I'm pretty sure Scawen is aware of the existence of OpenGL- why he chose directx at the time probably makes sense to him.
A couple of years ago, the graphics card you had pretty much determined the performance of the two api's. If you had a Nvidia card, you could be expected better performance in games running in OpenGL. If you had an ATI card, directx games like Half Life 2 performed better. I'm not sure about the current scene, but I would definitely hesitate to say that OpenGL is a better performer (upto 4X) overall. That seems a fairly biased conclusion imo. ?
It's worse than bias. It's utter shite. Due to it's old age OpenGL 2.1 in many cases performs worse than DirectX 9 on current hardware. Remember that OpenGL appeared in the early 90s and it's core has remained the same since (new features have been added through extensions). This unlike DirectX which changes each version. There are a lot of assumptions made about the hardware in the OpenGL API that just don't fit modern hardware. The driver has to do sanity checking and validation all over the place to make sure it can handle all the different ways of doing something.
It's old age also means that it's notoriously hard to write drivers for. This is mostly because of the sheer amount of features it has accumulated over the years but the fact that it's so far removed for the current hardware doesn't help either. The fact that ATI's OpenGL drivers have sucked for years (though getting better now) is not entirely down to their incompetence.
These problems with OpenGL are well known though and fixing them is the goal with OpenGL 3 which is due out Any Day Now™. The entire API has been rewritten to be closer to the metal of modern hardware (Similar to what happened with D3D10) and it should be considerably easier to write drivers for since it doesn't have all the legacy crud OpenGL 2.1 has. It also has the advantage of working on Windows XP so it could very well gain some attention since it will be the only API to provide D3D10 features on Windows XP.
As for you ReVVeD, all the examples you cited of OpenGL being better than DirectX are entirely irrelevant. You can't compare two different engines with entirely different art-direction and conclude that the difference is down to the API used. That's just nonsense. How about you look at ET: Quake Wars on Windows (D3D9) and Linux (OpenGL) and get back to me. You'd be hard pressed to find differences.
come on... they are an example, and they are meant to be seen as how a camera would capture the scene with certain speed for exposure...
anyways, have you guys been at the least inside the track along with the cars, 10am in the morning summer with the sun on top of your head, your shoes feeling like glue into the asphalt, specially white cars, they blind you. I've been really lucky thanks to a friend that's sponsoring a couple of argentinian formula renault cars to be in the pitlane, and in the presentation show for the cars pre-race.
come on, stop being cheap although anyways if you don't want this feature you can disable it. but let those who spend on hardware experience lfs as in the real world... from inside the cockpit of a car, after a few laps, the ambience and the track is dirty and foggy cause of the heat and dirt in the air (depends on amount of wind and location anyways), and even when you are inside the car, white cars will reflect the sun and they will shine, the sun is going to blind you too.
i don't want "photorealistic" images either... i don't want to see like a camera does.. but i would like to see how real pilots see inside real cars in real racetracks. and for that you need HDR.
i forgot about the helmet... the helmet visor film is going to get dirty... and it's going to shine too reducing and amplifying reflections unless you are using special coating..., wich will get dirty too, only thing to do is to remove a film layer...
i find a lot of todays games up exposure and in trying to add so many effects they end up making it look... fake. I thought advancement in graphics would be about moving it towards realism. I want to see lfs look REAL, the correct exposure, the correct colours in the textures.
i'm not bothered about being able to see every blade of grass, get a "lens flare" or watch the crowd jiggling up and down. What i do want to be able to see is what's currently there looking in the same contrasts and tones as my eye would.
Edit: And in response to the low end pc's problem, just have an option to turn it off! Or make it about time people upgrade their pc's. You can have a pretty good pc at very reasonable prices these days.
that's what i mean about "photorealism"... we don;'t wan't photorealistic scenes... we want realistic scenes...
dirty, foggy, blurry (heat). shiny, and blinding sun is a must... it's been a desicive factor in a lot of races... although it's one of the reasons racedays are around 11:00am is to avoid blinding sunshine.
it'd be nice to do dirty tricks like side dirt tapping to distract drivers behind but it might be too much to ask
Yes, many many many many times. Whilst a strong reflection can be quite bright, it's NEVER EVER made everything else glow. The bright bit is bright, the rest is the same. On a car, which is funny shaped, the sun is really only likely to reflect into your eyes perfectly on one or two spots.
So tell me, have you ever used your eyes on a bright day? Think about it next time, because bloom, or even HDR in most cases, is completely and utterly unrealistic unless it's so toned down it's not noticable.
it is toned down yes.. nothing like the usual HDR usage in games, but it's the difference to get closer to the real perception of the scenario and cars.
i think it's time to get out of the SGI era... SGI graphics "WERE" great... they are not anymore HDR or some equivalent technology should be used to get closer to even more realistic looks.
and i mean that LFS looks like SGI graphics, it looks extremely great... i like it a lot, but it's time to move on, closer to reality. windshields are not perfect... specially after a few laps.. on trackdays, after 15 or 20 laps i can't see a thing thru my windshield if i screwup and i don't remember to use some detergent on the water deposit to clean it up. there is oil, coal, dirt and a lot of stuff that IS going to make what you see thru the windshield or the helmet visor blurry. I can tell because i had to stop that day to clean up my windshield cause the guy in front of me had troubles with his engine and started burning oil gradually.
PS: i'm not saying that LFS "NEEDS" HDR or something badly, i'd rather have physics improvements, features, and a lot of stuff that it seems scawen gives priority with good reasons... but it'd be nice to have HDR if some visual upgrade ever comes to have priority during the project... dynamic enviroment mapping would change the game looks too.
one last thought... why do i care so much about how LFS looks?... well, i have a little simcenter here in Santiago de Chlile (www.vf1.cl), we have a couple of cockpits, and people enjoy racing, as much as they do watching other people race... for that, we have a 120'' projection where the race can be seen live while you wait for your turn. LFS has the potential to become a recognizable professional racing enviroment for the media... that means maybe live tv broadcast, or something. the better the game looks, the more people get to enjoy it without even racing.
That's a good point. Only shiny surfaces should give off glare and only at certain angles, when the sun's reflecting back into your eyes. Windscreens/chrome, highly polished metal- are very reflective. Car paint can be too, but perhaps not as much (and probably not enough to warrent blooming). Cars will typically be the shiniest objects in most scenes.
I often think that the main lighting effect that's missing from LFS is a subtle bloom effect for (certain parts of) the cars. Changing atmospheric effects, like heat haze(distortion), dust, fog, could possibly be pretty cool as well.
Yes, dirty windscreenms and that sort of thing are lovely, and I doubt anyone would say no to them (as long as they aren't done instead of cockpit interiors ). And I was aware, vaguely, of your simcentre from your previous posts a couple of years back.
But in your example images it was NOT toned down. It was insanely turned up, and looked as photorealistic as this. If LFS gets HDR and bloom at this level then LFS is doomed. If it gets added to such an extent that you cannot/do not notice it, then I'm in favour. But never in real life have I seen bloom, and HDR (i.e. direct sunlight) is either combated with not looking, squiting or tinted visors. Glare is nothing like bloom. And HDR lighting is nothing like glare. I'm not denying glare doesn't happen a lot - it's very common when the sun is low in the sky. But HDR and/or bloom cannot simulate that.
But seriously, I think HDR combined with exposure simulation can look great if done right. However, "if done right" is the important but rarely reached key point - vf1-xj220's screens for example look terrible, like you're wearing dirty or fogged up glasses. I guess the extremely simple pseudo HDR method of "copy layer, multiply layer with itself 3-4 times, blur layer, make layer additive" was used in that screen, which does nothing but make the image look like sh*t. If anything, only bright areas should bloom, everything else has to stay normal.
I think the reason the first shot especially looks weird, is that the lighting isn't consistent throughout the scene. The light inside the pits is quite subdued overall (and quite a tricky place as well to make a point about lighting), but the car is glowing like a phosphorescent mushroom at night. The metal drawers next to the car, on the other hand, aren't. That makes the eye confused, as the drawers and the car are probably mostly made from very similar materials, but the qualities of the reflected light they are giving off are very dissimilar.
and the white stripes on the car... are uumm... reflective painting *scratches his nose*
heh, no, seriously, the image was edited to make the car standout of the scene... fake lighning like that it's often used in publicity, although it's usually smoother so it would appear a shot with a soft filter or something. try to look at any point of the image and you'll see that the car attracts your eye wheter it's because it bothers you or because it draws your attention.
not to that level, i insist that if lfs ever gets a graphics engine improvement, lightning improvements are a must. if you take a serious look at lfs... it looks like it's always a cloudy day, sometimes not even the reflections of the cars can cope with that.
Well strictly speaking it's OpenGL ES, which is a bit different, and that's only one of the APIs it supports. These days most games use the lower level libgcm on PS3.
[offtopic]
Hi there, that's going to be my first post altough I have been playing LFS for quite some time as demo racer (I'm about to buy S2 though), starting with first versions and seeing it evolve intermitently since my interest on driving sims has come and gone quite some times (including the time when I didn't have a wheel at all) so it's been a long time since I last tried the game, downloading it again around one month ago, when I also tested some other driving "sims".[/offtopic]
Relative to the graphical part of the game and the topic of this post, I might remember that first versions of LFS were quite "basic" in graphics side and that it has improved a huge lot considering the rather small team behind the project, up to the time frame we're now, where it looks both 'solid' and 'right'.
Instead of a DirectX upgrade, I might point out that right now it might be more useful to get higher-poly models or more detailed race enviroments for the purpose of getting better graphics without tampering the feel of current graphics. Sure, those GT5 shots might look impressive, but they also look like 'plastic' and over-exposed, not looking that solid neither realistic, even considering most of the detail is on the cars and not on the track.
I understand that it is going to be needed in the long run to upgrade the graphics API to something more powerful and with better effects, but nowadays we're being taken over by 'effects' to 'real feel', meaning most games use shaders in such an exagerate way you might think cars and guns are made of moisturized pieces of mirror.
How LFS looks is correct as for nowadays standards, but it has a feature that is unique on this game as of nowadays standards : the correct use of colours, their brightness and saturation make you feel it's more real because they're well-picked and well-placed. Just like it happened back in 'Rally Championships' days, although the game was arcade-ish, the visuals looked realistic, not because of the number of polys or the Dx version used, but because the artistic work was coherent with what was to represent, which is the most overlooked part of many games but also one of the factor that determines immersion.
My opinion and conclusion is just a basic point of view that takes long to explain : Even though a DirectX update should be able to boost visual effects and post-processing, it should not a priority or a need at the current stage of the project, as it is still in Alpha stage and the basics of the game (physics, gameplay, controls and the interaction between those three put together) might be the main focus as of now. I agree that in like half a year or one year there should be a facelift that might include the upgrade to a new Dx standard, but as of today, being also on a transition point (to dual/quad cores, to Dx10, to OpenGL3.0, to the always-forgotten x64 architecture, etc.), it would be a couple of steps back to just stay back there.
So those are my two cents :]
PS : Sorry for my oh-so-big-huge-unreadable post, I like to make my arguments clear ^^
Definitely agree. There's a lot more to gain on the short (and long) run just by refining what we currently have. Remember that some of the cars and tracks in LFS are still basically the same as in the S1 days. Which is already about 5 years ago. Over those years people have getting better PC's, and Eric's skills have improved. Just take a look at how nice the FB02 looks compared to the older cars. Some of the cars could really use a couple of more polygons without having a big impact on the performance. The UF1 being the best example. That one just really isn't a good representation of Eric's work anymore.
The level of track detail is pretty much perfect now, it has a good balance. Some errors could be corrected though and LFS definitely needs better shadows, Kyoto being the worst.
The recent improvements of SO and BL are good examples of how refining the current content just works wonders.
). And I was aware, vaguely, of your simcentre from your previous posts a couple of years back.