our eyes can adapt to see quite well at those extremes.

I haven't had to make LFS adapt so much but it does have to deal with bright sunlight down to typical street lighting scenes. There is more to be done and the lighting is far from perfect. Anyway I hope you like the attached screenshots and the youtube videos.

Day to night transition at Blackwood:


Day to night transition at Kyoto Ring:
Attached images
BL_night_1.jpg
BL_night_2.jpg
KY_night_1.jpg
KY_night_2.jpg
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(Mikus1212) DELETED by Scawen : spam
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(BerdyGaming) DELETED by Scawen : spam
That's great progress, I can't wait for the update to come out.


It was indeed so worth it to tag along with this amazing simulator Did I Say That?

LFS
in 2020.
i can't wait for new south city OMG
gorgeous Thumbs up
Looks good!
I can't wait for its release!
I'm already wondering by 2020 when we launched amazing rally event !!! Heart
Quote from joaopaulopt :I can't wait for its release!
I'm already wondering by 2020 when we launched amazing rally event !!! Heart

waiting for this!Thumbs up
Awesome! Years back, I was (who wasn't) wondering about night racing, how great would that be and stuff... and now it's coming closer and closer. Great progress!
I can't think of how hard it is to make night lighting and shadows look real. I'm thinking of, for example, how would shadows cast behind a single car from multiple light sources (like on the first KY screenshot) - you know, that strange effect when something has that "layered" kind of shadow when in front of a LED strip (better demonstration of what I mean: https://i.redd.it/3ypgb3l21a021.jpg). Will this be a thing? I have no idea if that's a long time to code/create - maybe you plan having these group of lights count as a single light source in the lighting engine, and maybe that would be the right choice right now to speed up the public (or test) release, dunno. Sorry for my long(er) contemplation Smile
Keep it up! Smile Thumbs up
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(M7md1467) DELETED by M7md1467
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(M7md1467) DELETED by M7md1467
Nice to see some progress, I suppose those are prebacked light sources ? do only cars use real time light emission ?

Also I find the sunset auto exposure very bizarre, it's supposed to simulate eyes adaptation to low light conditions ?
The picture looks quite realistic, maybe there aren’t enough glare from the light of lanterns and light from the city, or the starry sky, depending on how far the raceway is from the city.
Scawen : Is it possible to make servers accept more cars and clients?

Like 60?

Dont know if you are aware, but last 3 days we had full servers - so people couldnt even spectate a race because they couldnt join. Many wanted to race but couldnt because of the 40 car limit.
Quote from Vladimir_nose :The picture looks quite realistic, maybe there aren’t enough glare from the light of lanterns and light from the city, or the starry sky, depending on how far the raceway is from the city.

@scawen need look this tho
Quote from lfsrm :Nice to see some progress, I suppose those are prebacked light sources ? do only cars use real time light emission ?

Yeah it looks like baked lighting for pits and night lamp posts. I wonder if thses baked lights will have specular lighting, night would be really flat at without it.

Quote from lfsrm :Also I find the sunset auto exposure very bizarre, it's supposed to simulate eyes adaptation to low light conditions ?

I agree, is the auto-exposition using camera framebuffer histogram like usual or it is "hardcoded" depending on the time of day ?

Scawen, I think you really need to add bloom to your todo list if it isn't already, it would really add to the final image if you have proper HDR data. I recommend an implementation close to KinoBloom (bloom by using downsampling instead of bluring), it allow really long bloom trail with low impact on performance (I used a similar implementation on Nintendo Switch, in a production game).

Anyway, keep it up, I'm really looking forward for the final result Smile

EDIT: It seems Vladimir_nose was thinking the same thing Big grin
WOOOW
I do like it a lot!
It looks awesome.

But I was dreaming about possibly getting the update as a Christmas present, but with "nothing to show" at this point, it fades away a bit.

I expect it will take more than 2 months to finish, am I right?
Quote from NumberTwo :Scawen : Is it possible to make servers accept more cars and clients?

Like 60?

It has been answered before, its not an easy job to increase that number. If its desired at all, increasing grid equals increasing chaos. For cruise though it can be interesting but lots of stuff needs to be changed let alone the fact if people can still run LFS on their computer / internet which such massive grid.

Quote from Scawen :floodlights to work.

Insim controllable LED array color changing track panels would be awesome
Quote from cargame.nl :It has been answered before, its not an easy job to increase that number. If its desired at all, increasing grid equals increasing chaos. For cruise though it can be interesting but lots of stuff needs to be changed let alone the fact if people can still run LFS on their computer / internet which such massive grid.


Insim controllable LED array color changing track panels would be awesome

40 cars are good at this point maybe 4-6 slots more will be good but for now it's not in first place, i think will be good to add 1 slot for Safety Car and making some system that admins can command it with typing only codes, and 2-3 slots for Rescue Car will be awesome too.
Quote from cargame.nl :Insim controllable LED array color changing track panels would be awesome

I hope that the digi-flags (I think Blackwood is the only track to have them at the moment) will eventually display yellows in a sector, blue and red flags etc.
Looking great. My drift touge will be sick at the night. I'm sure.

Quote from mbutcher : digi-flags (I think Blackwood is the only track to have them at the moment)

Yes exactly, this was discussed before so I only mentioned it as a reminder. It seems that work on lighting currently is on top of the list so might be handy to address this in the process. I forgot to suggest; for racing its also important to have mobile units because of the historically very popular open layout racing.

Quote from valiugera :My touge will be sick at the night. I'm sure.

not sure what this means.. Bulgarian saying maybe? Mobile floodlights is also an idea ye.. In case a dark spot is missed. Why not Smile
Quote from cargame.nl :not sure what this means.. Bulgarian saying maybe? Mobile floodlights is also an idea ye.. In case a dark spot is missed. Why not Smile

Okey i was sure need to add more info and pics maybe. I made before drift touge (this on the pic) and it will be very nice to can slide between dark and light zones. On the pics of the report i saw there is no floodlights arround this small road:



Also your idea for mobile floodlights is very nice.
Thanks for the progress report.
All I can think is having a laugh.
This thread is closed

October Progress Report
(381 posts, closed, started )
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