Cheers for the great smoke.
Tarmac smoke is perfect. Really perfect. Some might want it to linger slightly longer, but its really really good.
Issue: I noticed now that there are two files: "tyre smoke" and "tyre smoke grass". Since when using your mod tyre smoke on tarmac look great, but when hitting grass it looks crazy (lots of Bright dust flying high up), but i got a bit confused since you use the "tyre smoke grass" file instead of the "tyre smoke" one. I remember long time ago (too long to remember details) we changed tarmac smoke in the "tyre smoke" file, and not the "tyre smoke grass" one. Im guessing you checked all that already, but feels like the grass change could be avoided if using the first file for tarmac. Im probably wrong.
Does it mean the "tyre smoke" file hold the grass dust? I need to get the grass dust sorted or i cant use this mod since it looks nuts when hitting grass lol. If anyone have an idea what to tweak to lower grass dust please let me know. Cheers.
Thanks!
Here's how it works: Official Kunos smoke texture (a .png image file) is grayscale. It doesn't contain any color information. Then, when tyres hit non-tarmac, it's treated by different .ini file, namely tyre_smoke_grass.ini. Kunos official version colors their grayscale texture (which is white on Tarmac) into muddy/dark grayish brown. But my .png file already contains a color information. And it's not just 1 tint of blue, but various slightly different blue tints, copied from photographs of real cars doing burnouts.
When applied over my blue image file, the default AC smoke_on_grass.ini makes the dust color weird. Because it's meant for grayscale image, not blue. That's why the .ini's seems a bit illogical. I adjusted COLOR_BASE values, which are just RGB values, to eliminate the blue from my image file, when tyres hit non-tarmac.
The smoke itself is treated by tyre_smoke.ini. In theory, it would be possible to use only grayscale .png file and then change the COLOR_BASE values in tyre_smoke.ini. But then it would be just 1 tint of blue.
However, I've made experiments with this style, and it looks pretty ok, very different. Also tried with different smoke textures, I've been able to get much more and thicker smoke, without any FPS effect. Actually it might improve FPS, since the grayscale image takes less space from disk, and seems it actually affects (minorly) FPS performance, even though the filesize is really small. Maybe because it's repeated numerous times, and stacks up somehow? I don't know the reason.
Didn't want to include it into mod, since I'm not sure what to think about it... I was very surprised by the good feedback and downloads for my mod, so didn't want to change it too much. Now the smoke on grass is a bit more transparent than official Kunos, the values for this is OPACITY_BASE if you want to tweak it. Default is 0.25, now it's 0.20 to make the dust on grass a bit more subtle, while keeping the smoke thick.
Value for color is COLOR_BASE, these are 3 RGB values, so first is Red, then Green and Blue. In case you want to tweak it
COLOR_RANDOM means it adds slight variation to the base color, to make it less obvious it's repeated image file. But I haven't touched that, and probably making those higher would make it look weird.
OPACITY_VELOCITY_BASE in both tyre_smoke.ini and tyre_smoke_grass.ini is a negative value. It means how fast the smoke/dust cloud will die. In theory smoke could be made to float longer in air, but it would reduce FPS. With monster PC this might be worth testing. Default value for smoke is -0.1 but putting it to for example -0.07 would make the smoke stay in air longer.
In that case you want to also tweak SIZE_VELOCITY_BASE and put both values higher (width, height), because that means how big the cloud will stretch, as time passes. If you just tweak OPACITY_VELOCITY_BASE, it will look unnatural as the smoke cloud doesn't grow in size, as it fades.
SLIP_LEVEL means how much the tyre needs to slip (duh) for smoke to appear. I'm not sure of all values and their meanings, I haven't touched others than RBG/transparency since I trust Kunos has reasons why they are like they are, and I don't want to make smoke bigger with the cost of FPS drop. But maybe I should try more stuff, to see what can be done.
