x4fab

VR update, and some other additions and improvements

Another update! Sorry it took so long, as usual I kept coming up with new ideas and finding new bugs here and there. Here are few highlights:

• Major VR update: Single Pass Stereo (drawing the whole scene in a single pass) should reduce CPU load, Variable Rate Shading (currently only available on NVIDIA GPUs) can improve visual quality and/or performance (depending on settings). Oculus got ASW 2.0 support, and controllers now can be used to interact with HUD, touchscreens and cockpit ...

Fixes and a few new features (and another preview build)

First of all, I wanted to say, it’s truly horrible what’s happening in Ukraine and this damned war. Really hoping things would get better soon.

As always, it started with me working on fixes and then getting more and more ideas for some new things to try. So, in no particular order, some details about some of new features:

Skidmarks FX has been rewritt...

Next version 0.1.76 is finally ready, now to work on 0.1.77

It’s been even longer than usual, but I believe this 0.1.76 version is quite an interesting upgrade: it greatly expands scripting capabilities. Now not only scriptable displays got a lot more functions to use, but cars can use scripts without displays moving objects around, changing material properties, creating lights and sounds and such.

For example, script can be used to 2021-12-22 17:22:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Another attempt to make a preview build without all the bugs

UPD: Attached a new preview136 build, not really worthy of its own post, but with a few changes: issue with physics when some modded cars wouldn’t drive is fixed, new driver tags distortion fixed properly this time, GrassFX air disturbance fixed, audio buttons got a volume +/− mode, clouds missing in WeatherFX in some configurations fixed, ksAlphaRef not working properly for shadows fixed, scriptable displays now can load fonts from extension folders and modify shadow cas...

Another update preview with fixes (and a few new features)

UPD: New build preview92 is here: fixed sky with low-quality mirrors, fixed issue with digits drawn over things with reordered rendering, fixed issue with smoke not showing if soft particles are disabled.

Thank you so much for testing! Maybe this time I’ll be able to release a public update which wouldn’t require that much fixing. 😅

Here is a new build with, hopefully, most of the reported bugs fixed. Also, I changed default FSR quality preset to better reflect presets from...

Preview of the upcoming update 0.1.76

And another update took longer than I originally intended… Originally I wanted to make a bunch of quick fixes, but new bugs started to pop up, some new ideas I thought to try, and, well, here we are. This is a preview of the upcoming update, hopefully should be stable and ready for release (apart from RainFX part, that one still needs more work, although it’s getting there), but could you please give it a test?

2021-09-11 16:19:50 +0000 UTC View Post

New way to animate wipers, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and more (with preview build with rain)

First of all, I apologize for such a long delay. It’s silly, but I wasted three weeks working on a new way to animate wipers. Had to rewrite it a couple of times, but for most time I was working on creating a helpful tool which would allow to animate wipers easily.

Regular approach with letting car creators write an INI config could work, but setting those pivots and axis in there with nothin...

New build with rain

Not a lot has changed since previous build, mostly various fixes. I’m really hoping that this build would be more stable now. But there are some new things too though.

First, I pretty much completely rewrote AI Flood (that thing for Track Mode which teleports cars around so there are always some cars nearby on large tracks). Now it shouldn’t break AIs, cars should spawn more stable and drive off faster. And it also supports two lane AI splines too now.

After doing some testing...

Visual shaking is fixed! Plus quite a few other fixes in this preview of an upcoming update

After previous breakthrough with custom physics engine fixing physics on large tracks I got so motivated that I decided to use that moment of extra inspiration and finish second half of large tracks fixing. Although the solution is easy — simply offset everything that’s being rendered and a few other things that need extra accuracy — but I had to go through all of AC and CSP’s rendering to make that change, so it took quite a lot more time. But now it works, and although change is sub...

Preview build for the upcoming update

I’ve got some interesting news! But first, attached is a preview build for the upcoming update. There are quite a few changes, so I’d like to test it for another day or so before releasing it publicly, but it should be pretty stable now. Here are the main changes:

• CSP got configs that are applied to all cars and all tracks. With them, rain tyre patterns now can be applied to all cars that need them.

• Rain tyres physics parameters adjusted and fixed.

• Loading s...

New preview build with rain tyres

Finally, I think I managed to fix most of the bugs, so now I can continue working on RainFX. And here’s the first new thing: rain tyres! If during loading CSP would detect any slick tyres, it would automatically add a new set of rain tyres, which would be much more efficient at moving water away from contact point, ensuring better grip. Apart from different water moving properties, at the moment it’s a simple copy of softest tyres set, but more tweaks, of course, are coming soon.  2021-02-24 19:53:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Progress report: distant shadows, various optimizations and a lot of fixes (new preview build with RainFX inside)

After questionable previous release, I decided to spend some time focusing on fixes and optimizing a few things. Hopefully those new optimizations can somewhat offset damage done by RainFX. And if not — there is a new render stats app (hoping to replace original render stats by it later, once it’s finished), which can help to see where AC spends most of the time:

For each measurement, there...

Another build with rain

UPD: Urgent fix for mouse steering. Thanks to @aj647 for spotting the issue quickly!

It’s been some intensive bug hunting, but hopefully now performance should get back up. Also, if you remember, some time ago I’ve made a post about disc filtering for shadows reducing noise in shadows in front of the car (here’s new comparison screenshots). Now, I improved its general implementation and ma...

Another build with rain with a few fixes

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! A bit too late, unfortunately, as usual, I miss all the deadlines. 😅

For this new update, I’ve made a lot of improvements to the whole Weather FX thing, fixing quite a few bugs, or adding things like cloud shadows affecting other clouds. All the changes shouldn’t break compatibility, all fixes are optional to apply. Also, a lot of default Weather FX script has been rewritten to change sky, lighting, height-dependant fog, clouds look and distrib...

New preview build & CM Workshop progress report

First of all, I have to apologize for such a long delay, it has been a really tough month… Thankfully, now things seem to get somewhat better, so everything is slowly getting back on track.

On a brighter side, there was a lot of progress with CM Workshop, I believe it might be ready for early launch (mainly for testing) in a week or two. Still a lot of work left to do, but now server core is properly sorted out and finalized, allowing to add things like comments, likes or reports in t...

Good news and bad news (no preview builds yet)

I’ve god some good news and some bad news. First of all, unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances rain physics needs some more time, very sorry about it. With that, I decided to take a little break from working on it and instead work on another project. I think it might be even more important, and I should have done it a long time ago, but it’s quite more complicated than anything else I’ve done so far, and it didn’t feel like I was ready for it before. So, announcing

2020-10-20 18:21:21 +0000 UTC View Post

New rain build, but it’s mainly just fixes for now

Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since last preview, very sorry about that. I worked a bit more on rain drops on cars shading, especially the way they look under the light. Also, rain drop marks on tracks should look much better at nights now. But for most of time, I was working on all sorts of fixes, especially a fix for one particular issue causing some major stability issues with AMD GPUs (not that it was an AMD fault at all, just that NVIDIA’s driver was more forgiving to my newbie ...

And another rain preview build

I fixed one last big issue with rain visuals! Now, cars have proper wetness maps (gif with old drops shading, gif with the new one). And it is taken into account for drops falling off cars and other effects too. Also, guessing and car wetness calculations are reworked. There are still some tweaks needed to be made to drops shad...

Lots of various fixes

Visual part for rain is finished and fixed! Shouldn’t be too long now for the public release. Oh, and a new update without a rain, with fixes only, is coming very soon too.

Some of the changes:

• Fixed wiper guessing;
• Fixed rain in VR and triple screen;
• No more rainless cars (some specific cases might still need an adjusted config);
• Drops shouldn’t become black now;
• Fixed and updated puddles generation, with per-track puddle adjustment p...
  2020-09-08 14:09:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Easier way to test rain physics and a bit more

Unpacking “data.acd”, editing “car.ini” and moving original packed data aside is quite a boresome thing to do, so here is a new preview build of Content Manager which has a new option here:

Those three dots on to the right of it would show a menu allowing to reset per-car flag or change global setting too. It would only work in Quick Drive section, reverting all changes after the race e...

Fixes for rain preview

Those last few builds were definitely way buggier than I expected, very sorry about this. But how about this one? As you can tell from its preview number, there were a lot of attempts to fix one bug after another. 😅

Main changes:

• Non-working wipers fixed (by temporary disabling one of features, but it wasn’t that important; going to investigate why it was breaking wipers);
• Various stability issues at launch fixed;
• Windscreen drops fixed (main change, t...
  2020-08-27 23:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Fixed build

UPD 1: To fix black screen, in Graphics Adjustments switch from Original to something else, that should help. Working on a proper fix. Thanks to @Kinetik for the discovery.

UPD 2: New build, preview14, fixes black screen with original as AA algorithm in Graphic Adjustments.

UPD 3: And preview15 fixes crashes during loading on some tracks. What a mess. I definitely need to think of some testing mechanism.

Very sorry for the p...

Visual part is finished, and another preview build

UPD 1: Seems like there are a lot of bugs for some reason, very sorry about that, working on a fix right now.

UPD 2: New build is here (separate post because it was just too broken).

Very sorry for such a long delay, a lot has been done since. Now, visual part is pretty much finished, only thing that is left is to rework pu...

New preview build

Getting back to the whole rain thing, here is a new preview build. Here is a new build with Rain FX, now with brand new per-vertex rain occlusion baking during loading (for now without caching, and it might need more adjustments; also, it bakes models as they load, and driver models load first, so for now they don’t get occluded properly, will work on that).

Also, I reworked rain drops on car exter...

New preview, 0.1.62-RC

I think, apart from rain, there are quite a few changes which would be good to get to public builds, so here is a release candidate of an upcoming update, please give it a try if possible. No rain here yet, just a few other things. Here is a full changelog. As you can see, with all those fixes alone, it’s really the time to release it.

If performance with dynamic shadows would get ...

Progress report (no preview build yet)

Sorry for the lack of preview build, I was stuck in the last few days making a (initially intended to be) small detour. Not sure if you noticed, but to get rain to work, I had to add quite a few new shader sets, and possibly a few more would need to be added later.

(This way, if there is no rain, AC would use shaders that don’t even mention it, so whatever performance hit rain could add because of additional shader complexity wouldn’t happen.)

And, well, there was this very ol...

New rain preview build

Main changes comparing to previous build:

• Raindrops on windscreen now enabled by default, using XAtlas instead of UVAtlas for better and more stable windows mapping (plus it should solve all possible issues with Windows 7), wipers work even if FPS is not 65, drops shading on mirrors improved with a bit of occlusion to add some shape, layers fixed (now, if there are any semi-opaque areas on windscreen, they’ll remain under raindrops).

• Raindrops on car exteriors reworked...

Rain progress report (and a very unfinished build)

First of all, I want to apologise about how long it all takes… It’s quite a lot bigger than any other part of this mod, and I don’t really want to cut any corners. But now all the big questions are solved, so hopefully it should be an easier from here.

Here are the few main things added lately:

• First of all, I found a very neat way for online servers to set CSP as a requirement. The idea is basically to alter track ID in server config in such a way that original launcher...

Rain on windscreen

There is still some work to be done here, but it seems that proof-of-concept works! 

The way this effect is working, it uses texture for keeping water so actual final windscreen render pass can be done effectively. However, my initial attempt to store and move rain drops within that texture failed, couldn’t get them to make them stable and not fade out or stretch and cover everything. So here I use particles moving within UV space of that water texture. And the fact that it uses ...

HDR support and a bit more progress

Recently I got myself a new monitor so now I can tell between both shades of dark and bright! And, luckily, it also came with HDR support (I forgot such thing existed when picking a monitor, was focusing mainly on color). So now I tried to add HDR support to AC, although I’m not sure if it works correctly or not. Also, because of YEBIS, it does require a bit of trickery to setup. I couldn’t stop YEBIS from clamping output by 1, but it works just fine with floating point data as output, so...