I'd like to raise the suggestion of a second RealRoad material that cuts out the racegroove and marbles stage so that it shall have less of an effect on performance than the "full" fatty RealRoad material. Access Roads or tarmac runoffs really don't need the racegroove and marbles stages, yet require the rain reflection stage. At the moment I can not differentiate and have to slap the full RealRoad material on them. In the case of modern F1 tracks that's a lot of polys that are unnecessarily taking up ressources for something that is never going to be used. Luc has mentioned he wants to see such a material as well but I want to reiterate the necessity of it again. Thanks to a tester who put in a lot of effort to track down I have a clearer understanding of just how bad RealRoad can affect FPS on cpu-limited systems. I could barely make the track work for him and I feel we could make tracks much more fps-friendly for no loss of quality or features.
Hmmm...Just thinking "out loud" here, but it seems like you might run into issues when it comes to drying. And if it 'has' to take cars into account when drying, then it seems like (what I would imagine) the majority of the 'fat' is still there. I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what's going on under the hood, only the engineers could say for sure where optimization can be done while retaining graphical fidelity. I'm not trying to shoot down your idea either--I definitely agree that a 'lightweight' version of RR would be very useful.
Fair point. For runoff areas I entirely wouldn't mind if the area would dry as a whole by environmental influences only. With no drying from cars or drying lines. That fidelity is not needed for those off-line areas that no car would usually drive over anyway.
Well, it all depends on how it's handled, really. I believe I remember hearing that the rate of drying will be dependent on environmental factors such as amount of direct sunlight, rh%, etc. If the access roads are drying at a scripted rate, there could very well be quite a noticeable seam (which, we might be able to "cover up" by putting a drain grate between the two surfaces or something). If it in fact takes all of these other things into account, then there's a possibility of not much savings in performance. Again...it all depends on how it's handled.
