0.97c impressions: I think as of 0.97 you have nailed the road surface. I am sure it is not laser-scan accurate, but it feels very natural and authemtic/good to drive on to me. I know how much work that was, so while everyone's discussing graphics, just wanted to say thanks for fixing it! Shadow problems are about 99% gone for me--again, great work! The road surface is still too bright/light...sorry. It needs to be significantly darker to match all the pics and videos of the real track (and your splash screen). The trees, as you know, are still quite problematic. The lighting of them is too dark in most spots, but with strange inconsistencies. I would only say to relax and be calm...better to pause and figure-out exactly what might be the solution and then test it perhaps in just a small area of the track with another release some day. You can learn more by doing this than re-doing the whole forest over and over again!! I am also afraid that your monitor might be throwing you off, so either we need to chip in to get you a new one, or, you should use the rest of us to test and give feedback on lighting and colours if you can't be sure you're seeing what most of the rest of us sees. One request--can we get rid of the yellow smoke when hitting the curbs? I don't think those curbs trap dust, but if they do and it's on purpose, then just reduce the effect by a factor of 10 or 20 But overall fantastic progress. To me, at least, it seems like once the tree lighting is solved, we are ready for a 1.0 release. All the other improvements after that will just be icing on the cake!!
Hello Pleclair, first of all thank you for all your efforts and good work in bringing this track to this great sim!! It has taken great steps of development yet. But I have to agree to Marc Collins, those Tarmac texture is still way to bright. Take a look at the attached picture. In fact, tarmac colour is very dark and also the state is very smooth. In comparison to normal road surface this tarmac only has very small grains. View attachment 10427 Sure the colour depends on lighting, but it needs to be darkened a lot. Second issue - the dust: For sure it might be a nice feature, but as there is lot ogf traffic on the Nords it is simply not true. So I would leave it out. If possible, you might want to try to add the same values to the dust (on the road) as the rain has. So if more cars go over it, it woulf create kind of drying (in this case cleaning) line. But colour + size needs to be re-done also. All the other fixed issues are a great step to the next release - keep up the good word mate!!! Thanks a lot!
I cant download, it always stops moving at certain precentage and my app reports 0 data bandwith, can you please uploade to some other mirror?
Hi, Many thanks for this great work. I get these weird sparkles here and there and also a line that looks like a join, see screenshot - View attachment 10428 You can see the sparkles in the distance where the road kinks, and also on the grass to the left.
Hello argo0, First time I see you in the thread, so you must be rather new to this. It's currently a work in progress. The road mesh have been smoothed and cracks have appeared on the road edges. That need to be fixed. I fixed already about 2.5-3km of the track, but went to work with textures a bit instead. First, because it was really needed, and second, because I never did any prior to this, and wanted to have an idea how it worked, and get familiar with uvmapping before moving forward. Cause I already messed up a fair bit of UVs already by moving vertices and forgetting the preserve UVs checked on. I had to fix those UVs by hand... in some case it was a real mess! So there is still a lot to do. In the meantime, I'm collecting ideas, and getting tips, and that might result in me redoing the road mesh from scratch again using a different technique, that would probably be still much faster than fixing up cracks alone. But that is a bit ahead already, I havent gotten all the details yet on how to do this. So for the time being, I'm working on texturing, and improving my skills in this field. At the moment, I'm currently going over my trees again, trying to fix that blue cast in them, and trying to make them a little better still. After seeing Tosch edit to my trees, I'd like to replicate this myself I have just actually edited two trees, and I must say I'm on the right track
Did some testing and as Pleclair mentioned lowering texture detail does the trick indeed. I had it on High and one notch down to Full already made it very driveable (ranging from 75 to 60 fps (on my own though)) If you're interested Pleclair, since I was in testing mood anyways I've done many settings changes and it looks like this track can be easily used by steam-powered pc's seriously, 150 to 100 fps in low and medium settings on my pc is pretty great. Doesn't look great but its an option for the rare occasion I would be racing a full field of drivers on this track and since that doesn't happen much, I don't care Even everything on High it still gives 100 to 60 fps. About the texture size discussion, you mentioned ISI using the big textures so why not on this track. but doesn't the massive length of this track make it somewhat of a difference? Don't know how rf2 loads textures, all-in-one or bit-by-bit? I wish we had a draw-distance slider in settings so we could influence how textures load. Anyways, i'm very happy! thx again for your epic work man, really appreciated! oh minor thing, did a pitstop and boxes are still 50% on pavements/50% in grass. I could pit though but just thought i'de mention it. (lack of width in the pitlane could be the reason though) Plus reviving an old note: would be great if there would be more pitboxes avail. as it is now its not enough to serve a reasonable field in an event which (for our league anyways) has been one of the reasons why we never used the (rf1) track for our events.
Thanks! I agree, the tarmac is already darker. However, I think the picture you sent me doesnt really depict the real color of the tarmac. I know, from the textures I got, there seems to be a newer section of the tarmac, that should be darker, so this might be this picture you sent me. However, I have watched many videos, cockpit and bumper, and I can assure you I have never seen such a dark tarmac appears on a sunny day video. The tarmac is also much grainier. This video is one of the best I have found to really have an idea of what the tarmac is over at Nord. It's the only I have found that is bumpercam and HD1080. Keep in mind, the tarmac is darker in this video because its overcast. I can show you other videos where it is much brighter. This video is also nice to show how bumpy the road really is. You see how michael is soft one the throttle at times. Also, all those 2012-2013 videos arent really a reference for us. The track is modelled after an older Nord... before the repavement.... But it is going to be darker than in 0.97c still... I already made it another good notch darker... almost the same proportions as the previous change. A little less.
Thanks for sharing your findings with others that may be in the same boat too! Like I said, even with those textures, there is still a lot I can do to optimize things. For instance, I have measured that the longest distance where an object can be seen is close to 3km on the main stretch, when you are just arriving on it. So to be safe, I have set all objects in the tracks to be visible at 3.5km. The same with tree shadows, they are visible within a range of 1.2km for all of them. So just by setting the proper lods needed for objects on all the track should help quite a bit. I would think anywhere between 5-10fps is expectable. Also, at the present time, the track (road mesh) is divided into 32 sections as I have explained earlier. Instead of 132 or something like that. So again, this made the track much heavier... again 5-10 fps is probably expectable, since the road objects contains quite a fair bit of extra polygons as previously. Another thing, the new bushing at the start of the track... There was already X shape bushes in the first U shape corner, but I noticed on picture the bushing goes much further back on the straight, so i added more. And also noticed there was quite a bit more than we see in game. So I did a test and replaced the X shape bushes, that had 3 varieties, with 9 varieties of wild billboard bushes. So, even considering the original bushes had 8 polygons each, instead of 2 (counting in tris) now... I still have a bit more polygons for the bushes.. plus I added a new strip of bushes past the overlap where I noticed there was some, and none in game. So when you are in that area, you are dealing with quite a fair bit of extra polys for those bushes. And since they are visible within 3.5km, they are loaded for a while at the same time... so those with tighter specs probably experience hiccups in this area. In the future, I want to create visgroups for the extra bushes. So settings track details to max will results in displaying everything, and settings to high, med, low will trim on the extra. Might not create 4 groups, but 2-3 is probably expectable. So before I trim on the texture sizes, I will wait to see what the optimizations brings to the table first. Also because it's a bugger to redo something I just did... I will matter less to me to redo in a while, I think
Most probably, cause the video I just sent is from 2013, so a few months old... Really good reference for the track too Since you also see full screen and not inside a little windshield with the driver's head blocking some view too
I had to make this a topic of it's own because information like this shouldn't be locked to just on thread. I think EVERY track creator needs to know this. I have a STRONG feeling it's why tracks like VLM's and others run so well and look fantastic while others look basically the same or even not so good and run like crap.
Very good information indeed. I have read it yesterday. However, at the moment, I don't feel like going over something I just did not even a week ago. If that only implied reducing texture to 2048, I would do it right now, but I'll need to change the UVs again... However, there is something I dont understand. I know, and knew this before reading the article as its just common sense, that the 4096 wouldnt be displayed fully on a 1920x1200 or whatever else screen. However, I wanted to have the grass displayed as grass when the camera is close to it in replays, or while taking screens. Not just a bunch of blurry pixels. If I simply resize my textures using image size in photoshop to 1024... you will not even make out a single grass blade. Its will just be a bunch of pixels. If I resize to 2048, the grass is still seeable, so that might be a good compromise. If I resize the texture itself, so the grass is display at the same proportions in 1024 than in 4096, than I'll be left with a tiny patch of grass, that will repeat itself way too many times, and it will be easily seeable? So can you give me a concrete example, with for example, my current 4096 grass, say grvl_dirt.dds? How would you make it into a 1024 or 2048 texture, keeping the same quality when we zoom in on it, or in some replay cameras? Like I said on this matter before, I'm not arguing with you, you all clearly know more than me. But the goal here is have the grass keeping this sort of appearance while zooming on it, and still having little to no visible repetition? I cannot conceive this at the present time, that's all Thanks for the info, there is clearly not enough informations on this whole matter.
Thank you very much, pleclair, for your great work. I have the v97a and I feel the grip of the track very very low. Is this my problem or is a common issue?. I'm an old GPL veteran, so I know well how to enjoy driving on ice and I know well this version of Nordschleife, but I have to do all my best and big efforts to keep the cars in the driving line and even keeping the cars (driving too slow) on some parts of this version of Nordschleife. I have saved a Real Road with lot of AI driving during 10 laps, and then I feel a bit better grip in some parts of the track, but just a little bit, and in some other parts of the track the black Real Road does not appear and the track is extremely slippery, and driving becomes very very delicate and too complicated, worse than driving on ice, because with both sliding and skidding I wear the tires out too much. The corners in Nordschleife are very close to each other, so there is no time to go down the tire temps. Another thing is that I have activated the Transparent Trainer and even when I drive 3 or 4 entire (and correct) laps I never see the ghost car. Do you know why it doesn't appear? Anyway, congratulations and thank you for your time.
Wonderful. It works really great for me. Driving alone = 80 -140 fps. Start with 20 AI's 60 fps. This is high/max settings with shadows set to high and shadow blur to quality. Yesterday I experienced some performance issues with shadows set to max and 29 AI's... 25-40 fps in the start. But lowering shadows and a bit less AI's it works great. Some graphic bugs I've seen is trees that disappear while driving by... they disappear just a second before they disappear out of my view, so eventual shadows also disappear just in front of me, wich looks a bit odd. Also dust is created on random places on the tarmac, and pretty much everytime you or AI touches the curb.
Do you have 0.97c version, disappearing trees and shadows are fixed in this (latest) version. Download link is in this post: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/14150-RELEASE-Nordschleife-Tourist-v0-97a-beta?p=215661&viewfull=1#post215661
Ooops downloaded a new version just a few days ago, thought I had the latest... Downloading now, let's see if it's fixed. Thanks
Build 0.97c is now failing to load with an error on TREE_LARGE_18.dds Fixed. Track textures not on high setting. I usualy run on high, not sure when I changed it. Thanks Jim
