Yes sorry. I think this is an excellent thread, because it highlights what for me is one of the main things that needs improving in rFactor2. Physics-wise some cars are better than others but it's clear (at least it's clear to me) that the physics are already in very good shape and almost ready for release. The visual side of the sim still needs a lot of work. You could argue that it doesn't need any work and you are happy with it, but if it was released in it's current state I don't think it would be looked upon favourably.. it still looks dated. Some tracks look better than others, some cars look better than others, but from the 'TV' track-side replay cameras the whole thing looks like a clunky mess with shadows appearing and disappearing everywhere, terrible car LOD's and track-side objects which are straight out of the late 90's. Unfortunately it's 2012. Some people are hoping ISI will go back and re-do (or improve) the older tracks and car models before the sim goes gold - I'm pretty sure this will not happen. ISI just don't have the man-power to do it, or rather they do but it'll take till 2015, and by then the cars and tracks which currently look decent will also have started to look pretty old. It's a vicious circle with such a small development team. Personally I would forget about updating the current car and track models and work on the overall engine, HDR, time of day, weather effects etc. As FONismo pointed out the dusk and dawn lighting still looks a bit odd, and personally I find midday to be over-bright and slightly overpowering. It has gotten better though (the midday lighting problem) during the past few builds. It's frustrating because I don't understand how all this lighting stuff works, so I don't know how easy or hard it would be to improve it. It is taking a long time to get anywhere though, so as others have said I really think ISI should consider hiring someone who is proven in this field. There must be someone who could help them. Something which I personally keep waiting for are my lovely raindrops on the windscreen/helmet visor. GTR2 did this will a simple texture which turned on and off like a switch when it rained (no progression, so it either looked like it was raining heavy or not raining at all), it wasn't great but it was better than nothing. GTR Evo improved this with a more gradual rain drop system - the rain drop quantity increased as it started to rain harder and harder. Again this system wasn't perfect and had some obvious bugs (you'd often see spray from a wet track before a single drop had appeared on your visor), but I liked it all the same. Over 2 years ago ISI posted a preview video of their rFactor2 raindrop effect as a work in progress - it wasn't finished at all, but they were showing us the kind of cool new feature they were working on and it got me even more excited about the sim. What happened to it??
The car from rF2 needs to have the drive shafts enlarged to be closer to the real one. There are minor little things with wires/hoses that seem to be different, but being a mechanic I can understand the discrepancies there. The Velocity stacks don't appear to have any screening on top of them in the rF2 car, but it might just be I can't see them is all. In real life there would definitely be screens on top of the velocity stacks. The rear differential housing looks different as well. Not well modeled for that part. Could just be a texture issue though as it seems to be lacking a texture. The oil tank above the diff is also missing a filler neck.
That's why I strongly believe ISI is keeping some tricks up its sleeve. I also noticed that in some time it probably had better car materials, as we can see comparing the car on thumbnails and on showroom.
What i'am missing is the reflection of the sun. The track looks dead and boring. I remembered there was a build with nice reflections in the past. So i did a fresh install of rF2, updated to build 0.68, created the shader files with max settings, made a copy of those files, updated to build 69 and launched modmode. Then i maxed out all settings in modmode, closed the program and copied all saved shader files inside the Moddev\UserData\log\Shaders folder. I also imported some cars and tracks to have something to play with. The result looks very promising. In build 118, the lower picture, you can see the values for ambient and directional light are locked at 255 for each colour.
Wow thoes are quite impressive TOSH , all using earlyer build shader values ?? I wonder if the changes came due to the over all performance we incountered with those builds ?, the stutter ,low FPS, pausing .. everyone was complaneing about ? Most of that has gone now with last few builds but is this the price ? or is that stuff on the back burner while thay work on other issues away from GPX .. ??
I use an old build (069). The newer builds overwrite the shaders. There is no loss in performance stuttering, etc, those effects work always under the hood, but it seems they are faded out in some way. I think "back burner" is the right description. I also figured out that you can activate the wind movement of the trees in modmode, wich looks pretty nice too.
As said previously here, the car simply doesn't match the track environment. The track is way more pleasant graphically speaking than the car. This picture illustrates that very well. Looks like a cut cartoon car overlaid on a real picture (except by the ugly trees).
It's an old build and i can't set material properties. The car looks so strange because there is no reflection from the sky on the car body. Thats something you can setup in build 118 easily.
Very interesting and graphically very nice Tosch... the reflections and lighting on the tracks looks lovely.
lovely however unrealistic. This is no how dry tracks look like. Probably that's why it has been replaced by newer shaders.
I'm looking to make/release a rent a kart style mod and i was wondering if you would be OK if i used your models to base the mod on? - i'm happy to give you 100% credit and would try to replace the models at a later date (if you want?) but my current skills are only with the car physics and track building thanks visit : http://www.gari.pk/
The kart mod? Everything not locked up by ISI you can mod freely for rf2. They have no issues with that.
An intelligent brain would've located the recent Kart thread and/or contacted ISI directly via the main website, there really is no need to Spam every thread from 2012!
