New User: Graphics Seem Disappointing - Am I Missing Something

LOL, I was answering the wrong post: sorry for that.

 

the grass and sky textures detract much graphically

 

It seems to me that it's people you're talking with on the forum trying to convince you. Our product has a demo, there's plenty of gameplay videos around. It's not hard to see what it looks like as-is. That "as is" has changed, will change, but might not change how YOU want it to. Which is why, since 2012, we have openly stated to buy the product based on what it is as the time you decide whether to. We're not the ones doing what you said.

 

Way too many minds have been made up to get anything interesting as this through.
I totally know what you mean, and I've been studying that myself to some extend.
During winters here in the north (Finland), day is about 4 hours, not much more than sunrises and sunsets here.
Summer pretty much the same even if the day lenght is 23 hours at its best, sun makes such long "circle" around the sky that its low most of the time. Photographers fantasy land in that aspect for sure.

About the time of day and how it looks, personally I have achieved great results while trying to get the "most realistic as possible" in AC by modding the .ini's no matter what time of day.
Takes some doing, but hey thats part of the fun.
Similar project in rF2 would be the HDR profiles I suspect!? Never poked my head around there to see what is possible, but I would very much like to do some graphical piddling around rF2 rather than the obvious AA this and AF that.

 

So now its comes down to lighting and time of day and location on the planet is so important.

I do not care as long as it gives believable ambiance.

You all be happy to hear I sick of trying to justify my position that rF2 is the best looking graphics.

I leave you with this thought...............

lol



I have never said the grass adds immersion......

See my comment above.

Prove it ! lol


You should add IMHO to your beliefs.
---------------

P.S.

One comment I have made on grass 3 years ago..............

I don't think a single person commented positively, I think I got bagged for bagging rF2 ? lool



Okay well just look at GP's pictures of the era.............NOW THAT is PROOF ! hehehe

Look at any decent photograph of 1966 ( better yet some utube video )
It will show long unkept weedy grass in many places ( not lovely looking AC grass ) and at other places it was more manicured like rF2.

So both rF2 and AC Belgium and Italy are wrong and AC is total opposite to rF2, it has long grass everywhere.

 

ISI tracks don't use 3D grass, that's the reason it isn't "long". If I remember correct, reason was because it doesn't work well with their engine. It's another thing I don't necessarily agree with, 3D grass can look very nice (example) even in rF2.

Sky is not a texture in rF2, it's dynamically generated. Still, it could look better than this.

 

Lol and lol...

Good graphics are not matter of taste, they're there or they are not either. Good graphics simply must to look like the real thing. "Different visual style", sure... different from reality. But no surprise here, you're always up to cover all rF2 weak points whatever it takes, it's funny to see to what extent which you'd go for it.

Back to topic, yeah, graphics are not good, there's some special combos (day time / car / track) that can deceive you as the screenshots you saw. But, in general, GFX are bad.

Enjoy the great physics and Forcefeedback and never mind about GFX, you'll lose your life time trying to fix something helpless.

 

Chemtrails, lol (only half joking, lol)

 

This is the only forum I've ever seen where when someone says they like something about the software, they get jumped on by haters telling them that they're wrong and they shouldn't like it. It's even more funny when it's about subjective opinions. Oh the internet. Do these same folks tell some random strangers at a bar that their choice of beer sucks? Literally after years, why do these same folks keep returning trying to spoil others fun? Do they really feel that that they're that special or are their lives so boring that their only life skills are being able to stir the pot in internet forums? Rhetorical questions btw.

 

+111111 mediocre reigns supreme not quality. Most of the general public are largely uninformed and just choose whatever has more initial, "on-the-surface" "wow" factor rather than actually understanding what is actually better. It's the reason why Plasma TVs died and LCDs won even though Plasma looks way better. You go in a store and the LCDs are cranked in brightness and stick out like a sore thumb and they catch everyone's eye and most then choose those since the initital impression wowed them.

95% of consumers, including racing videogame purchasers, are just average consumers who know nothing related to the product category they are looking to buy into. Heck, people even defend Forza and GranTurismo as being proper sims.

Most buyers of all product-categories are extremely uninformed/uneducated, that's why it's all about the "wow" factor from marketing pretty graphics, over hyping tons of preview pics and keeping on releasing more preview pics over and over long before the release, tons of flashy videos with effects and music added to draw people in, get them pumped up, get them talking, etc etc.

RF2 doesn't do that, it takes on much more of an engineer or professional/industrial product/tool approach. Where it's as if it's only made for a specific person-type (engineers) or specific businesses (pro-product/industrial tool), but in the end it's also, and even more so, a "regular" videogame for "regular" people, and ISI needs to start getting more "hip", "flashy, "extreme" with all that marketing stuff.

It's difficult when you don't have the crowd-wowing, eye-poping graphics, but no impossible. I mean they could make all sorts of flashy, overly-dramatic/enthusiastic videos about realroad, rain, lines, night/day cycles, tyre model complexity, visual tyre flexing, yearly season affecting lighting, latitude and longitude affecting lighting, true dynamic clouds, all sorts of different amounts/levels of rain/clouds/sun, etc etc.

Pump out fancy, "shiny" videos, not 1 video mentioning all those features, but a whole host of videos talking about each one individually, with fancy camera angles, hip and pumping-up or overly dramatic music, etc.

They did one pre-rF2 release showing the visual tyre flexing with some sweet music, they need about 50 more videos/trailers like that. Infact I've seen that vid probably 10 times, sweet-ass video that probably pumped-up a lot of ppl into buying rFsctor 2. BSNismo made good ones back in the day, there were 4 or 5 from him that I loved, especially the 60s Brabham at 60s Monza one.

PCars and AC keep pumping-out these sort of "fancy", dramatic, high-quality vids, even for small announcements, or just for no reason other than pure marketing. It's not even about competing with other games, but simply just abiut getting your product noticed and "out there", and about getting people pumped/excited. Keep shoving RF2 in everyone's faces just like what every big, popular game out there does.

 

Given the time I often spend just watching the AI race, I gotta agree with Hexagramme and others. RF2 doesn't have the glossy and sometimes toy like apperance of AC (tilt-shift narrow DOF) but it looks in it's own way very "realistic simulator" like, it feels like business.

View attachment 15396 View attachment 15397

AC does have a very different style (pictures taken from a SimHQ screenshot thread):
View attachment 15398 View attachment 15399

But just because it's different to me isn't necessarily better.

In the end it really doesn't matter. Even if we put down the driving feel and force feedback between these two to individual taste, there is no question which title has more necessary features to actually simulate racing from start to finish. And right now we are getting swamped with awesome content of every category you could think of. I wouldn't ever change that for a few animated blades of grass...

 

I not commenting on graphics in here like I said.

I agree Jamie and my way is too answer said posts with sarcasm or by glorying RF2 even more.

On what planet does any of it do any good.

Having well informed people telling others why they are wrong or how they should act is a bit tiresome.

and like take shaders rather then bring them up every week how about one thread so it drops out of existence.

We ALL KNOW okay.......... all you do is put a downer on someones experience.

Rejoice in rF2.

 

You can't have been to enough forums. Here's a thread where some people are debating how many days are in a week. Enjoy.

 

So I gave rF2 another shot aswell, loaded up the new Clio's on the new Lime Rock and after reading here that RF2 needs a low sun and I went chose 5PM which sounded appropriate.
Well, what should I say. First of all, shadows. Why do they still get drawn 10m's in front of the car? This is easily something that makes it look like absolute crap, it feels unoptimized and unfinished from the start without even looking at anything else. Same with the stupid on the guardrails where you clearly see some short of shadow or hard draw distance limit.

2nd the colors, it just looks so washed out. The trees around the track (since Lime Rock is sort of a big bowl in between the trees) almost look like they're gray, for some reason instead of being lit by the sun on one end of the track and being in the shadows on the other end it simply looks as if someone forgot to saturate the colors.

These are 2 things that are immedeatly and obviously visible when you load and it just makes it look alot worse than it could be, or rather should be. There's clearly a strong engine behind the software put small things like this are just a huge letdown.
And then there's offcourse the fact that everything is very aliased unless you use a negative LOD clamp fix but I don't know if that's Nvidia's fault or an issue with RF2

It's a shame because there's some great texture work going on, the lightning engine is obviously very powerful and dynamic but it gets let down by these sort of issues which mess up the entire aestethic of the game

I'd love to take some screenshots to show exactly what I mean but I accidently closed my launcher and since it only opens once per reboot and I dont' feel like rebooting, it will be for another time.

 

A possible solution:

- Disable shadow blur.

- If you have changed texture sharpening in your player.JSON file, set it back to the default value of 5.

These two things can make a big difference to the shadow draw distance.

 

I thought shadow blur just delt with the jaggyness of the shadows? I remember doing some testing with it and found out that shadows on high with blur on low looked better and performed better than shadows on max with no blurring so I went with that one, but I'll give no blurring a shot.

And you're right, my texture sharpening is at 3 (lodbias -1) but I suppose this setting is irrelevant for me because I use the negative LOD clamp fix for Nvidia drivers which should automatically set that setting to 0 regardless of what is in the .JSON file. No matter, I'll give it a shot aswell

 

A setting you have it making them draw that way. Change it.

 

You must have some special settings because it's always there, sure it gets minimised to a certain point with shadows at max but even with shadows set to high its unacceptable how close they pop in.
What I ask myself is is this really the best solution to "optimise" the shadows at lower settings? Because this is exactly what I mean, the engine has lots of potential but it gets let down by the stuff like this which is probably WAD
Obviously anybody who's first test is with shadows at the "High" setting is immedeatly put of by how bad it looks.

And I'm only talking about shadow draw distance at the moment, I'm not even mentioning the nausiating shimmering shadows from trees bring forward because that's a whole other can of worms. This isn't as easy to see in a still image alltho the images below already show huge aliasing for shadows that are a couple of meters away. The ones close to the car look pretty sharp but there rest far from it.

This is all with default player.JSON by the way.
Shadows maxed out, still clearly shadows poping in alltho as I said minimised.



And this is shadows on the high setting, nothing has immedeatly changed about the shadow quality itself but it's literally a cut off line where it abruptly ends. (Yes my line isn't straight, but that's the point it moved along with me)

 

Sorry to go OT, but I just drive. My graphics appear just fine.

 

Well, thanks for making me think of a lovely Bruichladdich at work...

Uwe