x4fab

Tiniest of progress reports (no preview build)

Sorry to say, but nothing much for rain happened in the last few days. I was mainly fixing bugs and then decided to spend a few hours to work on the few tweaks for chat app, and, well, got carried away with ideas and a bit of dealing with imgui (which is great! but requires a special approach from time to time) and stuck with it for a few days.

But please don’t think all of that time has been wasted — a lot of things I figured out would come in handy when I’ll get back to finishin...

And another progress report (without preview build)

First of all, good news!  Jackson Papageorge (aka mclarenf1papa) is working on physics, and we found a good way to pass puddles from GPU to CPU side. So hopefully that part will be on point.

Puddles generation has been reworked, to increase fidelity and adjust amount of puddles in general. Here is a map of localized minimums based on physics meshes (notice how awesome is laser scan here):

<...

A bit more progress (still without a preview build)

Hello, and, as usual, thank you for your great support! Here is another update on the progress:

• Found a way to distribute puddles based on track’s physics mesh. Would need more work, possibly for alternative methods for certain tracks with less detailed mesh, but overall it seems promising (and works especially nice with great Assetto Corsa’s laserscans).

• Made some progress on...

Preview build for v0.1.51 (without rain for now)

Going to release it tomorrow unless there are some horrible bugs. Not a lot of changes, mainly just fixes. Trees receiving shadows are now optional and disabled by default, that should help with flicker (and I also tried to fix and improve shadow mapping, but just in case), also, found a neat trick to reduce that banding on trees with some dithering (comparison with 2x MSAA, and 2020-04-05 01:56:28 +0000 UTC View Post

Another progress report (no preview build yet)

First experiments with puddle maps. Just a repeated texture all over the place for now, to set transition and materials. And, of course, puddles shouldn’t look like that, it’s temporary. :)

 Also, found a way to improve wipers trace, now it’s much smoother. And performance seems to be getting much better now, with separate set of shaders. Rain drops now take only about 3 FPS from 66 to 63, and I believe other parts can be optimized too (right now those procedural maps are qui...

A bit more progress with rain (no preview builds yet)

It took longer than expected with those updates for Content Manager, sorry about that. But I’m still working on rain! Here you can see another idea in action.

Previously, I was using something based on approach described here — a few static textures and some procedural code to make them move. It’s a very neat solution, but it doesn’t seem flexible...

PBR update

I finally managed to understand a bit more about PBR shading, and realized what there was before had a few major mistakes to it. Plus, in general, PBR works best with nicely prepared detail textures (roughness/gloss, AO, metalness, all that). So this is a fourth major change to PBR materials, fixing various mistakes and adding new options, and I think it might not be last. But now it at least starts to produce some reasonable results. 

2020-03-04 23:21:27 +0000 UTC View Post

Another progress update (without any builds yet)

Finally made first steps working on long promised rain. Unfortunately, as you can see, it doesn’t look all that good and yet already takes quite a lot of FPS (going from 65 to 55 FPS on my 1060 6GB in FullHD). I’m not quite sure why, and really hoping things will improve later on.

What’s ready: rain drops on surfaces with a second layer (surprisingly expensive, possibly because of Extra FX pass; needs visual improvements too), rain drops in the air, rain shadow to get rid of rain ...

Shadows update (with preview build)

Not a lot of screenshots here, that part shows itself better in motion. Not even sure if video could capture it well either.

I reworked Smart Shadows part, adding an option for custom shadow matrices. They should be more stable, so shadows wouldn’t jiggle around as much with camera rotation, and take into account corners of triple screen cameras or VR orientation properly. Stabilization is pretty simple, but this way, it doesn’t require sacrificing pixels-to-meters ratio.

2020-02-19 01:20:11 +0000 UTC View Post

Temporary small experiment

With 0.1.43, apart from various fixes (I would really want to prepare a new stable build right now), I added a small temporary thing. I had this idea for a long time, to see if any of those cool pursuits would work with more accurate physics. And now Custom Shaders Patch can exchange messages between clients via chat, so why not try it. I didn’t want to waste too much time on it, just do something which would allow to check if it’s any fun or not.

To use it, make a server and add �...

Multi-layer rendering for colored glass

Another thing I wanted to get familiar with before working on rain: multi-layer rendering. For colored glass to mask stuff behind it properly, it’s best to render it with multiply blending (turning white to red instead of dimming it and putting red on top), but that would mean regular shading would get messed up. So now there is an option for SHADER_REPLACEMENT to render mesh twice: first time with a different solid color shader with multiplicative blending, and second its usual render pass...

Third attempt

I’m very sorry for lack of updates and responses, as usual, got stuck with something. But I got some interesting news! I finally managed to make something out of that mess of a grass, by switching back to textures and combining that approach with a few things I learned with geometrical grass. Now grass spawns more frequently, and with better texture (made a special generator), seam is not that visible.

2020-01-16 02:56:16 +0000 UTC View Post

Cloud shadows, and a few more things

Weather FX update turns out to be quite big, with new and new options being added. New clouds still look pretty sad, but I think they’re improving, although there is still a lot of work to do with shape and materials. Also, now sun is properly blinding too:

Added some new features for post-processing filters as well: custom glare shape for first person view, a couple of extra options for anam...

One last thing before starting to work on rain

Happy New Year and thank you for all the support!

In the last few days, I started working on a default Weather FX implementation to be a bit faster alternative to Sol (which is, of course, absolutely amazing, but I think for slower PCs it might be a bit of a strain). Plus, it would be easier to work on things like better tunnels, rain and what not. And while setting it up, I thought I’d try to find a different way to render clouds, which wouldn’t require a massive textures library (...

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you, and thank you for your support! 🎊🎉

Just released a new version with a lot of fixes, and added a small surprise for a day, hopefully it’s not annoying and working. It’s more active at nights and should follow holidays schedule according to the region set in Windows settings, but if nothing works, here is how it should look like.

Thank you for all the amazing support...

New features for tracks

Added a few new features for tracks, like animated objects or particle emitters. Tried to make the whole thing flexible (so, for example, it’s not a train in config, but an object moving along a certain mesh with a few other objects following, and then light, sound and smoke source are attached to that moving object; to make sound change pitch when train slows down, config binds a parameter of FMOD event with good old track condition bound to the speed of the whole thing). Thanks to Soyo fo...

Proper IBL instead of those spherical harmonics

I finally found out what people use for nice reflections and ambient fitting objects in scene! Now we can get rid of all that dynamic ambient stuff and use proper approach instead.

Here you can see difference in detail. Or, here is a good example...

New grass shading

What’s really neat about geometrical grass is that its shading might be much more detailed. Sure billboards could have some sort of normal map, but at their core it still looked like a billboard. Notice how now grass casts shadows on grass and it doesn’t look weird.

Geometrical grass could be cut t...

Some reworkings

As I mentioned a few times before, I really dislike the way new grass looks. Way too high by default, and when it’s set to be short, it just looks horrible. So here is an attempt #2: this time without any textures. Instead, each grass blade is a bit of geometry, five triangles for closer ones, one triangle in distance. Takes twice as much time to generate (I think it might be improved by adding skipping each 2nd frame), renders a bit faster, overall takes similar amount of time as before. A...

Small addition for some headlights

Had a bit of fun experimenting with tracing rays in a special shader, and I have to say, results look better than I expected! Quite noisy without TAA or post-processing AA though. And I used to struggle a lot trying to find a way to make headlights on Peugeot or Morgan at least somewhat acceptable, couldn’t find any good solution though.

Although, about that, this thing won’t help Peugeot, Morgan and similar cars much. It works, but for it to work nicely, in needs some very good nor...

Something else I’ve been working on

(Please, don’t share this video, as it’s very WIP.)

Here is a bit of a preview of another update coming soon-ish (cursor will be shown as well, of course, forgot to turn it on during recording). Based on IMGUI, new UI will properly support controllers or keyboard-only navigation (although it would be helpful to try and rewrite it to make it simpler to use), already supports scaling to work better on 4K displays, and in general might contain some helpful improvements here and there, ...

Some features from the upcoming update

 Going to publish an update very soon, thank you so much for your support! Very sorry it took, I started rewriting some code a bit and it ended up with removing huge chunk of old codebase and replacing it with newer faster approach.

Update on grass

Deformation is working! Both wheels and car body (actual collider mesh) now deform grass. Based on distance towards ground, so jumping cars won’t bend anything (never mind grass going through ramp, it’s to show it’s not bend; for actual tracks, some area adjustment could get rid of grass or shorten it in that area):

2019-09-01 16:09:09 +0000 UTC View Post

Another feature for tracks

Procedural grass! Got it working, thanks to GRID devs for all those great ideas. At its core, similar to smoke, same bunch of particles generated on GPU side, although here, it’s being regenerated each frame.  Still some work to do, but in general, I think, it already looks pretty decent (although, texture, I think, could use some work). 

Grass is synced with ground color and lighti...

Distant geometry

A few shaders (for now, ksPerPixel, ksPerPixelAT, ksPerPixelNM, ksMultilayer and  ksMultilayer_fresnel_nm) got an option to get rid of distant clipping, set in track config. The idea is to “squish” geometry alongside view direction in such a way that it wouldn’t affect fog, lighting or any other visual things. Just get rid of clipping. 

Not quite sure that there aren’t any fla...

More experiments with lighting

It’s a very early preview which might not end up anywhere (so please don’t share it for now), but I got another idea on how to deal with lights in tunnels: patch can use dynamic ambient values to estimate  brightness around the camera and use it to adjust intensity of dynamic lights and exposure (to simulate eyes adapting to dim tunnels vs bright sunlight outside). Unlike auto-exposure which is based on what’s seen on screen, that approach checks brightness in 180° range around lo...

Vertex AO for cars

Do you have that one well made mod which however doesn’t have AO baked into it, and UV mapping is not good enough for a quick fix? Or maybe some Kunos car bothers you a bit with its flat look? Great news! Turned out that bakery using NVIDIA’s OptiX Prime is great for baking AO for cars, it’s fast and, in most cases, surprisingly good-looking.

All the advantages are here: it’s zero FPS c...

New effect for Extra FX

I have to say, I quite liked the way fog looks now with distant emissives (more about it), only thing that was upsetting was the headlights not lighting up any fog around them. So I added a new effect to Extra FX adding that glow, it does something like primitive raytracing of headlights cones in 20% of main resolution, with screen split into 16 tiles to speed things up. I feel like there might be a better way of d...

Reworked distant emissives

First of all, sorry for another delay, update is coming soon. It’s just that I wanted to tweak distant emissives a bit so they would work better, current version looks way too sad, and it took a bit longer than I originally planned. 

Newer implementation now has separate small point with somewhat constant on-screen size, and larger glow which fully depends on fog, and is completely hidden in clear weather. Plus, that glow is visible further in fog, so it adds a nice backlit-like ...

Lighting for particles

It works quite smoothly, as long as it’s per-vertex rather than per-pixel. But I think this is even better, as it looks smoother, and with new system, particles don’t grow too big.

Now I got some good references, so behavior of particles now quite a lot different from that video. Preparing a newer video. :)