Head lights as well as tail lights appear way too bright. This might also be due to excessive bloom and the fact that all those lamps emit light omni-directionally (which in reality is of course not the case, especially not for head lights!).
Another issue is light temperature. Since LFS' cars generally belong to the late 80s to early 2000s, pretty much all of them would use traditional light bulbs. The only car I would imagine having xenon headlights is the FZ 50 (and of course the VW Scirocco, once the time comes).
Finally, the night sky over a city is usually not that dark, since clouds get illuminated by the vast amount of street lamps and other light sources. Of course the odd atmosphere is also because none of the buildings/windows are lit.
Edit: I'm not overthinking this. It's a visual update and I'm commenting on the visuals. Also Scawen is the one striving for realism in every detail so I was hoping to provide another perspective. And yes of course you can, theoretically, retrofit a dozen bone-stock 90s hatchbacks with LED rear lights, but that's not the point. Scawen and Eric can take my opinion to think about what they want to achieve, or they can leave it. But I don't want to discuss this with other users any further as it needlessly clogs up the thread.
Hah.. Ye, very true. Only the parking garage has lights. Randomized lights (going on and off at long intervals) in the apartment / office blocks? Would be funny.. But.. Not much to do with a racing sim anymore. Difficult.
you are severely overthinking everything. cars can have upgraded lights for temp and brightness regardless of year. Also the night sky, Go to a more rural area, even with light pollution you get very dark skys on the right night. Over thinkin it, but good thoughts.
That would be such a touch! Also making the intervals a function of time (for example, much more lights in the evening than during the night). I think that would make South City so special and alive.
I agree with booplesnoot here. Great thoughts and feedback, but I think pairing light temps with the car's (fictional) age is the least important thing right now (I may be wrong ). Some variety in light temps across all the cars would be great, though!
these are good points for finishing touches, people calling it overthinking are just worried about the "release date" moving forward which is usual business and unknown anyways so relax
Good points indeed. Majority here, myself included, overlook any and all of these points since we are so desperate for a release. His opinion may have set the update release out another 2 years.
It could certainly cause some glare when close to a strong light source, but that would be easy to spot as glare, as for the sky anything that would be caused by light reflecting from the lens or windscreen would affect the image as a whole
So.... I guess we ain't getting a January Progress report.... Oh well. Enough about that.
Lighting. Much of this thread has to do with Night time and lighting. I been sort of stuck on something else though. Matte and satin colors for the cars. Would that be hard to do? The background elements all have matte colors. I don't know squat about what goes into coding colors or what exact color swatch is used. I do know that Pantone matching system has two basic variants - PMS C (coated - glossy) and PMS U (uncoated and pretty much matte) I also know that some paint makers have CMYK and RGB formulas to color match their paint colors. But that's really for people to have the ability to dial that particular color into their computer and printer. I know most folks are into glossy paints and high reflections. To me though, too much of that kills the realism. Someone posted a screen shot from another game, the gloss and reflections were waaaaay over the top. Almost needed a welding hood to look at the picture. Yeah. I'm not desperately wanting to have matte colors as I like shiny cars too. I do see a lot of potential in having access to matte colors though. And I know this subject has come up before, only it was just skimmed, no real depth went into the subject.
I don't know how correct you'll be. At this point it's LFS playing catchup to other sims like iRacing, but LFS is like a single guy building a log cabin versus a 50 person crew pouring concrete, framing, and throwing up walls every hour.
For myself, LFS holds a special place and there's still things that it does much better than any sim on the open market, but the places where I felt LFS always thrived.. other sims have caught up and surpassed.
iRacing's new tyre model has some flaws, but it's by far the best tyre they've created. You can slide and recover slides and actually drive the car over the limit without fear. The damage model is very cool and has improved racing because people realize that contact can be and is race ending.
Now LFS' implementation of day night cycle looks like it'll be really good and significantly better than iRacing's, and on par with ACC. But I don't forsee much endurance racing in LFS anymore outside of 1 off events.
@gu3st Think not many guys want to rent a game. And about ACC I like it but have hardly hours in it so maybe don't like it that much.
Atm I play mostly Wreckfest and I hope LFS will get that netcode But I must say it's hard on server and with 24 players on server the server uses arround 20% cpu (4th gen i5 at 3.6ghz) and 12mbit/s.
When I whatch LFS server when it's busy it's 3 a 5% cpu usage and cpu is often at 800hz. 47 cars online uses less the 1 mbit/s
But cars also bit jumpy in lfs.