[RELEASE] Nordschleife Tourist v1.65 beta

Discussion in 'Locations' started by pleclair, Aug 4, 2013.

  1. pleclair

    pleclair Registered

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    Hello,

    To my knowledge, and the many times I loaded, and failed to load a track, I can tell you at 99%, that if you crash past 75% or so on the loading bar, the track have been successfully loaded already, you are probably running out of vram at that point.

    Try to lower textures settings, run with less AI, this should help you load and run the track.

    You see the two arches at the bottom of the rf2 loading screens? When the loading bars approaches the inner loop on the right side of the screen (which is around 75%), this is the point where the track is loaded, it seems that stuff happening after that is related to precalculations, or stuff done for the shaders, I can't tell you exactly, that's a feeling. Cause when you change HDR settings, and turn it off/on, the track will load much slower, and it happens at that spot. After 75%....

    When I change textures settings, like spec values, bump maps, and so on, the game will also take longer to load, same as if I had turned off HDR. So it must be doing stuff related to the shadings and precalculate stuff to help speed up things in sim?

    That is a wild guess, maybe someone from ISI further explain?
     
  2. pleclair

    pleclair Registered

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    Anyone noticed the forest floor texture I used on the right side of the road going past aremburg? :) I thought this heavily crowded spot shouldn't have much grass, and used a forest floor texture instead. I will do this later for all those spots with heavy trees.

    EDIT: I knew I was forgetting something! I have also cleaned up more mats, removing the textures that was unused and taking spaces, like I mentioned in my other post. And we are now down to 538mb package (with the added 18mb from the gp objects that were missing)..

    Once I swapped all guardrails, we will be in the 400 range I think... good news!
     
  3. Ronnie

    Ronnie Registered

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    Great news.

    Do you plan on updating road mesh textures? This darker, green-purple stripe in the middle of the road that goes for the whole lap. It is a big thing for me.. How the road looks like. :)

    Apart from that it is a magnificent project. You should be proud.
     
  4. Marc Collins

    Marc Collins Registered

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    Sounds like amazing improvements!

    I vote yes to the forest floor instead of grass--that will help realism a lot.

    The flickering (on any track, anywhere) is the number one immersion-killer for me. It just screams that you are in a digital world instead of letting your brain get lulled into thinking the screen is reality.

    I don't think the dust issue is just one of amount. The issue is that other than at the grass/dirt BESIDE the track, there wouldn't be any dust on the track or curbs because of the frequent dampness and heavy use of the track. Sure, sometimes some dirt might get thrown on the track when someone gets too aggressive cutting a corner, but do we really want to make that little bit of dirt permanent for all time and all conditions by locking it into the design of the track? I don't think so. When other cars are on the track, the only time you should see dirt is when they are cutting the corners or falling off the edge of the pavement. Then it's a huge signal that you are pushing them too hard, or they are pushing themselves too hard. Heartbeat increases... The dirt adds to the drama in this racing situation! But having dirt all over the place all the time just becomes a distraction and an annoyance.

    The only other important issue I'd like to mention (others have already discussed) is the overall decision as to which track and which time period this version is supposed to represent. The new edge drainage control curbing is a great example. If that curbing is now mostly or all gone, then we have two choices: remove it because we want the track to be realistic to today, or, say that the track is 2004 (for example) and then tailor it to those conditions based on period photos, etc. If the track is the tourist version, then there shouldn't be crowds along the edge of the track, because there is no races happening for them to watch. If the intention is to eventually turn this into the 24h version, then great, the crowds are a nice addition (except for the overdone fires). pleclair, it's your track and you can decide to do whatever you want, but I would plead only that you be consistent so that in the end we have the best version of one time period and one variant of the track.

    Of course, if you are really ambitious, you could always split some of these things out and have two or three variants (a 2014 version, an older version, a no crowds, full crowds, etc.). We don't deserve any version of this amazing track and are all indebted to your tireless efforts, so even one properly done variant will be amazing!! Thanks again and again for working on this.
     
  5. Coanda

    Coanda Registered

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    G'day pleclair, I lowered the AI to 20 and all is ok. Thank you. I am running a 780ti though which I thought could handle 29 AI easily.
     
  6. KeiKei

    KeiKei Registered

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    Thanks, interesting to see how it looks (agree previous was bit too much). I think all these little effects will improve overall immersion.

    About SSD drivers mentioned earlier. Tested with my system (two SSD drives; one for OS and the other for apps) and at first time track loading takes 2 min 32 secs and after that 37 seconds.
     
  7. conrel

    conrel Registered

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    The decreased size sounds very good. I hope to get more cars on the track then :)


    ATM I'm running with 50 AI's containing T5, BES and about 20 Corsa

    sent via Tapatalk
     
  8. pleclair

    pleclair Registered

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    Yeah, I was loading the track yesterday after a change to mats, and I thought it was taking longer than 2 mins... probably in the 3 mins range or sometimes, maybe more, quite a wait actually. But I'm using 5x00 drives, don't remember exactly, speed have changed a bit since I was into this. Back then you had 5400 (think so), 7200 and 10000. No SSDs.. :)

    But actually, I'm surprised that it takes more than 2 mins with an SSD. I would have expected it to be much much faster than this. I was thinking of 30 sec load time or better with this kind of drive. But again, I never saw one myself, so I can only imagine. I know there was server's SSD back then, they costed a fortune, and was blazing fast, installing Win NT on this took a mere fraction of the time of the fastest SCSI back then.
     
  9. pleclair

    pleclair Registered

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    Nice, you should be able to fit in quite a few more with the next update!


    The guardrails will be even smoother now. I couldnt auto smooth some section due to the guardrails being in many objects, so I had to pull in verts at those locations, and it wasn't the best job. I have now merged all guardrails into one object, and working on this as a whole. So the flow of the guardrails should be perfectly smooth all across the track.

    Since I did this a while ago (smoothen the guardrails), I did with mesh smooth, and left it like that. I'm now cleaning the unneeded edges in the center, and adding some vertically. Then I space the edges to the same size for a whole section, and I'm trying to match as best I can the size of the edges, which happens to be around 3-4 meters long. Some sections had ultra long edges, and some much smaller... made it harder to map properly. So having even edges will help the matter once I'm there.

    I can't wait to load those new guardrails up, I'm sure the performance will increase drastically, cause I remember the performance hit using those 2k guardrails (at least for me), it was one of those changes I really noticed.. probably the worst for me.

    So we'll be using even less ram with the new guardrails then we were at first using the default textures that was lower resolution and had like 15 or so files and mat defined.

    Will be really interesting, and might enable some more people who couldnt run the track anymore to run it again! Without resorting to setting everything to low!
     
  10. conrel

    conrel Registered

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    I'm really looking forward for these changes :) I think I could get some more running even now since I used the no of 50 at v0.97n (medium details) so I will try it out.

    Cheers

    sent via Tapatalk
     
  11. Guimengo

    Guimengo Guest

    It's very interesting you're planning to hit the 400mb mark with this track. Goes to show how far optimization goes when you compared this track (accurate or not) to some others that are a third of the Ring but have filesizes into the 2-300mb.
     
  12. Dale B

    Dale B Registered

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    pleclaire, the track is a bonus but I'm so glad to hear you're alright, you had us all worried! ;)
     
  13. Kickbox

    Kickbox Registered

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    I have some bad points, what can be bether.
    Some Textures flickering,
    i have only 17 fps at replay, when i see the car from outer view,
    the grip-level a much lower in comparison with another tracks.

    hope that things are in work now.

    sorry for my criticism, but i only want, that the track be the best "Nordschleife for rFactor2"
     
  14. Andreas Binz

    Andreas Binz Registered

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    Yea the GP and sprint track is driveable. Nice to see the big progress ;)
    Pleclair you are working on the GP and sprint track - this is fantastic. Is the little Müllenbach track also planned in the past ? http://is.gd/S92VBT
     
  15. Kickbox

    Kickbox Registered

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    And what is with that kerbstones?

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
  16. pleclair

    pleclair Registered

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    About the texture flickering, I've hunted down quite some already since 1.5, there should be considerably less in the next update. I won't be hunting the trees yet, so I'll check out the crowds, the stuff around paddock is already fixed.

    I also get much less FPS during replays. I haven't tried to lower replay fidelity... but this should be better with the new guardrails using much less vram. We'll see.

    Grip level is fine imo. I highly doubt the grip level over there is comparable to any other gp circuit... cause it's not a gp circuit, and the track isn't modelled around a recent repaved nord.

    I won't be touching the grip, 0.95 is plenty.

    Lol, I knew someone would find a way over there :) Specially with those missing fences at the bridge :) Lol! Yeah, like I said, I did some work over there, but when I got to a ultra tight hairpin, I didnt knew how to wire this section so it flows good, and stop working on the area. But I did quite a bit, specially the section closer to t13.

    EDIT: Sorry missed a question. Regarding the Mullënbach, if I complete work in the gp section, I will be overhauling it fully, so it will be redone as well, yes. I'm not really aware of the many config the gp section has, but I will do the longest one at first, so it includes all of it? If possible, I don't know yet... I have never driven this track much.

    But I need to sharpen my skills first, cause the work over there is giant. The thing is... nord itself is rather simple. There isn't much building around (well there should be a bit more, but com8 kept it simple to save geometry, and probably because since it couldnt be done good, it probably was better to keep uglyness to a minimum.

    What I mean is, the geometry of the gp building is really simple... and I doubt it would look really good, even if I do change the textures, and manage to find some, since those will be even more track related, and those textures aren't exactly flowing the market.

    So, until I'm confident to be able to do something worth including, it will be kept as it is.




    Well, the texture there was over there depicted this, but was flat to the ground, I thought by giving them real volume, it would add to the realism. Actually, I do like this. It adds an extra layer of danger. You need to be more careful in these areas, and racing with AI proved to be nice, if you wanna pass someone in a section like this, you must be crazy, or know what you are doing ;)

    I won't be changing them either. Sorry if you don't like this change.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 19, 2014
  17. pleclair

    pleclair Registered

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    Regarding the darn guardrails! I spent the day yesterday fixing them, welding verts, removing uneeded edges, etc... spacing the edges to the same 3.2-3.3 meters, so I could face map them.

    Turns out, I unwrap these guardrails, and the uv verts are still placed unevenly. No problem, I thought, I can space them evenly myself, and it should work. I did a couple of guardrails this way, until I got to one that reacted badly to the spacing horizontal... the verts didnt go where they should, so I knew the geometry was screwed...

    EDIT: face mapping on the old fixed guardrails sent the faces flying in all directions... i would have needed to xform each faces back to the needed direction... way too much work :)

    So I pondered about what to do, and remembered a script I had seen before but didnt bought cause I wasn'T needing it, but it turns out exactly what I need now. Was only 5 euros too, so it was rather cheap.

    What I do now is select the edge loop around top, create a shape, around bottom, create a shape, and the sides, so a total of 4 shapes. I then run the script on these shapes, and I can create a mesh based on the parameters I enter. So I can play with how many sections I want, etc, so I can match my edges more easily, since it's updated in realtime until I collapse the edit mesh to edit poly.

    Then these new guardrails can be perfectly face mapped!

    So that's what I'm doing now. Will probably do the fences like this as well once I'm done.

    The flow of the new guardrails should be that much better again then what was done before. :)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 19, 2014
  18. wgeuze

    wgeuze Registered

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    You can also look into spline mapping, just a hint ;)
     
  19. F3n3k

    F3n3k Registered

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    I can't wait to test this new version.
    Do not forget to update the first page.

    Good luck!
     
  20. vittorio

    vittorio Registered

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    Great update!

    I just noticed that I don't get reflections on cars at Nordschleife V1.5. Tried URD EGT and ISI GT cars. I get reflections at Silverstone. I have set ENVIRONMENT REFLECTION = HIGH and ROAD REFLECTION = HIGH. Is this only a problem on my system (something broken) since no one mentioned missing reflections?
     

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