He wants to import every track, so let's see how it progresses, and I hope ScaViEr won't be too upset (@Eric: you will be able to see the track in their form of glory )
The screenshots are not nice, I agree, but LFS's graphics engine is no where near the RAGE's one.
Just the shadows and the lack of volumetric lighting (and poor fog) are making the screenshot you uploaded "bad looking" (not even talking about PBR materials, depth of field and all that kind of stuff, and without even considering that LFS has pre-baked lighting while GTA use fully real time lighting.
And finally, you are comparing the new Westhill with Aston, not a legit comparaison at all, I'm sure that if you take the same track, on the same spot, with the same weather and the same sun direction, it will look thousand of times better, while still being fully real-time.
EDIT: While I'm on it and since you seems to like good looking LFS, you should check out my shaders for LFS (link), the new fog is really improving the depth of the scene and fixing some of the graphics problems with the default's LFS one. I will upload a new version to add some configuration and improvement soon.
I know all about your shaders They're pretty sweet
I use to have a completely re-textured LFS all in 4K with custom shaders and ENB. It looked pretty sweet, but then I stopped playing LFS for a few months (just started again around a week ago) and want to play LFS unmodded this time around, completely vanilla
The reason I posted a Westhill screenshot is because that's where the original person took the photo, I can't change that and I don't have access to this overhaul (yes he's completely redesigning the entire game, I'd post screenshots, but as I said before they contain /vob mods and this is the only one that doesn't)
Even so, the textures in the screenshot I posted are quadruple the resolution/quality in the screens you posted and there's no Anti-Aliasing on. Plus Depth Of Field is a personal preference and it doesn't really portray life all that well, in fact it's less realistic then IRL because it's smooshed onto a 2D object and is player-based rather then where your eyes are looking. I dislike DOF, and there's not too many games that actually apply it all that well.
I mean, not saying this isn't cool (it's pretty f*cking awesome actually, gonna be the fifth time I'm playing on LFS' tracks in a different game, the other's are: rFactor, Assetto Corsa, SLRR and NetKar Pro), but it's just not really that good looking. I know it's because of the way he had to extract the textures and models from LFS, but if he remade the textures in good quality it'd be pretty sick!
Plus I'd be pretty down to play or even pay to have LFS in a new engine, but I don't think that'd ever happen considering how slow LFS is actually developing at this current time. Although LFS in UE4, CE5 or IT6 would be amazing, I'm not sure if it'd be possible to convert LFS' complex physics to another engine though.
I know what it is, I even made things for my game that I never released (yet ), took years to get it where it is.
I don't remember the name of this mod though, if you could refresh me that would be cool (even in PM if you are afraid of being banned for that lol)
You can't detect where the player is looking at for now (actually there are devices for that, but maybe 4 guys have it in the world lol), so we do it how we can, but I think it looks pretty cool and doesn't distract when it's tuned correctly (only very far objects are blured).
Not with this track and this mod. FiveM FiveReborn doesn't calculate realtime cubemap when a custom map is loaded, and the track isn't made for such a modern engine (LFS doesn't even uses world objects' normal !). That's why I'm waiting to see Westhill and Rockinham on it, I'm sure it will look much better. But the shadows and the volumetric lighting are really giving the track a concrete feeling (which isn't that much present on Assetto Corsa's engine).
Everthing's possible. But I don't really want to see LFS ported to a generic game engine like Unreal Engine or Unity (and I know there is zero probability for that, so everything's cool ).
I know Scawen wants to work on the graphics engine after the release of the tire physics, but it would be really nice to have a graphics programmer on the team, because real-time graphics are evolving so fast and are such a big selling point !
Oh no I definitely don't want this LFS in Unity, then it'd be worse then the current engine
"I know Scawen wants to work on the graphics engine after the release of the tire physics, but it would be really nice to have a graphics programmer on the team, because real-time graphics are evolving so fast and are such a big selling point !"
I don't understand why they don't just hire some more people? They obviously know people have been waiting years for some of their promises yet they still run a 3 man show
I've even offered to do testing before and they said no, I don't get it though. If there's such a popular demand and they have more then enough money to hire people and pay for new things, who not just do it?
I'm wondering how legal this is. I mean - all the tracks are licenced content,accessible only for those,who have purchased LFS licence,now the guy offers the stuff for free,even if it's another environment.
No wonder you got rejected. Betatesters usually are a group of the most dependable and trusted people, so that any closed beta there might be never sees the light of day.
I think you never saw Unity used in it's full potential.
But I think it would be too heavy for what LFS is, and wouldn't match the way Scawen works (optimizing things as hell and having full control of what happens in his game).
I don't like to speak for them (@Scawen: don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong), but from what I understood, it's because LFS is more of a spare time project than a big thing that would get them millions of dollars. That's how they see it, even if they do it for a living. As a developer, I like the way they don't want to rushed by the community, but as a gamer, it makes me REALLY frustrated.
One of the reasons I'm on graphics programming right now is that I'm frustrated by the LFS's graphics engine, I started learning graphics programming because I needed to see how hard it would be to make a realistic graphics engine. And so far, it's more a work of research to find work that fits your needs (performance and quality wise), and implementing it, 99.9% of the time, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. But it takes time, and is evolving every day, and when you have a whole lot of things to do next to it, I can guarantee it's hard to be on every front at the time.
As I said, see LFS like a fun project to work, they don't want to make it big. For me that's sad, considering the missed potential of the game.
AFAIK only mods reproducing demo content (Blackwood) are legal.
The author of GTA mod should probably expect an email from Scavier soon? (maybe I'm wrong and they will not care, up to them).
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edit: about Unity... I think the performance hit would be considerable, but then again, if Scawen would create brand new PBR "deferred" rendering 3D engine, it may be as bad as Unity or even much worse. But as long as LFS has it's current engine, the switch to Unity would bring the bad of both together in the early stage ... old graphic assets with slow engine. It would take time to exploit the new possibilities and update all assets.
Besides that I believe Unity works with "float" coordinates, while LFS is using 16:16 fixed point IIRC, so coordinates of 3D points in LFS have the same resolution granularity available over whole 3D area. In Unity the resolution is best around centre of map (0,0,0), then it gets worse toward edges (probably not noticeable on ordinary track, I have no idea at what size it will start to bite you visibly, may be already at ~10km, maybe at ~100+km).
I did check the screenshots on the mod page, and I somehow miss the point, they look IMHO quite the same as original LFS, or worse. The reflections are weird in some (doesn't look like reflecting the surroundings properly, looks more like current LFS fake )
The only one being different is the night one, but that one looks completely wrong when compared to real world racing (the lights looks too weak and glows around car looks wrong too, not following the shape of lights/car exactly), looks more like some arcade game (actually that's what GTA is, right?).
Then again, I have hard time to see what's great about graphics in new games since 2001, so I may be just half way blind.
I would understand if they started LFS as a spare time project and continued on with that if they didn't get a lot of users, but LFS has had millions of players and is the most realistic simulator to date. If they worked on and advertised LFS as something more then a side project it could easily be as well known as Assetto Corsa, iRacing, e.t.c.
This game had (not going to say "has" as I think they already lost that opportunity a long time ago) opportunity to bring in millions and be one of the most known game sims out there, who doesn't want more money? It just doesn't make any more sense to me unless they don't actually like working on LFS which is the only plausible explanation I could come up with.
One hundred times the profit, one hundred times more players, more people working on the game, LFS being better and bigger in terms of game content and quality then what it already is and last, but not least still have all the loyal fans. They had such an amazing opportunity here, the route they took in this scenario just doesn't register in my brain.
Kinda sad knowing that LFS could've been so much bigger and better, with everyone gaining from it and yet I'm here sitting, still waiting for the VW Scirocco.
Having a bigger team and a bigger community means you have also less freedom of development. You have obligations to do what people want instead of doing what YOU want. I know this feeling, and I hate it too. But I guess by recruiting someone with the same vision as you for the game or making him clearly understand that he should be going by your vision will help, but the then the newcomer will feel like his ideas have no impact on the direction of the project, which is the opposite of how it should work in an indie team.
That, in my opinion, would be sad. Like I said, if the work is done properly, it can give us a sneak peak of what to expect with an upgrade to LFS's engine. Plus, it's free advertisement, and it's not like GTA V is making concurrence with LFS.
I think it's really not noticeable, it would need a really big map to make this a real concern. I'm sure not even Westhill or a possible South City remake will cause any problem at all. Nearly every modern game engine uses float for positions (either 32 bit or 64 bits if needed, like Star Citizen or KSP, which is on Unity BTW)
I don't see why a deferred renderer would make LFS bad. Deferred rendering can be really performant if done correctly (see Tiled Deferred Renderer used for example in the Frostbite engine), but I don't really think this would be a real need for LFS.
The only real use of a deferred renderer that I can see for LFS, is night time on South City, with full real-time lighting. But it would set the minimum requirements way higher (since it uses more VRAM and more bandwidth, and requires a GPU with Multiple Render Targets support).
But for now, I think a simple PBR forward renderer with HDR and a REAL post-process pipeline would be more than enough for its needs, and will let the minimum requirement stay relatively low.
Well, Global Illumination, Physically Based Rendering, Ambient Occlusion, Borek Depth of Field, volumetric lighting, and object-based motion blur are only a few thing that I can list that make today' real-time graphics really nice IMO. Oh and I forgot about real-time reflection, a real struggle in 2001
Today's graphics are all on the subtility, and trying to be the most physically based possible, now that we're getting enough horsepower to do so.
Hopefully, LFS will keep prioritizing simulation fluidity and low-latency instead of good look, even though I wish it gets better look soon
Talking about Unity is kinda ridiculous here knowing how much care is taken on saving every single bit of performance. Yet it is also ridiculous that doing everything by yourself made LFS outdated in both performance and appearance aspect (still no track shaders, and also do u remember how many weeks Scawen spent on proper alpha sorting?..)
Physics is using the CPU, while graphics are mainly GPU based, so no compromises on physics fluidity are done if it's properly implemented (setting graphics and physics in two different threads than the main one would be even better for CPU performance, since absolutly no one have a single core CPU in 2016).
Talking about Unity is kinda ridiculous here knowing how much care is taken on saving every single bit of performance. Yet it is also ridiculous that doing everything by yourself made LFS outdated in both performance and appearance aspect
Technically, there are track shaders, but not the one you are referring about
And alpha sorting is still not right at some placed, I reported the problems where I found them, never got an answer.
For the shaders, it would be nice if Scawen just that a few hours to give us the input we need to improve the shaders, so people can have less outdated graphics, which will give a bit of time for Scawen to work on the physics instead instead of trying to be on every front at once.
This is a double moral, on the one hand we are here because lfs is still so good on the other hand, some want to change the workings that have made it so good
after the latest Porsche pack addition in AC their ''players online'' have gone quite up. 13:00 and almost 2000 players online, damn.
Was it somewhat around 2009/2010 (perhaps 2011) when LFS used to have 2300+ racers online on evenings? Damn, those were the days I miss AMG with its GTR+AS3 server, that was so much fun ;D
