Hey, One feature that will really improve the sense of immersion during night driving is the visibility of the rear lights. I noticed that the rear lights of other cars are bright till a few car lengths and then they quickly start to disappear. In real life you can see rear lights for miles away. I would love to see this improved. Watch the video below to see what i mean:
because rear lights (as well as headlight glows) are done in old rf1-like way. But even in rF1 there are flares effects provided by custom shaders. When I saw Menage's tail light glows I didn't know should I cry or laugh Another reason is that there is no light intensity simulated correctly. Most lit point (emissive 255,255,255) is just too weak. Maybe it should affect HDR more. But mainly emmisive material is just one which is not affected by light changes (diffuse or direct). but it doesn't simulate light emition.
I want better rear lights as well but imo that's a minor problem regarding lights. What's really crucial is overall illumination of track from headlights, I hope in rf2 it is sort of automatic so everything will be correctly illuminated. In rf1, 90% of tracks looked terrible during night, for example tarmac was lighted but trees were not. Also most headlights could only see not too far. There were only some exceptions, like VLM Sebring or Potrero de los funes which had many lamps so it looks real nice at night. But if we take nordschleife, that was hardly suitable for night.
Bump Also it would be nice to see better light beams and glow effects (for cars and tracks lights) For example three night shots from modified Mustang & Sebring on rfactor 1. I must say that it looks ten times better in motion because it's constantly changing depending on angle view and distance.
This does ring a bell, I had thread where I started exploring possibilities of headlights in rF2, haven't had chance to explore further, but thread is here: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/3408-Improving-lights?highlight=headlights However I'm not perfectly happy with the result as some things did appear too bright, some too dark for my liking, don't know if latest build with hdr on might work better, if there would be headlights, which seem to be broken, at least I don't get projector, only glow when I turn lights on. I could make low/dipped beam and high/main beam with clever trick of putting four projectors and two of them had initial state on, so they were always lit, for night racing one might perhaps make upgrade file, lights on and lights off and use light switch to turn main beam on and off, that might provide some amusement value. Anyway as in rF1, also in rF2 lights are not utilized to realistic levels at least by Meganes by default, it is more like driving only fog lamps on. In rF1, lights were casted from up to down, also many objects did not have 'light is casted on' parameter, which resulted trees to remain dark, however there were some issues with that parameter that did cause black edges to my trees at least so many chose to keep that parameter off for trees because of that. These are from my rF1 headlights document: I store such stuff on my site so I can find it when I have forgotten about how to do the stuff, link for lights in rF1 is here: http://finnsontrack.weebly.com/lights-rf1.html What you see in camera is not at all what you see in reality, here is video from my car, with those lights I could really see at least twice the area seen at the video and close at front area was not even nearly that bright, but what I see in default Megane lights is what I would assume seeing if watching video from it. Problem with cameras is even worse when there is rain and night, this is nothing like reality, even that car had rather poor lights, especially reflectors could be seen far further and lot more clearly, also side of roads too (car was over 1600kg and ~150Nm NA diesel torque it did not go faster, flashing is windshield wipers): So anyone adjusting lights based on video footage will end up way off from what illumination is in person. I find this aspect lacking a lot as I have spend most of my time on road at night so it looks just so wrong compared to what reality is and I hope that these examples and explanations can brought up the issue and how it makes night time racing to somewhat not interesting before issue is refined.
