Why is it so much work to get decent colors in RF2?

IMO, rF2 would do well to redo the lighting/shading/rendering for physically-based rendering; PBR would be much more apt in a sim than it would in a Mario-like game, or even a shooter. I know they've tried 'some' things here and there (i.e. a high-luminance sun), but there's still a way to go (i.e. using 'roughness' for specularity instead of specular color/power; and a separation of metallic and dielectric materials). One place that would be tremendously difficult (although, they do seem to be making strides in this department) is that then nearly every object would require convolved (convoluted?) reflection maps or some sort of semi-dynamic ambient lighting (for the different times of day). They've done some great things recently with the parallax-corrected cubemaps for the road reflections (noticeable on Loch Drummond), but they're only specular reflections at the moment (i.e. mirror-like, not 'rough' reflections).

Anyway, that's just my opinion; I'm sure they're already aware of these things; and I don't expect anything to change, because it would likely mean re-authoring so many textures for existing content. However, if there was some way to shoe-horn some of this stuff in with new shaders or something for new cars/tracks, that'd be fantastic, though! From what I've gathered from what I've read and done on my own with PBR, it tends to yield more consistent results; plus, it's dealing with some relatively real-world values that can actually be measured/acquired. I also think that this will help alleviate many of the issues with HDR. Since one of the key foundations of PBR is conservation of energy, you will no longer get materials that look good at one HDR setting but then look like crap with another HDR setting--or at the very least, the differences will be much more predictable.

 

I think this is because they recently worked reflection into the specular equation; so we're getting a lot more of the sky reflected in the road. Hence, the blue tint. Also, I believe the greenish tones are coming from ISI setting the default turbidity to 2.0 a few builds ago. Possibly?

 

Ah, I do remember dialing back turbidity to take some green out

 

And good real road from human online races.