Hi, I'm having problems getting AI cars wipers to work in races. I was wondering if they are meant to or not. Can someone help with this issue?
You didn't say if your wipers are working? So I'll presume not. I'm not sure if wipers are working anymore? BUT not all cars have them. I think the ISI nissan gt did have it. So the next question is what car are you using.
They work on all the cars in the mod. Its a FIAGT mod download not ISI but wipers on all cars work well. With any car you drive from the mod in practice you hit the switch and they work no problem. When you do the race same thing the wipers work, just not on the other (AI) cars. Thats the problem.
Hm, what do you mean by not working in AI cars? I presume you can't control wipers directly on AI, the same way as you can't turn their headlights on or off. It's triggered somewhere in code when the AI headlights are enabled, so I assume same with wipers. Currently there is no need to use wipers since rain on windshield doesn't work, so there would be no trigger I guess.
The headlights work, not the wipers. Only on the car you drive works when you trigger the switch. I normally would make like a mimic animated rain drops windshield, The problem is that the rain drops dissapearing dont match the exact moment the blade passes. But close enough for effect.
The problem is as you've been told above that rain drops on windshields don't work at all in the game, so you're trying to mimic something that can't be physically achieved yet.
Its just for effects. It looks okay. Not perfect like Pcars or ForzaMS but not that bad. You set the frequency in the rain drops textures (animated of course, and not to many to look to fake as well ) to match about the speed of the wipers, and once in a few occasions you'de get the drops to wipe when the wiper goes over them and it looks ok. Better than nothing during a wet race. You do what you can with these things seeing they're customizeable, everyone has their tricks and things to make it look that little bit more life like until proper effects get installed. The wet weather setup in this sim is great. Animated artificial raindrops look ok. I just can't get the AI cars to switch on their wipers, for the replays. I don't they do. Anyone know more about this?
Don't worry people I found the fix, you just add the line Autostart=(1) to the .GEN file. It looks great now (for effects). Thanks for your help.
Here is something about what I meant and why I thought was worth getting the wipers to work. Please see images of animated raindrops. (mind the bad drawings!). Notice the drops on the wiper section of the windscreen on the second image. Sometimes they disappear when the wiper passes over them. It all depends how well you set the frequency on the material properties list. It's not that bad for effects. Your eyes are normally glued either to the track or the other cars anyway during the whole of the race to notice the imperfections but sometimes the thing looks real enough. I would recommend it to anyone, actually. The only problem is that you have to make a seperate .gen file for the car for the raindrops textures windscreen and you can't set to changing weather conditions. I got the idea from reading a post once about using textures to animated a gear shift or something which I would not use if the the thing was'nt triggered during the actual gear changes. It's a bit like the heat haze meshes, thats not bad. And you can even make good brake dust meshes though they take alot of work with the alpha channels to get to the right shade, but leave a good impression in the final result.
This is brilliant. Do you have a video of it working? Could you also get the 'static' rain drop area to change slightly to simulate the effect of drops hitting the screen there too? Or even link it to speed so they stream backwards? Studio397 you should give this man a job!
Sorry I didn't get back. I can't make a video, don't know how. The shots were taken frame by frame. There are about 6 animated texture maps in the sequence on the wiper area. The ones on the rest of the windscreen I thought of animating as well but was a little more work to get. Something like trails left by drops that collect other drops along the path is what you need to get for proper effects. It just gets a little bit messy as you make up the maps and not worth it if you don't have the time. But, sure, it would compliment the overall effect.if you can make up a good set.
Awesome! So a set of textures that fills the screen over time, and how is that linked to clearing it in the center where the wipers are? When wipers go on another set of textures that have the wiper clearing marks start playing? We gonna need a boatload of textures for all types of windows and wipers. But is it doable, and on a decent looking level? Argh i wish i had PS... Would start making textures immediately.
Yeah, it's not that hard once you get the hang of it and is just enough for effects. You need to keep the centers (or wiper section of the windscreen parts of the maps) from the set of the maps and use them for the windscreens of the other cars. You just have to make up the outer sections again from scratch. Once the maps are made I would then set the sequence for them at say 0,1,0,2,0,3,0,4,0,5,0,6..... When you put the 0 or the first one from the set (which is incidentally a blank one) in between the others, is what gives the impression the wipers are clearing the drops, all be it, not on all passes. Then you just adjust the frequency settings so the speed of the wipers match about the speed the drops disappearing then reappearing. I haven't spent that much time with it to see if the timing can be perfected, but as I said I'd be too focused on the racing to notice. I might add those 4rth, 5th and 6th gear spins are a must to build your reflexes and to improve your overall driving ability, the smaller ratios take longer for the braking torque of the engine to hault the forces that would expel the body mass sideways, and timing or instinct is the first tool to apply really. Great fun though! Wet weather in sims for mine is a must to have if you appreciate your racing. RF2 has great weather effects apart from the raindrops on the cars, but unreasonably to expect I would suggest, because of the large numbers of the modded cars, the complete effects. But this method, at least, almost provides an mimic of one.
Thanks for the explanation. I think ive read that they might add this later on. Dont know if thats a rumor though. If its possible for the community to do it im sure it will happen as long as the will is there. Very happy you are looking into it. I was wondering about in rF2 if i use the "visor" option in TUNING my PC drops under 60FPS, and it seems its just a texture overlaying the screen so why the FPS drops? Do you think raindrops texture would eat performance? Of course anything you add will take resources but seems 1 single visor texture shouldnt eat that much unless maybe there are effects involved as well. Just got curious why 1 semi transparent texture would eat so much performance. I dont remember FPS drops with the visor mod in Assetto Corsa by Sniper.
@Steven Luppino BTW do you know if its possible to mod adding texture swaps to the tires to show wear or does that have to be coded by S397? Not the best blending values perhaps, but just as an explanation: -00% wear - First clean texture -15% wear - Blending between 1st and 2nd starts -25% wear - Second texture -40% wear - Blending between 2nd and 3d starts -50% wear - Third texture -65% wear - Blending between 3d and 4th starts -75% wear - Fourth texture -90% wear - Blending between 4th and 5th starts 100% wear - Fifth and final texture (most wear) In the example i did 5 different textures with different wear graphics (less textures like 3 would be better since 5 is overkill). First one is clean and shiny and the last is the most worn rubber. Wear value determines the blend starting and the swap. So between 2 determined wear values the 2 rubber textures start blending slowly until it hits the swap value to switch to the next rubber texture. I dont know if this is how it would be done... Would be epic in open wheelers though to see the rubber getting rougher and more worn as you drive. My thoughts were that if this is doable as a mod injection it wouldnt be too hard, but im guessing it doesnt work without being hard coded by S397. I know only of graphics and sounds. Programming/scripting is way over my head.
Here's another good trick you could use if you come from the southern hemisphere. You can mimic, to a certain degree of realism, the spark effects coming from the undertray,. Here's my end result. All you do you is take the drs flap out and use a mesh you make up with the sparks textures and animate the shader with frequency set on high a high number to flash on and off quickly. For example (1,0,0,0,0,0,0,2,0,0,3,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,02..... ). Then position the mesh, use plain flat rectangles 3 or 4 should do, joined at the end and the next one angled a little more than the one under it but join them at the end. Like this Then flip it 180 degrees and position it at the front and under the car, then set the pivot point on both the mesh and in the cockpit info file until you get it to stop or position itself just behind the car when drs is activated. And set the frequency of the animated shader accordingly as well. And this is the result. It really looks great. Better than RF1 even. The only draw back that I'm having is trouble getting it to work for more than one drs zones on the track. If you have two drs zones, it passes the first one normally, but when it reaches the second, the animation of the textures freezes. I don't know how to fix it and had to settle for just one per track. But that's ok if it you picture your average track with not too many long straights. And the sparks last for the whole of the race, even when the fuel load is small and less weight on the car. But they're problems you could easily ignore especially when the result is this good.
About them not working in all the drs zones, it's because I hadn't switched to the main RF2 from ModDev yet. When I did they worked on all of them.
This is seriously impressive stuff! I'd love to see a video of it working! So is this linked somehow to the car bottoming out? I'm interested to know how you trigger the sparks. Unfortunately all my cars are too high so they wouldn't spark unless something has gone very wrong. But it would be a cool feature if the car has lost a wheel, or has a puncture and is driving on the rim to see sparks flying out. Can you do flames and tyre smoke too?
Are you mad? Punctures? When do you get those, ever? These are only a replica of sparks mostly using the drs function to activate it. You have to lose the rear flap though and join it to the wing. It' mostly for the eye but real enough. You start the act. zone halfway down the straight when then the bottom height nears zero from the downforce and speed and stop it when the car prepares to brake for the corner. These things look unbelievable. They wouldn't beat proper sparking but not fully. Anyway, real sparks probably won't be for a long time.
