Both directional and ambient light can bounce. Both are light after all When you have cloudy weather, surfaces not directly exposed to any fragment of the sky will still be visible. Usually directional light is stronger so it dominates all that bouncing, but then again - direct exposure to sky light can dominate bounced directional lighting. MaXyM was actually talking about that direct exposure to sky. Sky is treated as light source in game engines, but it has often just one single value called ambient light, and lits every surface eqaually. A big simplification but we lived with it for years Using ambient occlusion maps one could pre-bake amount of direct exposure to sky and use that to control ambient lighting. That's enough to call it ambient occlusion. But you can go further and include bounced sky lighting in your pre-baked ambient occlusion maps. For static elements of the scene all these maps would be static anyway. And one more step you could take would be to include normal vector in your ambient occlusion maps. This normal vector would be a weighted average of where the sky light originally came from to that point of surface. Then you can sample amount of ambient light from a cubemap instead of using single ambient light value. Sky isn't euqally bright in all directions. Of course this cubemap would be rather small and very blurry with just the sky and clouds rendered into it in HDR. Or you could use sphere map since you would only ever need half of that cubemap. Still cheap in terms of framerate, but unfortunately would require some work on implementing it I prefer to have ambient lighting controlled by static maps rather than using some screen space ambient occlusion techniques. These are doomed to fail, because they're based on partially lost input (resterized scene instead of full knowledge of object's surroundings). SSAO is one of these things I look for in options menu, to turn it off I hate that "black mist of unknown origin" making it's way all around the screen
They are always late. I bet 3 weeks Release date late this year? Looking at WIP images I doubt very much.
Since we have time before next media, Tim has time to elaborate something nice. I am hoping for the next media (videos or screens) will be in 1920 x 1080. And if it's a video, a car not alone on the track would be very nice.
If it's possible. As I said before, none of these screens are representative of final quality, so their resolution shouldn't be that important to serve as a dev update. Final quality screenshots for marketing purposes will be marketing quality.
No, one WIP video was held to await two others. I've already openly confirmed we're still on target for 2011. Read into it all you want but the words being written aren't changing.
While waiting for the next media, can you maybe give us some information on how far the progress on the FX effects is and when we might see some screens, Tim?
Thanks for the Screens Tim! One thing on the "Cartoony" appearance from me, I do see some of it in these screens, but then again I did/do from un-photoshopped rF1 screens, but when in game I dont see that at all, just the way I look at it I suppose. The Marshalls/Pit Crews look great, one thing i'm looking forward too from the modding community is maybe more of these types, someone might do the famous Australian F1 Chequered Flag guy (remember him!?) for example, that'd be great! Its little things like those that make a game complete for me, sure you need the main ingredients of physics/graphics/FFB/AI etc, but the little touches do go a long way. One question: The Belts and Switches in the first screenshot (Towards-The-Finish), are they "alive"? as in do the belts sway with the motion of the cars, do the buttons go up and down with a light perhaps? Cheers Marc
In that case, would it not be better to post them as available? WIP is WIP, we understand. Better to post things one by one than in one huge lot, then nothing for months... edit: i admit to being skeptical of a 2011 release; the release date was 'promised', then nothing, then a WIP video was promised, that was delayed.... you might understand why WE are thinking this way
Unfortunately I haven't asked that in a little while. I'll try to find out on Monday. Yeah things often look quite different when they move. Immersion is a pretty powerful thing. Yeah one of the main things I took away from F1 2010 was how important some of the little things are. Birds flying over the car, fireworks, all those things kind of helped to immerse in the race. The stuff in rF2 it does make a difference. As I've said before when you see someone spin or you force someone into haybales it's cool to not only see haybales flying but to drive on down the road and see what looks like a living person waving a flag and looking at you as you drive by. At this point the buttons aren't active. Actually some cars don't have proper hookups for revs/gear yet, but that's not a big deal to do when they do it. The window netting doesn't move as far as I know. The other videos are a part of the same thing. Yep, you're right, I'll stop communicating things which are possibly going to happen. Although I've always worded in a way which certainly wasn't promising, I can understand and won't do it again. I believe he is talking about me posting that some news on release may be posted soon, which although still true, isn't something I should probably be posting, it just causes issue. I don't see the kind of language ("hopefully") as promising either, but I now know the community does. Lesson learned.
I don't see it as promising either, so I'm on your side. I think that some of the community standards are a bit too high as they change the definitions of some words. I advise against rushing out a release. When a company rushes a release to meet a deadline, there will be bugs in the program that should have been obvious to the developers and that should have been fixed before the release.
There will be issues, doesn't matter how long devteam will be working on a product. You may bet on it. But I can see no problem if fixed after release.
Hey Tim thanks for the confirmation on those "looking at you" marshals. Was wondering about that in the wip-screens but never had the time to ask. Cool feature to me. And again, take your time. rF1 has never been as good as now. Unbelievable engine that is. Lasting over 6 years and still improves.
I'm not saying that there won't be bugs. I'm just saying that there will be fewer, and less noticeable bugs if they don't rush the release. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anyways, can't wait to see the new screenshots and videos.
