This news made me happy. I hope the new retro version will be with us soon.

Quote from Bokujishin :

and eats through its RAM, even on Linux.

Beware that linux uses the spare ram for disk caching, making certain operations go faster. I found this out last year when i built a home-server that only runs linux. You can verify how much ram it actually is using with free -h. The -h just means the output won't be showing in bytes, but rather a human readable output.

Since this is slightly off-topic, i will leave it at that.

I wonder if LFS was no hardware limit, would it be with the new physics already?
For example the requirements are intel core i5 up to 4.7GHz or more i7
16gb or 32gb ram video card nvidia4060 or more?
I think dealing with very old computers slows down LFS development

I think it has to be 2 version of LFS
One retro for old computers with new graphics
One for modern powerfull PC with new physics
even if the physics isn't completely finished
Beta version until Scawen is finished

One thing I've been wondering, although not related to Kyoto updates but the new lighting system in general. In real life, all shadows created by light sources of some width/height include penumbra, where only part of the light source is occluded by an object. This makes the shadows look softer the further away it is from the occluding object:



Judging from the new screenshots, the shadows are always sharp no matter the distance from the object. Is this something that you would like to look into in the future? I don't know how difficult it would be to implement but I think it would add an extra level of realism for the new shadows.

Edit: Judging by the reactions, some people seem to misunderstand - I'm not saying this is essential to have or should delay the big update, it's just an observation, something that would be nice to have.

Well... that is to do with the way shadow mapping is done. It's all a big trick, of course, and the resulting image has shadow sharpness varying in a different way from reality. As you say, in reality the sharpness of a sun shadow decreases with the distance between caster and receiver. But the method of shadow mapping results in shadows being sharper when they are nearer to the viewer.

If you are interested enough for a long read, there is a really good article on the Microsoft website which goes through the whole method, issues and solutions. It's relevant to ours to about half way down the page.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dxtecharts/cascaded-shadow-maps

Our shadow maps are "cascaded shadow maps" using an implementation of "exponential shadow maps" or ESM rather than VSM described at the end of that article.

Good to know you're using cascaded shadow maps, do you also blend them to avoid the sharp transitions?
Also, does "about half way down the page" include PCF?

I would also like to ask Eric a small question regarding Kyoto: where does the original Kyoto's Japanese come from? Since some of it seems to be a bit grammatically broken (see this recent addition to the manual), I was curious, and on the new screenshots, the Japanese looks correct so far.

Yes, they are blended to avoid sharp transitions. I use a spherical distance from view point rather than Z, so the transition doesn't move if you rotate the view without moving.

We don't use PCF. Softening or antialiasing is done using MSAA which is possible with ESM.

Thanks for the explanation, Scawen.

If I understand it correctly, a different technique would have to be implemented to generate soft shadows with variable-size penumbra. I found some presentations talking about percentage-closer soft shadows (PCSS).

From slide 39 on:
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/presentations/2008/GDC/GDC08_SoftShadowMapping.pdf

They do mention using ESM to filter the shadows, but that's where my understanding ends Interesting topic nonetheless.

Quote from super_gt :

I think it has to be 2 version of LFS
One retro for old computers with new graphics
One for modern powerfull PC with new physics
even if the physics isn't completely finished
Beta version until Scawen is finished

Given it sounds like a sizeable issue has been the 2 versions of LFS (the current public version and the "new" version) that are very divergent and the intent behind releasing the retro physics version is to bring the public and "new" version into sync, it defies logic to fork the community between 2 versions like that.

Quote from super_gt :

I wonder if LFS was no hardware limit, would it be with the new physics already...

No, it has nothing to do with hardware limits. More to do with human brain limits.

We arrived in interesting times. Although I'm quite skeptical in the capabilities of complex tasks, "AI" already helped me a lot. AI between quotes because its not really AI, more like machine learning and pattern recognition but its helping nevertheless. And its only in its beginning stages

Quote from HKS Custom Tuning :

stop, we low end pc users also need to enjoy lfs, the only reason we enjoy lfs...

oh ! calling me selfish while not even having bought the game ...

Quote from Flotch :

oh ! calling me selfish while not even having bought the game ...

“Demo Racer” says it all haha, looking forward to the new Kyoto and the update should bring with it some
new modern optimizations so fps variation may not fluctuate that much. 2025 I’m glad to see LFS get a new push
Into the spotlight for Sim Racers and hopefully compete with the larger names like Assetto, GT, Beam, etc!

Quote from Flame CZE :

One thing I've been wondering, although not related to Kyoto updates but the new...

Sunlight is pretty much parallel with only a 0.5 degree shadow spread, so the effect shouldn't be super obvious in this case.

Quote from pärtan :

Sunlight is pretty much parallel with only a 0.5 degree shadow spread, so the effect shouldn't be super obvious in this case.

You are right, it is only noticeable in shadows far away from the object, e.g. electric poles, tall trees or buildings.

Here's an example LFS vs real life comparison. You can see the hard shadows of the power lines in LFS vs soft shadows in real life.

Quote from pärtan :

Sunlight is pretty much parallel with only a 0.5 degree shadow spread, so the effect shouldn't be super obvious in this case.

While sunlight can be considered to be parallel because of the distance, its enormous size is still relevant for umbra and penumbra (and in the case of solar eclipses, the penumbra area can cover the entire Earth even when actual umbra is a much smaller spot). This probably goes quite a bit off topic though but you can still see this effect in plain sunlight. Another light source that would show this effect very much is a car's headlights, though this is much more complex to do because of the spotlight source instead of the sun light, and much more expensive to compute.

Still, as we are on the subject of lighting, I do wonder what kind of tone mapping, and maybe HDR Scawen is using? Several screenshots seem to show very washed out colors on brake lights for instance, while in real life, they appear very red. I would personally recommend investigating tone maps such as ACES or AgX for instance (AgX being more realistic, and Blender offers a "punchy" variant that has more contrast). Then again, the brake light issue might just be an issue to do with the emissive textures, which are probably additive.

And while I'm on brake lights, I wonder if the various lights are more visible in the new version? On some cars, it's currently very difficult to tell when the driver in front is braking, unless you're right behind them - again, in real life you could spot a brake light from several hundreds of meters no problem, but in games, they're difficult to see because they appear so small they literally don't get displayed properly.