Since this is probably new to all of us I thought I'd share a bit of my experience with getting wet weather to work. - There is no need to micro-manage the no-rain zones. Since Fuji has these "protrusions" from the pit building, I put NoRainZone boxes under each of them to have a zigzaggy edge to the NoRainZone. The resolution of the NoRain effect inside the sim is not even close to high enough for this to appear though. - It seems that reflecting the guardrails/walls along the track will only be possible with either A LOT of work or on tracks that have pretty much no elevation changes at all. Like mianiak found out, you'll need to detach every single segment into its own object and create a new reflection plane for it. I first tried eyeballing it for one section of wall (150 meters or so in length) with one reflection plane but the results were poor. I figure putting each segment into its own object will hurt fps quite a lot in addition to being an awful lot of work so perhaps it should be saved for walls directly next to the track (so they would be quite visible, not just from certain angles) and those which have a consistent "elevation plane" and thus could easily be given an effective reflection plane. I've had some weird issues too, like the reflectedenv not showing up in the material editor after going through four to five materials (manually entering "reflectedenv" into the field worked fine though), or the reflections in dev mode being monochrome or weirdly distorted. The latter two appeared inconsistently and I couldn't reproduce them.
I can confirm all of these from my work, the second and third of which I'd desperately like to see fixed. Nice, concise post.
With the second point, are you talking about seeing the walls in the road reflections, or making the walls/guardrails reflective? If you're talking about making walls/guardrails reflective--I would think this would be a non-issue. Since walls tend to be vertical, they don't receive much rain, and thus won't reflect much. Even Armco mostly just get's a bit darker in the rain on the surfaces facing upwards. Plus, because most of these surfaces are going to be perpendicular to the view, I don't think one is all that likely to see much specular reflection (i.e. reflection map, not the specular component of the shader). I suppose that viewing along the walls/rails 'could' produce some reflections, but, again, I would think it's more likely to be a more diffuse (i.e. fuzzy/blurry) reflection.
Seeing the walls on the road. At Fuji it's a borderline issue since the walls are relatively close (4-5m) to the track in quite some places. So I would like to have them be reflected on the wet road, but it's not going to happen as the only straight bit/place with constant elevation change is the front straight. As I implied, I'm only going to have the pitwall reflect on the track surface.
I feel like we're best off begging ISI to either fix or implement an alternative method of tracking reflections, however CPU intensive it might be.
