Racer v0.8.27 released!

[Ruud]

Hopefully quite close to v0.9RC1.

Get it at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0.8.27.zip (75Mb)

The changes:
- move_cg=1 didn't offset correctly: cameras, wipers, generic models, brake calipers, exhausts, dials, helmet, carlights Z/far.
- 'rewind' commands for live rewinding (if RTD logging is on)
- Default font made a little bigger again
- onspeedlimiter.rex gets executed when the speed limiter is turned on.
- Shadowmapping tweaked for director and other cameras.
- Fuel consumption reset to 0 when standing still (was 99.9 L/100km).
- A missing controller (defined in a controls file) would crash Racer
- Using something other than default.ini in racer.ini's ini.controls now works (can be saved)
- 3 profiles available in the controller setup screen.
- The names above the cars were black - fixed with floatingname_*.cg shaders.
- The wheel blur models would show in the car selection garage.
- Added grass smoke particles
- Select car/track screens sped up by loading only part of the car.ini/track.ini files. Assumes 'car' is at the top though (!).
- Selecting a car, then exiting would crash.
- When cars stood still, too much was damped away and the differential wheels would rotate a bit.

 

[Ruud]

Would like to use my wheel for next release... pretty please?

What wheel is that? If you get me a profile*.ini that is good for that wheel, I can include it in the presets/ folder. You can check whether that's working:
- make a nice profile for your wheel
- copy the profile.ini (1, 2 or 3) to the data/controls/presets folder.
- rename that profile according to the device name in your Game Controllers panel (i.e. 'logitech_g27_usb_wheel.ini')
- go back into Racer, select a profile and 'Autodetect'. It should detect your wheel and load the presets file now.
If that works, mail me the preset file (the device name is how it is recognized) and I'll include it in future releases.

 

[KS95]

I told you about it before, the MS Sidewinder wheel. It works, but is unusable because I end up with about 6FPS because of it.

 

[Cosmo°]

Ruud: I couldn't test it a whole lot yet, but the updated .exe improved the differential locking behavior noticably. Wheels are still spinning in opposite directions when high locking percentages are used, but the effect is smaller to the point where it doesn't get out of hand anymor (no auto-burnouts/getting stuck so far).

What exactly did you mean when you said you've "taken out the locking from the diff"? They still seem to keep wheel velocities linked when appropriate and indicate the locking state under Ctrl+8...?

 

[luthobu]

0828a works with my tweaks. Amazing. Faster too.

Edit: AVG does not like it though.. LOL (see image).

 

[camsinny]

Hey Ruud, any chance we could get the car's top speed for the current and last lap passed to the elt's? And maybe the last laptime too?
According to the docs there's only the best and current laptimes, though I'm sure in the little box up the top left I saw my last laptime at some point, so surely racer keeps this in memory somewhere.

 

[DavidI]

Theres something odd with skidmarks, I noticed with the lambo that sometimes the skdmarks seemed to flip mid way, it looks like arrowheads, and the skidmarks looked scaly. Below is a photo of skids GD made, they don't seem to flip, but u can see the scaly pattern.

 

[camsinny]

Also, currently the "Best Line" is based on the AI lap. (Red is braking area, green accelerate and interpolated inbetween or something.)
However - couldn't you use the same method as the brake assist thing and compare the current car speed to the AI lap and base the colour of the line on that?
I think that's how most other games do it (ala GT series and Forza). It just looks a bit awkward having the line red when you're basically stopped.

 

[boomer541]

DavidI,
I edited the skidmark image to get better skidmarks, worth a try?

Accidently hit Ctrl-A and got the following image.



Don't like Ruud's shdow settings.

 

[boomer541]

I like my settings better.



If you would like to try my settings I'll post them.

 

[DavidI]

Post 'em

 

[DavidI]

I must comment that the actual driving experience is rather good now, imho with my DFP and the new torque settings adjusted. After hooning around in FSR's M3 for an hour or so, I had to go to the shop. I noticed my own car felt quite horrible & not very sharp handling wise, it had me worried for a second. It dawned on me that there was nothing wrong with it (Mitsu Magna wagon FYI), its just the actual driving experience I get in Racer now seems realistic.
I used to own a Diahatsu Charade (3cyl 1ltr) & a worked Holden Piazza (4Cyl 2ltr turbo). I drove the Piazza most often, but when I DID drive the charade the first few corners i'd just about crap myself as it felt like it was going to roll over. It (& I lol) never did, it was just going from hard suspension to soft, front to rear drive etc, was so different.
Theres a positive comparison there imho

 

[Mr Whippy]

They look a bit better there Boomer.

I'm struggling with the blurring at bigger split distances. In some cases it almost looks like it's being blurred twice, with a double set of halos at the edges.

Either way, there is some fine tuning needed still. I'm fairly happy with them now though. Generally the speed has come back to Racer while getting nice shadows, which is good.


Have you tested much on other tracks btw? Flat surfaces are pretty good for detecting the acne, but you could do with some vertical objects in scene to see how the smCor values work with those too


We could do with a shadow test scene... something like that GTA city conversion, but just all in grey

Dave

 

[Some1]

We could do with a shadow test scene... something like that GTA city conversion, but just all in grey

I can upload my shadow test scene if you like. Although, it is a bit primitive, and perhaps could use more different objects, but overall, it does the job.

The best way to detect acne is to use a shadow test car (whichever car, just change the materials in car.shd to all grey) on a shadow test track and then just slowly rotate the car and see how the self shadows behave when the car's side starts to face away from the sun for example.

 

[Ruud]

That looks much better out of the box here.

A few questions though, is the fade point picking up from the split distance values in Racer.ini, or is that hard coded in shadowmapping.cg, just that your fade distance of 500m isn't lining up with the values from Racer.ini you posted. Are they independent things? Or is the fade always 100% at split 3 end point, and 0% transparrency at split 4 end point?


Nitpicking now.

From the helicopter view, is it worth making the splits car relative, so it's as if you have zoomed out from a car camera view. Right now helicopter view looks a bit pants. I guess the heli cam will never see that far away from the car for that to be an issue?

Blurring algorithm looks nice on near splits, but is very aggressive on distant ones. At about 2pm lighting, my car at about 100m away looks almost like it's got a shadow at both sides, the shadow is blurred so heavily it's 'leaking' back out to the lit side of the car.
This is why I am not happy with blurring, it makes shadows look big and soft and it hurts the feeling of realism. Blur=0 looks better all round to me... that isn't to say I don't like blur, it looks nice when the details are big, but when they get small the blurring is too heavy... is the blurring algorithm easily editable to tweak?


Lastly, should we have smCor for the other camera profile too? It seems smCor values are tweaked for split sizes, and interior cameras are using different ones?

Dave

I've moved the heli down a bit. Also, I now only blur split 0 and 1.
The last fade is in BlendSplits() in shadowmapping.cg; you can clone that and make your own, but the extra instructions are not worth it IMHO. It will be slower again just to tweak the end fade

An extra smCor[] will also cost more performance; I'd rather keep it worst-case for both camera profiles.

 

[Ruud]

Last question

The new FF features are very nice, but I still struggle to copy my real car. I can get the weighting and stuff all very nice.
Then I realised why my real car is weighty around the centre, but light when steering. Power assistance.

Just after driving a friends car the other day without it. Haha, it was seriously hard work parking it.


Is there any easy way to make it so that when we steer, the steering gets lighter, but when we are not, it stays heavier? That might help give that nice weighty feel dead ahead, that then seems to subside when we manoeuvre?!


Right now I feel I can fudge the effect with more inertia than is reasonable. This is probably low in real life, but it does a good job of being noticeable when your not steering, obviously, but when you steer the initial inertia is overcome and that is like the power steering assistance coming in.

For now, I'll tweak it so it 'feels' right, but it's just an interesting observation anyway

Dave

That would be power steering indeed, bringing down perhaps inertia, perhaps damping. If a pump starts adding force, you'd see to decrease damping as you steer. More complex than that; it might be position dependent, or velocity, or torque (which wheels don't measure and send to the host app). I may venture into power steering a bit before v0.9, but I need to be careful there.
BTW tuning friction/inertia/damping to feel the same on all wheels is hardly possible. Only high-end consumer wheels seem to be able to give nice friction and such, so getting those feelings the same on all wheels is quite impossible. Let's just hope players tweak their friction/damping/inertia settings.

 

[Ruud]

Would like to use my wheel for next release... pretty please?

I won't put the joystick polling in a thread, since that's what the drivers already do, and it can generate problems with multithreading.
In your controller.ini, try adding timings:

joystick
{
enable=1
time_per_update_in=100
time_per_update_out=100
...

The '100' is in milliseconds. The default is 10, which means 100Hz. With a lower frequency (higher time_per_update_*) you might get it working reasonably well.

 

[Ruud]

Ruud: I couldn't test it a whole lot yet, but the updated .exe improved the differential locking behavior noticably. Wheels are still spinning in opposite directions when high locking percentages are used, but the effect is smaller to the point where it doesn't get out of hand anymor (no auto-burnouts/getting stuck so far).

What exactly did you mean when you said you've "taken out the locking from the diff"? They still seem to keep wheel velocities linked when appropriate and indicate the locking state under Ctrl+8...?

Two locking mechanisms indeed exist; driveline locked to engine, and wheel locking due to braking torque. The last one was removed; in those cases, if a wheel was locked due to braking, all energy flowed to the still movable wheel.
The driveline lock still exists; this is like the clutch (which also has a locked state); once the wheels start rotating at the same velocity (delta velocity reversal of wheel0 vs wheel1 spin velocity), the diff is locked. Once the torque bias ratio is exceed (plus any preload effects), the diff is unlocked.

While the diff is locked (wheel0 vel == wheel1 vel), the locking torque is calculated exactly as reactionForce0-reactionForce1, to keep the wheels from accelerating away from eachother. If not locked, a real friction torque is calculated based on bias ratio and preload. The nice thing with exactly calculating the locking torque is that the wheels are kept perfectly still (accelerationwise) with respect to eachother, whereas a friction torque would create a jitter as the wheels continiously accelerate away from eachother, and back again (overshooting each step).

Still, the moment at which the diff locks still gives a bit of wheel velocity difference, which should perhaps be reduced to 0. However, every attempt anywhere in the sim to damp things nicely to 0 always leads to trouble...

 

[KS95]

Yeah that works.. ish, thanks.

 

[Ruud]

Hey Ruud, any chance we could get the car's top speed for the current and last lap passed to the elt's? And maybe the last laptime too?
According to the docs there's only the best and current laptimes, though I'm sure in the little box up the top left I saw my last laptime at some point, so surely racer keeps this in memory somewhere.

The 'intermediate' value switches to the last laptime as you cross S/F, that's probably what you've seen.
I don't record top speed, they are momentarily stored as you cross timelines.

 

[Ruud]

Also, currently the "Best Line" is based on the AI lap. (Red is braking area, green accelerate and interpolated inbetween or something.)
However - couldn't you use the same method as the brake assist thing and compare the current car speed to the AI lap and base the colour of the line on that?
I think that's how most other games do it (ala GT series and Forza). It just looks a bit awkward having the line red when you're basically stopped.

Dynamic bestline is nice for >v0.9. I've put it on the grand list.