Sure thing mate! I will do that. God I wish I didn't have to go to work today. I'd much rather be racing the Matra on that wonderful track of yours. The curse of being a grownup lol
Looking forward to the update of this masterpice. I had to turn off transparency aa because I had some transparent trees at some third party tracks. So I'm excited to see the improvements. Thanks for all your hard work.
There is very little work left to do before release. TBH, I probably could have had it released a couple of days ago if I was so motivated. I expect the last couple of tasks will trickle in today/tomorrow, and it should be public before the weekend, or on the weekend.
You are a most generous person with your talent and enthusiasm. The rF2 community salutes you and are eager to experience the updated Longford. It's already a fav in almost any vehicle. Actually, I'll give it a try in the shifter kart
Here I have some screenshots showing the new house model View attachment 15979 View attachment 15980 A culvert that was introduced in 0.97, but most people probably don't notice it because they're too busy trying to stop View attachment 15981 And some shots of the new tents View attachment 15982 View attachment 15983
RELEASE POST for version 0.98!! Release post!! version 0.98 now available from the downloads page +@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ V0.98 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@+ This release is primarily a maintenance release to fix an AIW issue. - AIW: Fixed issue where some low-grip/high speed cars would miss apexes, and the final corner entirely (added AI path kinks before turn in - doesn't appear to concern cars which already worked well). - AIW: Attempted to help some modern GT type cars avoid first lap crashes by narrowing AIW corridors. - AIW: Some improvement for historic cars (BT20/Howston) crashing in wet conditions at kink before Tannery Corner. - AIW: Note, Since early builds there have been three variations of the starting grid, so experimenting with those may help avoid first lap incidents (eg. Staggered Grid for modern cars). - House: Replaced old GPL model of large house on driver's left, after rail crossing (new model is ~11K triangles). - Tents: New tent models and textures to replace the old ones. - Road: Slightly eased some bumps (track mesh) on the flying mile. - Road: Added slight hump/dip between turn two and the viaduct (was hard to be sure from reference photos, but newly acquired reference photos from a different angle make it much more obvious - thanks to Cooper997). - Road: Some changes to material specular settings. - Terrain: Some changes to texture & material specular settings. - Terrain: Some changes to some normal maps. - Trees: Improved tree settings for people not using transparency AA (should look less bad). - Grasses: Improved tree settings for people not using transparency AA (should look less bad). - Bushes: Removed some shadow casting in viaduct area. - Footbridge: Partial update/partial remake of textures. - Crowd: Minor tidy-up work on the old 2d cardboard crowd (yes, still the same old crowd textures at this time). - Tyre/Tire Markers: Slight reduction in height of collision mesh (will still flip cars with low floors etc). - TDF: Small changes to road bumps in terrain physics definition file. - CAM: Some changes to trackside camera clipping planes to reduce z-fighting (not perfect, but better). - Maintenance: Deleted a few megabytes worth of old textures from Maps.mas. ===================================================== ===Known Issues, Non-Implemented Features, & Notes=== ===================================================== ===The AI - Sometimes they'll hop onto the dirt banks on the inside of a few corners. - Some cars may collide/crash in the first corner of a race (more likely in rainy conditions), in the Viaduct section, along King's Bridge, and on approach to Tannery Corner. - F1 and some other cars may collide with tyre markers. - The AI cars struggle to form up to the 3-2-3-2 'Hisoric Grid' after a warmup lap, so skipping the warmup lap or using a different grid layout might be considered. - ISI Historic Spark and Eve F1/F2 cars don't usually make it around the final corner (running AI calibration in a test session may help). - Level or Staggered Grid layouts may help prevent first lap collisions, as well as reducing AI Aggression settings in the menu. ===Headlights - Some cars may not have their headlight beams rendered on road, terrain and objects correctly or consistently (includes ISI Corvette C6 cars) ===Animations - Some of the animations have small glitches and sometimes the marshal's headphone's are floating (not yet a fix priority). ===Wet Road Reflections - Fences and some terrain areas are not currently in the reflection list due to the nature of the reflection system. - For some undiscovered reason, reflections of some trees/bushes/buildings etc may appear and disappear (popin/out) in the road reflections in a manner inconsistent with the mesh's origin (efforts have been made to bias the system to produce more accurate results). ===Shadows - Some popin, popout, and awkward shading of trees/bushes/buildings etc. ===Poles and Fences Flickering in the Distance - Distant poles and fences may flicker due to the difference between shaded and unshaded parts of the mesh. There is a constant reevalution of which part of the mesh to render into the available pixels, and where bright and shaded gemometry is close the rendering alternates between bright and shaded pixels. Using something like nVidia's DSR should reduce flickering by rendering at higher resolution and then the resultant downsizing for display will have blended the brightness transitions. ===Bridges - Bridge structures don't currently extend down into the river bed mud. When bridge structures are updated, they will. ===Terrain Shader - Using terrain shader launched in rF2 build 860. Older builds of rF2 will not render terrain correctly. ===Terrain Decals - Slight blur/darkening where grassy road-edge decals blend into terrain. ===Normal Mapping - In a couple of areas one or two of the normal maps don't seem correctly oriented with the lighting system. ===Performance - There is a framerate drop of around 30% when exiting Mountford Corner (the final corner) and in the Viaduct section (there should be FPS gains on low track detail modes if needed). ===General Efficiency / Optimisation - This project was started as a beginner some time ago, and has been a learning experience. Skillz, philosphies, techniques, and technology have progressed in that time. As a result, and the size of the circuit, updates are a rolling process, and there isn't usually time to do all desired updates at or by a specific time. It is planned that the older models and textures will be updated, optimised, or replaced. ===Continued Development - The main target of development will be updates/remakes of a number of buildings/structures. - 3D trees for track-side trees are planned, but takes too long to reach my desired accuracy at this time (some unreleased work has occurred but it is time-intensive). - New tent models are planned (implemented in v0.98). - New house models are planned. - Separating painted lines from road textures (pitlane and grid lines are already separate).
You deserve a medal for your dedication to this track! It is very impressive how you've managed to keep framerates so good and have all that texture richness. I cap my framerate at 80 and even adding 30 BT-20 AI, it never dropped below 60 (start, viaduct, and final turn on first laps are the hard part, mostly due to AI bunching up).
You be the man Woo! Had a quick race in the BT-20s. Driver next to me said "Moo over" and sent me spinning into the cow pastures. Awesome, hair-raising fun. Keeps getting better and better. Thanks Woo.
