hi, a very simply (i hope to implement suggestion - "effect" can be seen in many racing games. easy way to uplift realistic feeling of realtime rendered cars. based on pre-rendered alpha textures from GI skylight, separate for car body and wheels (responsive to their turn angles), combined with currently used calculated drop shadow. of course ... fall off with distance to ground.
preview explainins GI shadow maps on XRT car.

+1 cause i dont know what it means

In a nut shell, accurate shadows that follow when the wheels are turned?

I'm think I might need to read through again.

What he is trying to say is to apply a fake shadow using a texture which is made for the shape of each car. So it's not a calculated shadow cast, but a premade texture. And the use that in combination with the already present calculated shadows.

+0.5 from me. It could turn out ok, but I'm hoping updates to the graphics engine will provide a better solution. Shadows in LFS are quite crappy, especially shadows coming from trackside objects. Plus LFS doesn't have multiplied shadows. So for example when a car goes under a bridge the shadow of the car doesn't get multiplied by the shadow coming from the bridge.

+0.5 from me too. Shadows in LFS could be improved, but not by faking things.

Quote from geeman1 :

Shadows in LFS could be improved, but not by faking things.

Good idea, Scawen should update the render engine to use photon tracing... Of course a nasty side effect of that would be that the game would run maybe one frame per week on the top end supercomputers :drunk:

In practice, pretty much everything you see in games are "faked" entirely. Only thing that matters is wether the result looks realistic enough or not and with this method I believe it could look better than with any other 'high performance' approach.

Quote from Kegetys :

Good idea, Scawen should update the render engine to use photon tracing... Of course a nasty side effect of that would be that the game would run maybe one frame per week on the top end supercomputers :drunk:

We don't need to go to that extreme. But adding a blob under the car will not help realism. The current shadows we have now are just fine. Just a few small touches needed, like joen said.

Quote from Kegetys :

Good idea, Scawen should update the render engine to use photon tracing... Of course a nasty side effect of that would be that the game would run maybe one frame per week on the top end supercomputers :drunk:

caustics on the dashboard would look sweet though

Apparently the lfs shadow maps are currently 2 color bitmaps. only shadow or light. Thats the reason why a car has no shadow when its in the shadow of a house.
Additionally there is the gouraud shading of course, but thats just a polygone shading that is calculated from the angle of the poly towards the light source, and not a projected map like the shadows under the car.

I've been thinking about this for a while too.

If you look at the shadow of a real car, its made up from two distinct parts - the shadow from the car blocking the direct rays of the sun (the shadow that moves around as the sun moves) and the shadow from the car blocking bounced light (the dark area directly underneath the car). LFS current has the former but not the latter, giving a (slight) impression that the cars are floating a little.

Quote from [d9] :

hi, a very simply (i hope to implement suggestion - "effect" can be seen in many racing games. easy way to uplift realistic feeling of realtime rendered cars. based on pre-rendered alpha textures from GI skylight, separate for car body and wheels (responsive to their turn angles), combined with currently used calculated drop shadow. of course ... fall off with distance to ground.
preview explainins GI shadow maps on XRT car.

The idea is good but the problem is it won't work with lfs because ground is not flat.It has height too.So the shadow plane would not exactly fit on gruond plane... unless a projection is made.

Gastro-Intestinal shadows?

-1

quit jokin around

+1.

a Simple effect, that adds that touch

Its a simple effect to minic the second shadow that real cars cast. Cars cast one shadow from ambiant light and one from each direct light source. During the day this is mainly the sun. The more intense the direct light is the darker and shaprer the resulting shadow. We already ahve this shadow in LFS but we do not have the difuse shadow caused by ambiant light whis is present in real life. Adding a pre-rendered shadow that is scaled based on closeness to the ground is a very easy and visualy realistic way to mimic this in a simulated envirnment.

+1

I'm very for faking things like shadows being an option if it means I can run with decent looking shadows under normal conditions with frame rates. LFS is the only current game that I don't have major fps issues with and it seems more and more new releases believe in forcing people with prehistoric PCs to have both crappy visuals and crap frame rates on the lowest settings. To me it makes no sense that older games can have better looking graphics with higher frame rates and no drastic change in the rest of the game to explain the performance loss

graphics are all generated in a 'fake' manner - if it's fast and comes out looking good then great.

Quote from geeman1 :

+0.5 from me too. Shadows in LFS could be improved, but not by faking things.

lol it has to be faked, no "game" [can] calculates shadows and GI realtime

i say +1 but we should see this in a graphics update (if we get one) anyway

+1 for better shadows

and what about in-car shadows? on a sunny day there should be distinct shadows in the car too.

Quote from XCNuse :

lol it has to be faked, no "game" [can] calculates shadows and GI realtime

Hmm, atleast in the picture OP posted the shadow is totally wrong. There is a shadow on the side where the light is coming from. Adding a static blob of shadow under the car just seems weird in a time when other games feature calculated almost realistic looking real-time shadows.

One way or another it will look more realistic if the area under the car and tyres is darker. So I'm all for whichever is the most framerate friendly way of doing that.

Quote from geeman1 :

Hmm, atleast in the picture OP posted the shadow is totally wrong. There is a shadow on the side where the light is coming from. Adding a static blob of shadow under the car just seems weird in a time when other games feature calculated almost realistic looking real-time shadows.

oh i didn't see that, yea but thats just a render, knowing the devs they'd do it correctly

actually current shadows for the cars are "3d models".
I think the 3D engine has to be updated because Scawen is limited with using some effects.

Some pixels shaders are laying in dust on our graphic cards in LFS currently.Scawen give them a small excercises

Quote from DEVIL 007 :

Some pixels shaders are laying in dust on our graphic cards in LFS currently.Scawen give them a small excercises

why not put them to proper use then ?
we have a whole bunch of highly parallel units doing nothing in a game largely made up from parallel problems running on a sequential core
but i suspect this isnt at all posible without any specs from the card developers and i also have no idea how tightly speced shaders are but i suspect that there might me quite some deviations between cards

Quote from Shotglass :

why not put them to proper use then ?
we have a whole bunch of highly parallel units doing nothing in a game largely made up from parallel problems running on a sequential core
but i suspect this isnt at all posible without any specs from the card developers and i also have no idea how tightly speced shaders are but i suspect that there might me quite some deviations between cards

Are you thinking about doing physics on the cards? I don't think that'd be doable right now as there is just too much leeway in terms of floating point precision and similar in the current APIs for accessing them. I don't think any cards support the entire IEEE 754 standard for floating point math like the x87 FPU does (maybe the GeForce 8 series, but I'm not sure), which means that the results of the physics calculation would be different from card to card, or between GPUs and the CPU fallback (which would be needed too I guess). Not necessarily a bad thing of course, but it's a step down compared to how it works now where everyone gets the same physics.

I think the whole GPGPU thing won't really take off until we get the likes of AMD's fusion which is eventually supposed to expose the GPU through extensions to the x86 ISA. That means both the CPU and the GPU will live inside the same memory address space, with cache coherency and all the goodies that bring. I doubt it'll be a worthwhile path for LFS until something like that comes around and is adopted by at least the two big ones (Intel and AMD).

Sorry.. Waaay OT .