damn give us something new to try..

It is very cool to see the amount of work that has gone into your work so far, really amazing that you are dedicating your time to get those little details done. I know great achievements take a lot of time but damn I wish there were like more guys in the team so you could get stuff done way quicker. Still tho, looks very impressive and definitely up-to-date.

Looking great, although the last part of the transition to dark looks a little abrupt? Or is it just me? The part before it goes to pitch black feels unnatural for some reason. And also not sure if it really gets THAT dark? Also the flood lights turn on, but they seem to fade on at the very last part of the cycle?

But great work, I'm curious how South City looks in the dark with all the lights turned on! I hope to see some great reflections.

Im interested to see how some layouts look on night lights. And as one guy already asked is there a possibility to make atleast servers a bit bigger? To let guys spectate races when there is full 40 cars grid. Even 5 additional server spots would be great (well additional grid slots would be even better). Because now we have GTI and FOX leagues that make full grid and its not enough space in server to spectate/race.

I think FBM was packed also - or close to it?

God bless

Quote from Pathseeker :

Im interested to see how some layouts look on night lights. And as one guy already asked is there a possibility to make atleast servers a bit bigger? To let guys spectate races when there is full 40 cars grid. Even 5 additional server spots would be great (well additional grid slots would be even better). Because now we have GTI and FOX leagues that make full grid and its not enough space in server to spectate/race.

layouts and 40 slots with a demo ? in the time it was needed to have at least an S1 licence for that

I'm still wondering how many tracks have to be done

Quote from cargame.nl :

It has been answered before, its not an easy job to increase that number. If its desired at all, increasing grid equals increasing chaos. For cruise though it can be interesting but lots of stuff needs to be changed let alone the fact if people can still run LFS on their computer / internet which such massive grid.


Insim controllable LED array color changing track panels would be awesome

lmao man it's nearly 2020. A budget 300euro pc could run LFS with 40 players easily. Why limit something to the minority? Go big.

Great! With this update, the game begins to write a story! We all need this

Quote from nacim :

I agree, is the auto-exposition using camera framebuffer histogram like usual or it is "hardcoded" depending on the time of day ?

This auto exposure method does not look at a histogram, this is one that remains constant at any time of day, regardless of what you are actually looking at. It considers the sun and sky brightness / colour to come up with the exposure and white balance values. It's better for working in the editor at this point but I am planning to try the histogram method, that considers the actual image you are looking at (like a real camera). Because ideally it should change if you are in the pits or outside or in a tunnel or looking at a sunset or away from a sunset, etc.

Quote from nacim :

Scawen, I think you really need to add bloom to your todo list if it isn't already, it would really add to the final image if you have proper HDR data. I recommend an implementation close to KinoBloom (bloom by using downsampling instead of bluring), it allow really long bloom trail with low impact on performance (I used a similar implementation on Nintendo Switch, in a production game).

Thanks, I'll have a look at the method you linked to, and another look at the method I read about before, which I guess is the 'standard' method (taking the bright pixels and spreading horizontally then spreading vertically then combining that output with the original render target to create the final image).

I do have a HDR render target available in HDR mode. I took these shots and videos in SDR mode. I like the idea of having an SDR mode available to avoid all the expensive post-processing but I'm interested in trying the HDR type effects.

For people who are interested in how the automatic exposure works, I recreated the Blackwood video but this time with auto exposure and auto white balance disabled.

For comparison: Blackwood day to night with fixed exposure and white balance

Quote from Kyance :

lmao man it's nearly 2020. A budget 300euro pc could run LFS with 40 players easily. Why limit something to the minority? Go big.

There are limited development resources, no need to waste time on something which isn't beneficial. The upcoming update is a graphical one, no-one has any idea how this is going to perform not with 40 cars let alone with 60 (on a full grid, this is something different then scattered around the environment). Go effective, quality above quantity.

Quote from Flotch :

layouts and 40 slots with a demo ? in the time it was needed to have at least an S1 licence for that

You can see me as "Trespasser" in s2-s3 servers i was talking about fragmaster leagues where now we surely would need a bit of more slots in server.

Quote from Scawen :

This auto exposure method does not look at a histogram, this is one that remains constant at any time of day, regardless of what you are actually looking at. It considers the sun and sky brightness / colour to come up with the exposure and white balance values.

Interesting, thanks for the insight. If you can have the histogram method working on DX9 with no compute shaders, it could be interesting to see its performance. The advantage being that the current method can stay as a fallback for people those PC can't handle the histogram technique.

Quote from Scawen :

which I guess is the 'standard' method (taking the bright pixels and spreading horizontally then spreading vertically then combining that output with the original render target to create the final image)

Correct. Well was standard for a time, I think most modern games are using the mip pyramid technique nowadays, as it has low performance impact and scales well with resolution.

Quote from Scawen :

I do have a HDR render target available in HDR mode. I took these shots and videos in SDR mode. I like the idea of having an SDR mode available to avoid all the expensive post-processing but I'm interested in trying the HDR type effects.

Nice, I would really like to see the same blackwood video in HDR mode for comparaison.

I think HDR rendering should really be your main target (with SDR fallback of course) as with a time of day and decent light ranges, without it you'll probably have a lot of clipping.

For most PCs, having basic tonemmapper (like Reinhard or others, nice resource here) would have virtually no performance impact compared to current "Post Processing ON" if you put it in the same pass as the final frame composition (where you'd add the bloom to your framebuffer, which would be in the current PostProcess.psh)

Not really sure how important it is in the grand scheme of things, but I'd really like to see that clock ticking over to match the time-of-day setting...
And I know Eric doesn't want to show anything half completed, but I know there's a lot of people here who would love to see a basic road map of South City - simply for hype purposes of course

Quote from Shirtkicker :

see a basic road map of South City - simply for hype purposes of course

Definitely.... definitely!

I really like the way that LFS is turning out. Looks a very big progress on this game, devs. Congrats.

Also, @Scawen, is there any thougs or idea inside todo list, to add Safety Light bar to cars? Now that you're working with lights and those things, I think that it's a good idea to have the chance of add a bar of lights and then use the car as safety car. Also, on driving servers like [TC] will be good for having police cars.

Spoiler - click to reveal

Quote from cargame.nl :

There are limited development resources, no need to waste time on something which isn't beneficial. The upcoming update is a graphical one, no-one has any idea how this is going to perform not with 40 cars let alone with 60 (on a full grid, this is something different then scattered around the environment). Go effective, quality above quantity.

Project Cars 2 works flawlessly with 32 cars on grid. I doubt that 40 - 50 would cause any more fps drops in LFS as the graphics are much much simpler. If you run shaders, then probably. With default graphics? Nah.
Cruise servers are arguably the most popular servers in LFS and extra slots for them wouldn't hurt. Increases traffic flow, would be great on both smaller and bigger maps. Same for event servers. More players, more chaos. Race servers can keep their slots, but with the graphics/weather upgrade coming, endurance races will be more popular and those are much more fun with more players, so again. Depends on what you want, but in general, more slots = better.

Yes and its a reason why its 32 there. It's not only videocard concerns but physics need to be calculated, MPRs stored, netcode needs to stay optimized. LFS still is single threaded (!). Its not simply raising a number and see what happens. I was in a lot of endurance race organisations after the raise from 32 to 40 (upon my request by the way) and the benefit of this raise was far less then expected because the attendance forced to do a two or even three server split after all. 60 signups means a split of 30/30 etc.. Raising the bar to 50 absolutely makes no sense. If you want to discuss a raise then you have to talk about at least a doubling of the numbers (48 -> 96 connections) otherwise its not worth the energy. But I do not see something like this happen before the internal engine of LFS changes.

At this point i don't think we need extra slots. Yes there are still league that made full server but it's not so often. Better will be to work on this new tracks and night mode. If LFS have positive interest from old and new racers after this big update then maybe will be good to work on new slots and SC/RC system.


Scawen when we can see some pictures from new South City too? We see some from Kyoto,Aston. Does Eric will work on Fern Bay too?

Quote from BorislavB :

Scawen when we can see some pictures from new South City too?

When Eric will provide them (i.e. when he feels it's ready to be shown).

Quote :

Does Eric will work on Fern Bay too?

He either must to rework it, or Scawen has to remove it from the game (and so far the plan is to rework it if I understand Scawen properly, he never mentioned anything being deleted from the game, *I* am mentioning it, because it's one of the theoretical options how to release the patch).

As the current track would be seriously broken with the new graphics engine ... the materials with new shaders would look wrong (so it would be maybe playable, just looking weird/wrong in places).

But the new shadows require proper geometry with the track surroundings being modelled in more complete way, having also solid walls on sides where you can't see it from the car on track (and these are often missing in old tracks as they were optimized out for old engine).

Without these fixes the shadows would blink hardly almost everywhere, suddenly popping/vanishing, so it would be not possible to play it like that (unless you prefer to play with "stroboscope" effect ).

(I'm a bit guessing, so my description of situation may be not 100% accurate, but from my own experience with 3D engines programming and with the changes described by Scawen I think this guess is not completely off... I think some of that was even mentioned in one of the progress posts, but I can't recall it for sure any more, it's kinda taking a long time to remember every post... ).

Quote from cargame.nl :

Yes and its a reason why its 32 there. It's not only videocard concerns but physics need to be calculated, MPRs stored, netcode needs to stay optimized. LFS still is single threaded (!). Its not simply raising a number and see what happens. I was in a lot of endurance race organisations after the raise from 32 to 40 (upon my request by the way) and the benefit of this raise was far less then expected because the attendance forced to do a two or even three server split after all. 60 signups means a split of 30/30 etc.. Raising the bar to 50 absolutely makes no sense. If you want to discuss a raise then you have to talk about at least a doubling of the numbers (48 -> 96 connections) otherwise its not worth the energy. But I do not see something like this happen before the internal engine of LFS changes.

Yep, fair enough. Maybe, with more content being added to S3, people will buy the S3 license and the devs could get the chance to upgrade the engine. The replay and spectator netcode is just terrible and hides so much info.

I don't know if this was asked before, with the new lighting will the layout objects generate own shadows?

Quote from F.C.Barcelona :

I don't know if this was asked before, with the new lighting will the layout objects generate own shadows?

Yes, in the Rockingham graphics progress report we got some screenshots with layout objects having shadows:
https://www.lfs.net/static/screenshots/ror201809/sept_layout_objects.jpg
https://www.lfs.net/static/screenshots/ror201809/sept_layout_ramp.jpg