Hello Racers,

In our July progress report we talked about the realtime sky that allows day to night transitions and showed screenshots of the Kyoto track area. Since then, Eric has been working on South City and Scawen has continued with the lighting. More roads have been opened up and you can drive into the multistorey car parks. Road surfaces, fences, barriers, objects and various buildings have been updated. There is still a way to go but we would like to show you some of the changes so far.

With realistic brightness values, the difference between night and day is very extreme. For example a shot taken in street lighting may need around 4000 times the exposure of a daylight shot. To compare LFS with real photos we have a manual exposure mode with the same settings as a digital camera. In normal use, exposure and white balance are automatically controlled.

A bloom effect has been added for the High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode. This spreads the light out from the brightest points in the image, to simulate the similar effect that happens in a camera or your eyes. In game this helps bright lights or the sun to look a lot brighter.

Some recent updates: The sky is now generated on the graphics card, saving CPU time. The sky is updated more than twice per minute around sunset and sunrise. Sun brightness and colour is more accurate. Our shaders have been updated to allow better sky reflections on surfaces that are not perfectly smooth. Headlights now illuminate nearly all objects including other cars.

We hope you like the pictures and videos!

Please check out our earlier reports which show the changes on the other tracks.

- LFS Developers

Further reading: Graphics Progress Report: South City - part 2