Looks like Eric has spent more than a year on SO ; still has some things to do on SO, on KY, ... and fully FE. I suppose that Scawen has some times to spend on multithreading.

Wow, I'm really impressed by the ammount of work put into South City, good job !

@Scawen: You moved histogram generation on the GPU, that's nice to see, and looking at the settings that you got to tweak it, I feel like we saw similar papers for it.
Did you had to move to feature level 11 for it or did you found a way to make it work in feature level 10.0 ?

Clouds can be a really long task, and really rewarding, but yeah, I'm sure that when you'll get nice clouds rendered you'll have a hard time containing yourself not to implement rain weather and simulation, so I suggest you get the tire physics ready first

Quote from lfsrm :

Hopefully the core graphics engine is near completion.

Is it even possible to finish a graphics engine ? As a graphics programmer myself, I sincerly doubt it

can't wait to have a look

thanks for making your software so exceptional. I've gotten pretty deep into the force feedback response with the fzr after many years in. really amazing when you think of it and surely not going to start disappointing with the next version

Quote from Scawen :

I have a bit more to do on the graphics, though I want to spend some time on the physics soon.

Nice, but i remember there has problems with merging code of the two LFS builds, how progress is going on now of merging builds with tire physics and graphics, or it is done now?

Wow, SO looks so different that it really feels like what it might've happened with a city in 17 years . Aside from the technical side of modelling, Eric has quite some skill as a city architect.

Great work guys, keep the momentum alive .

Amazing, I'm already great in love with LFS but now with this i'm getting even more ! Amazing future that will be and amazing things that will give to do in these new changes !

I hardly understood anything. But you don't have to if you have learned to trust the developers.

Thx for the Report and the Pictures. Some corners are totaly new and other hard to recognize again.

Quote from Scawen :

Thank you for the feedback, pleased you like the progress so far.

I have a bit more to do on the graphics, though I want to spend some time on the physics soon.

A couple of urgent things I can think of.

- I want to convert the 'individual car diffuse lighting calculated from dynamic environment map' into a compute shader so I can use it for all the cars that have an environment map. More distant cars will use the 'approximate diffuse' lighting that is currently in the paths. That's only about a day or two's work, I think, as it's a simple compute shader (and a conversion of existing code).

- The approximate lighting, for more distant cars and will also be useful for temporary objects like physics objects, layout objects and skid marks. It always was stored in the paths. But now I think it can use the occlusion octree, as that already covers all driveable areas. This sounds like a few days work.

- One obvious thing is clouds in the sky but I really don't want skies to prevent work on the physics. In my mind this can be released without clouds, but cannot be released without the physics updates.

- Various things on paper lists here but I am actually crossing them off faster than adding them now.

On Eric's side there are still plenty of holes and gaps at South City, mainly because there are really a lot of new roads and connections and he has been filling those new places up with detailed buildings. Some more holes to fill at Kyoto, and there is Fern Bay too. So both of us will still be busy for quite a while.


Thanks for the comparison shots!


Thank you for that!

Thank u for this last report all looks great

Thanks for the report, can't wait for Fern Bay

Always nice to see improvements in LFS Well done.
my 2 cents for VR as a only-VR user. and having tested auto-exposure in iRacing.
It doesn't work well in VR as the whole view is taken by the game, opposite to when looking at a game on a monitor ( or triple ) that take only , maybe 25%, of your FOV.
Knowing LFS I am pretty sure the level of exposure will be tunable in the options so I don't really worry about it
I hoped we could have so previous of the sound for the echo, the system looks really nice and real-time echo is a huge improvement in sound immersion and perceived quality
Cheers.

Thank you for not stopping the constant progress. Can't wait till the update comes out, this will forever be my fav game ❤️

Quote from Evolution_R :

The other major thing was:
[graphics and physics on separate threads]

But I guess that is maybe after the graphics are done.

Yes this would be helpful for maintaining high frame rate as the CPU still has do do a lot of work asking the graphics card to draw things. So I will be thinking about this probably when I'm on the physics.

Quote from nacim :

Wow, I'm really impressed by the ammount of work put into South City, good job !

@Scawen: You moved histogram generation on the GPU, that's nice to see, and looking at the settings that you got to tweak it, I feel like we saw similar papers for it.
Did you had to move to feature level 11 for it or did you found a way to make it work in feature level 10.0 ?

I did have to use 11 because InterlockedAdd was not allowed in feature level 10 and I couldn't think of another way to add to the histogram buffer.

Some possibilities here, the old 'read back a small texture and analyse on CPU' is still there for test purposes, so could be resurrected for Direct3D 10 GPUs. But I was thinking maybe feature level 10 could use the SDR mode and use time-based exposure instead. That would allow D3D10 graphics cards to use LFS but some things wouldn't be much good, e.g. it would be very dark in a car park.

But I don't know how many people have a Direct3D 10 graphics card as D3D10 was out a relatively short time before D3D11 was available. I think for now I'll keep trying to make sure it can run on them using SDR.

Quote from Aleksandr_124rus :

Nice, but i remember there has problems with merging code of the two LFS builds, how progress is going on now of merging builds with tire physics and graphics, or it is done now?

The new tyre physics is in this new version. So the situation is that it might be a bit hard to try to copy the old tyre physics from the public version, into this new version. I am more motivated to try and update the new tyre physics to an acceptable level. It is nice to drive with but needs some good work on load sensitivity, pressure and temperatures which are not correct.

Quote from MagicFr :

Always nice to see improvements in LFS Well done.
my 2 cents for VR as a only-VR user. and having tested auto-exposure in iRacing.
It doesn't work well in VR as the whole view is taken by the game, opposite to when looking at a game on a monitor ( or triple ) that take only , maybe 25%, of your FOV.

Yes, I found in VR the exposure is calculated as dark if you use the whole view, because so much of the view is the car interior, so then it overexposed the image. So in LFS it limits the exposure check to a smaller square in each eye (both added together for a single exposure histogram). This limited square is 30 degrees each way, equivalent to a 60 degree FOV on a square monitor.

When you drive fast you look far ahead so this right turn that appears at the last moment is unacceptable for me.



I would like to see the same video but with an onboard view.

Quote from super_gt :

When you drive fast you look far ahead so this right turn that appears at the last moment is unacceptable for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=_fe-jndUjEc

I would like to see the same video but with an onboard view.

That's because the straight before the right turn is uphill, so you wouldn't be able to see the corner anyway.

OK, here is the same video from the in-car view.

The idea is you should not see any pop-up at all.

Quote from Scawen :

OK, here is the same video from the in-car view.

The idea is you should not see any pop-up at all.

...

indeed, everything is fine, even in the mirrors

Quote from Scawen :

OK, here is the same video from the in-car view.

The idea is you should not see any pop-up at all.

I apologize, good job.

Quote from Flotch :

indeed, everything is fine, even in the mirrors

Speaking of mirrors, @Scawen, how do you handle shadows for mirrors and environement maps ?

If I'm seeing correctly, for mirrors, you are rendering another cascade (maybe using a bounding frustum of the 3 mirrors in order render shadows 1 time instead of 3) with a max distance of around 250m. This is nice, considering a lot of game just don't render shadow maps in secondary renders (environement maps, mirrors).
For environement map I can't see much in the current screenshots and videos

Quote from Scawen :

But I don't know how many people have a Direct3D 10 graphics card as D3D10 was out a relatively short time before D3D11 was available. I think for now I'll keep trying to make sure it can run on them using SDR.

Looking at the Steam hardware survey, for what its worth, DX10 GPU and less account for only 2.9% of all users. FL 11.0 is available in virtually every PC nowadays. The only "big" GPUs that I could think that are DX 10.0 / 10.1 are the GT 2xx series, released in 2008.

Quote from Scawen :

But I don't know how many people have a Direct3D 10 graphics card as D3D10 was out a relatively short time before D3D11 was available. I think for now I'll keep trying to make sure it can run on them using SDR.

My two cents from the steam stats:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
It looks like 95% runs DX11 capable GPU. That might be lower for lfs as it is a heaven for low spec pc racers, and I understand they would not like to be dropped off. But DX11 is pretty comon now!

Quote from Degats :

Eric's been busy

Obligatory comparisons:

https://imx.tc-g.uk/so202009/01
...

Thanks Degats that made me realize how much stuff has been added, that's just a crazy amount!
Big up for the work Eric. And of course the new rendering and lighting from Scawen is great too!

Quote from super_gt :

I apologize, good job.

No problem, I think it is a good question and this new video answers it.

Quote from nacim :

Speaking of mirrors, @Scawen, how do you handle shadows for mirrors and environement maps ?

If I'm seeing correctly, for mirrors, you are rendering another cascade (maybe using a bounding frustum of the 3 mirrors in order render shadows 1 time instead of 3) with a max distance of around 250m. This is nice, considering a lot of game just don't render shadow maps in secondary renders (environement maps, mirrors).
For environement map I can't see much in the current screenshots and videos

In mirrors, yes, it uses a bounding frustum of all the visible mirrors to generate a shared set of shadow cascades. Actually it goes with full distance at the moment although this is probably wasteful and we could get a reasonable result with fewer cascades. But fewer cascades means some extra copies of the shaders because the shaders use a #define for number of cascades. Still, the mirror views are narrower so their shadow render seems to be quite fast.

In environment map at first I used no shadow maps, but there were some very bright areas that stuck out badly because they were really in shadow, but appeared brightly lit in the environment map. In the end I chose to render everything in the environment map as if it was in shadow. It was a better choice as the main visual function of the environment map is really to block out areas of the sky. The sky is so bright compared with most objects, it's quite rare that I notice the missing sunlight on some objects in the environment maps.

Quote from loopingz :

My two cents from the steam stats:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
It looks like 95% runs DX11 capable GPU. That might be lower for lfs as it is a heaven for low spec pc racers, and I understand they would not like to be dropped off. But DX11 is pretty comon now!

Thanks. On further thought this morning I should probably keep DX10 support as a separate issue from SDR mode. For as long as it's easy, I might as well leave DX10 available but with certain features disabled. E.g. their cars would use the approximate diffuse lighting instead of calculating it from the environment map. But they could still use automatic exposure using the CPU method. I don't know how long DX10 support can last but think it is worth keeping it as long as it's easy to do so.

good job! I can't wait to progress from the Fern Bay track.
Will a future update work fairly well with the integrated graphics card? I have intel hd 4000 and currently max 60 fps at the maximum graphics settings.

Awesome job Scawen! So initialy we might get new tyres with some mistakes, but then with some updates you will bring them to level you expect to reach? Or you think you will have enough time to make them to level you want with the update?
Also what we can expect performance wise from new tyres? Will initial grip level will be the same, or there will be quite diffirence?

One thing that might be an issue is viewing the track from the free cam if things are rendered based on the car location. Is there something I'm missing in the explanation?

Quote from BerdyGaming :

One thing that might be an issue is viewing the track from the free cam if things are rendered based on the car location. Is there something I'm missing in the explanation?

I think that shouldn't be a problem, cause for example when you enter the Shift+U mode, the occlusion would automatically no longer be based on driver's view, but rather on the view of free cam (or occlusion disabled completely, but that would be a performance hit for sure).

@BerdyGaming, I think in the free camera mode (Shift + U) this will be adjustable or if it's not - it should be.