Hello Racers,
We aren't ready to do a full progress report this month. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about some experimental work I have been doing.
DISCLAIMER: This work is unfinished and there are many issues left to solve. At this point it is not certain that it will be released. This must be taken in the spirit of a progress report, showing experimental work that sometimes takes place behind the scenes.
The story behind the experiments:
- Because of the way the new lighting works, it should be possible to share lighting configurations between tracks and have realistic sun directions. There is no longer a need to have a limited number of lighting setups per track.
- In a test version of Live for Speed I can set date and time and the sun direction is calculated from that info, along with the latitude of the track.
- The problem then becomes how to limit the time settings to the times of day we can support. One possible answer is to allow all times of day and night, which in turn would allow the lighting to change through time. That led to this experiment with headlights.
You can click here to see a 6 second animated GIF of a 24 hour period in the summer at Aston. Please bear in mind it's just a work in progress. The sky doesn't change and is simply darkened after sunset. The changing sky and sunlight is very roughly done in this quick test and is something that needs to be worked on if this experimental work is to be released. Other work includes making the cars receive light from headlights, improving the floodlights, etc.
I hope you like these early shots of work in progress.
We aren't ready to do a full progress report this month. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about some experimental work I have been doing.
DISCLAIMER: This work is unfinished and there are many issues left to solve. At this point it is not certain that it will be released. This must be taken in the spirit of a progress report, showing experimental work that sometimes takes place behind the scenes.
The story behind the experiments:
- Because of the way the new lighting works, it should be possible to share lighting configurations between tracks and have realistic sun directions. There is no longer a need to have a limited number of lighting setups per track.
- In a test version of Live for Speed I can set date and time and the sun direction is calculated from that info, along with the latitude of the track.
- The problem then becomes how to limit the time settings to the times of day we can support. One possible answer is to allow all times of day and night, which in turn would allow the lighting to change through time. That led to this experiment with headlights.
You can click here to see a 6 second animated GIF of a 24 hour period in the summer at Aston. Please bear in mind it's just a work in progress. The sky doesn't change and is simply darkened after sunset. The changing sky and sunlight is very roughly done in this quick test and is something that needs to be worked on if this experimental work is to be released. Other work includes making the cars receive light from headlights, improving the floodlights, etc.
I hope you like these early shots of work in progress.
