Quote from Scawen :

I had hoped to get the 0.6G released this weekend but while dealing with the names over cars, I tried a method that can be used to improve edges of alphatest textures, which must be used when polygon sorting isn't feasible. For example on trees, ironwork and some railings. I got into a test these last couple of days, on this work which is on my Westhill list. Delayed the 0.6G patch but that's how it goes. See these comparison FE and SO shots. This is without supersampling. I don't use supersampling, I know some people with super graphics cards do, but this is about improving the situation with ordinary multisampling AA.

Looks much better. Good work!

indeed Very nice

Looking nice.

Quote from luchian :

Joke aside, "live" driver animation would be pretty awesome. And to top it off, visible by others in MP

You laugh, but didn't GPL have that, well, just raising an arm (like to indicate you stalled on the grid)?

Quote from Scawen :

It would be nice for gestures. There's something quite tough about dealing with steering wheels and gearshifts that aren't exactly the same size and position as the ones in game...! Sometimes they would be free, sometimes kind of "snap to" the position of the in-game object. Tough! Anyway I am obviously not looking into this now.

^^obviously

Quote from Scawen :

[..]I tried a method that can be used to improve edges of alphatest textures, which must be used when polygon sorting isn't feasible. For example on trees, ironwork and some railings. I got into a test these last couple of days, on this work which is on my Westhill list. Delayed the 0.6G patch but that's how it goes. See these comparison FE and SO shots. This is without supersampling. I don't use supersampling, I know some people with super graphics cards do, but this is about improving the situation with ordinary multisampling AA.

Yes, please !

Quote from duke_toaster :

[..]You laugh, but didn't GPL have that, well, just raising an arm (like to indicate you stalled on the grid)?

I was not laughing, on the contrary was being appreciative of the idea (AC has also 2 predefined gestures for roofless cars).

Why is everybody talking about LeapMotion instead of control VR?

Quote from luchian :

Joke aside, "live" driver animation would be pretty awesome. And to top it off, visible by others in MP . The ultimate sim. (and no more: when should driver reach for the gear lever, if animated shift).

Yup, I'm dreaming of that since I bought my first wheel. Having the ability to use your hands to make some gestures would be awesome.

Quote from Whiskey :

Why is everybody talking about LeapMotion instead of control VR?

Guessing $100 vs $650 might have something to do with it.

Nice work on the alpha layers AA, Scawen. That looks insanely better.

Crazy fast graphics cards aren't really needed to supersample LFS though, even the integrated Intel Iris GPU in the Haswell processors can pull it off nowadays.

Quote from Matrixi :

Guessing $100 vs $650 might have something to do with it.

That, and not having to wear anything.

Quote from Matrixi :

Nice work on the alpha layers AA, Scawen. That looks insanely better.

Crazy fast graphics cards aren't really needed to supersample LFS though, even the integrated Intel Iris GPU in the Haswell processors can pull it off nowadays.

The "tree edge alpha" seems even more important on the Rift now because of the big pixels. And supersampling isn't yet available. I think that if I did enable 4x supersampling of a 4x screen size distorted buffer down to to the main screen, you would still benefit from multisampling when drawing the image to the pre-distortion render texture.

But the pre-distortion render texture would be 4278x2922 (96 MB for the colour and z buffer) so I'm still not really keen to try that yet!

Nice work Scawen. Even if not Everyone will see that, I will and that's cool. Thoses pixelated trees and fences were burning my eyes.

While you work on littles fixes on alpha and Z-buffer, can you also fix the "smoke invisible through fences" bug ? Maybe it's already fixed with the new system ?

Wow, great work. Night and day change on trees. Looks much better.

Quote from nacim :

While you work on littles fixes on alpha and Z-buffer, can you also fix the "smoke invisible through fences" bug ? Maybe it's already fixed with the new system ?

I asked about this too after the DX9 test patch was out - see the bottom of this post.

Yeah, it's one of littles LFS's bugs that are not so long to fix but are requested often.
An other thing I do not like is the default green font color for texts and names. Why not simply white ?
And why does changing font on cfg does not affect the game's font ?

Quote from nacim :

Yeah, it's one of littles LFS's bugs that are not so long to fix but are requested often.
An other thing I do not like is the default green font color for texts and names. Why not simply white ?
And why does changing font on cfg does not affect the game's font ?

White is sometime hard to read with some screen.

This is why white text also need black shadow, so it can be readable everywhere

Strangely, although the smoke is not really related, that does appear to be fixed with the new system, because it does not write to the Z buffer during the sorted alpha pass of the frame (when all the transparent parts of objects are drawn, from furthest to nearest, after all the solid parts have been drawn).

You can see a suggestion like that by Ped7g in the post following the one Flame linked to.

There is a side effect. In fact the smoke behind the fence is overwriting the fence you are looking through. But usually this isn't a visual issue as you see in the first image of doughnuts at Blackwood. There is a slight problem as you can see in the second smoke image. I'm guessing this won't often be noticeable but we'll see when when you get a test version, or if there are any other side effects of not writing to the z buffer during the sorted alpha pass.

I think the only time you will see visual errors from this, you would have seen a visual error anyway. For example in the 3rd image, this missing fence is how it has always been (because of a limitation of the high speed sort, in this case the fence behind was not drawn first). In the 4th image, the new system looks better. but if you look closely, the fence behind is overwriting the fence in front.

EDIT : The 3rd and 4th screenshots were taken before the edge smoothing was done, so that's why the trees still look rough.

EDIT 2 : The fence behind a fence thing is more noticeable in a weather option that illuminates the fences.

"Aliasing" looks way better, but smoke on front of the fence is a bit glitchy on the second scrrenshot... As for normal racing I would prefer like this (your test version).

Quote from Scawen :

But the pre-distortion render texture would be 4278x2922 (96 MB for the colour and z buffer) so I'm still not really keen to try that yet!

so what?
you need a pretty insane graphics card to get anywhere near 75fps in most modern games and get the full enjoyment out of your dk2 so you can expect the majority of rift users to have at least 2-3gb of vram

Cool, it's (partially) fixed
I think that for the first test patch it's really cool, and then for final version it just need somes improvements to be perfect

Why does the smoke is not written on the Z-buffer ? It could correct the bug, right ?

Quote from nacim :

Why does the smoke is not written on the Z-buffer ? It could correct the bug, right ?

No, there is no way to get this perfect in real time graphics.

All the alpha textures objects are no longer writing to the z buffer. They are only reading it.

Each individual puff of smoke could be added to the alpha sorting tree if you want slow things down for no reason. But then there will still be problems because of the radius of the sorted objects. The sorting in the binary sort tree is not perfect, as you see in the other images of the fence behind a fence.

There are always going to be sorting problems. It's just a case of which type of sorting problem do you prefer.

I did choose a specially odd case as a demonstration but I suggest you aren't going to see these things.

I request that you see it live before making any more requests. Sorting of individual smoke puffs is so far down my list, it's not even on a list!

I don't think it's such a big deal as long as you don't see the bugs while racing / on track. The first image by Scawen can be easily seen from the TV camera, but now you won't notice the bug unless you focus on it. Of course the smoke now appears in front of the fence, but I guess it's still better than no smoke.

Yes, the trouble is that transparency doesn't work properly with Z buffers. It's not just me being a crap programmer!
Alpha sorting issues are a pain in the butt that all real time programmers must deal with.
I'm interested to see if you discover any unexpected issues when I can release a test of this.
I am working on code to allow this to be selected per object, as otherwise there are some sorting issues. Yes, them!
Then I must go through every track, finding the objects (trees, etc) to switch on the new system.

Okay, we'll see on next test patch
Any estimated release for it ?

EDIT : By check out by myself on LFS, I found this weird thing, sometimes it's glitched, and sometimes not, and when we get closer, the glitch disappear.

Quote from Shotglass :

so what?
you need a pretty insane graphics card to get anywhere near 75fps in most modern games and get the full enjoyment out of your dk2 so you can expect the majority of rift users to have at least 2-3gb of vram

Or some drunk people that have 2 GPUs each with 2 GB of RAM.

Quote from Scawen :

The "tree edge alpha" seems even more important on the Rift now because of the big pixels. And supersampling isn't yet available. I think that if I did enable 4x supersampling of a 4x screen size distorted buffer down to to the main screen, you would still benefit from multisampling when drawing the image to the pre-distortion render texture.

But the pre-distortion render texture would be 4278x2922 (96 MB for the colour and z buffer) so I'm still not really keen to try that yet!

If you want to see if you can use or not somes big options, you have two solutions :
- Read the lastest Steam hardware report (fast, but not sure for LFS users)
- Develop an home made hardware detection that send hardware infos of LFS players to LFS servers (longer but more precise )

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Or some drunk people that have 2 GPUs each with 2 GB of RAM.

SLI or Crossfire doesn't stack the RAM though. Even if you slap in 4x 6 GB graphics cards to your rig and enable SLI, you'll still only get 6 GB total. It's the same data mirrored on each cards framebuffer.
/OT