Hello!
I'm very afraid that this has been suggested but i didn't find it with search so i'll post this. By deforming road surface i mean that car wheels would leave a mark on muddy/gravel surface like it's shown here:

I know it's not a good example but you'll get the idea, it can be done by textures, but what it really would do is, even up the races so eventually you cannot use the best line because you'll go slower there and even may get stuck if it's rainy (s3) by doing this with 3d modeling it would run the game into heavy framerate issues, but maybe it would be possible to do with textures, like the tyre marks are done, but they would affect the physics aswell (bumps etc). It's not an easy thing to do, but i'm sure it would add some serious depth to a rallycross race, right now it's just hitting the right lane and keeping up the speed, and only motivation to go on is a challenge, for me it's starting to fade because there are very little racers getting it as fast as i can. (i'm not braging)

Just my 2 cents (/me gets my flamesuit ready, just in case)

I think it's a good idea

buy s2!

Definitely a good idea.

Vain

i agree with the 2 above posts

:up:

Yeah, I think for the simplest way to have this done would be to have all DIRT/GRASS surfaces to have a different kind of skidmark texture drawn.

We already have skidmarks on the hard tarmac, but if we could have the skidmark texture be drawn as an 'inset' tire track on the dirt or grass, it would work out great. It may look flat, because it would just be a texture drawn still.... but I think it would be the first easy step to having it... and it wouldn't look all that bad.

Other games do it, and it doesn't look so bad.

As for a deformable surface where the surface is actually changed.... well that would be a tough one, pretty advanced, maybe that will come later on.

:up: :up:

What they said^

yep.. i remember the thread about this back in RSC, i cant remember what it was called so i dont know what to search; i think it was something around the lines of rally.. and groove

+1

Would be difficult to make properly though...

Thanks for the positive answers. /me hangs the flamesuit back on the wall where it belongs.

Btw my point was that the skidmarks on mud/gravel would affect the driving/physics not just the cosmetical stuff, but it must be somehow evident, so there wouldn't be some holes that u can't really see...

That is "BACK TO THE FUTURE" stuff

can't wait for these feature come to life in sim racing!!!

great idea Taavi

RBR has this, though only in championship mode and the road doesn't exactly deform dynamically. It just depends on the starting position if the road is deformated or "new" road.

yup good idea (real live changes) i think it would not be hard to implement, but imo we don't have the computing power to cope with this yet...

It's mainly raising te polygon-count in the high-duty areas and changing the alternation of some polys when someone drives over them. It's a lot of brainwork to be put into it, but the CPUs are definitely up to the work. Performance decrease in fps: 0(,0002)

Vain

would add some realism if you could spin a hole in the ground and leave marks. dirt flying onto the gras, tarmac, car etc. affecting both grip (gravel on tarmac) and visibility (mud on windshield)

Quote from Vain :

It's mainly raising te polygon-count in the high-duty areas and changing the alternation of some polys when someone drives over them. It's a lot of brainwork to be put into it, but the CPUs are definitely up to the work. Performance decrease in fps: 0(,0002)

Vain

nope, i will argue on this... you have to matematically find out how much and which poly has to be altered and the increased poly count will do a hit on fps on its own... the physics of changable envrionment has not been seen in many games yet (red faction if i recall correctly), this is why the Ageia Physics processor has been developed...

That is because the free deformation of the enviroment is really complicated. Here in LFS we don't have free deformation, all the player can do is create tracks in the dirt.
When you think about how to construct tracks from a pattern of a lot polygons (let's say quads, for simplification) it really isn't too complicated in terms of CPU-time. There's still a lot of maths and thinking to do, but the CPU usage should be far lower than what f.e. the tyre model causes.
But I don't think we should get into details of a track-model here. That'd be beyond the scope of the thread and we want to leave some work to Scawen, no?

Vain

it would be nice, but i think it's an insane idea for todays pc's .

Quote from Vain :

TWhen you think about how to construct tracks from a pattern of a lot polygons (let's say quads, for simplification) it really isn't too complicated in terms of CPU-time. There's still a lot of maths and thinking to do, but the CPU usage should be far lower than what f.e. the tyre model causes.

Having for example reasonably looking (and acting) ruts in gravel road would require significantly more polygons representing road surface per square meter than are used now. Then these polygons act as input to collision detection algorithm (you need to know where the wheels contact the road in every simulation step). The computational complexity of this algorithm is probably more than linear wrt number of polygons, so there is definitely significant computational cost involved in achieving such deformable surfaces.

Possibly I'm going to get flamed for even mentioning a console game in a positive light here, but the PS2 game "World of Outlaws" (a surprisingly good dirt-track sprint-car simulator) did a nice job of this, although in a very simple way. As the various sessions passed over the course of a racing day (practice, qual, heat race, etc.) the appearance and grip levels of the track would change and this would mean that by the end of the day the fastest line was in a significantly different place than it was at the beginning. (This was a great way to make racing on a short-track dirt oval more interesting and challenging, although the really casual user might not have noticed it.)

Now of course this was all achieved through "canned effects", and what was really happening was that racing occured across five or six subtly different tracks as time went on. Nevertheless it was a cool effect and something similar could surely be done on an LFS rally-X track without the sort of CPU-intensive graphical issues that actual modelling of bumps and ruts would involve.

Dirt tracks in the mud would be nice.

Quote from jtr99 :

Possibly I'm going to get flamed for even mentioning a console game in a positive light here, but the PS2 game "World of Outlaws" (a surprisingly good dirt-track sprint-car simulator) did a nice job of this, although in a very simple way. As the various sessions passed over the course of a racing day (practice, qual, heat race, etc.) the appearance and grip levels of the track would change and this would mean that by the end of the day the fastest line was in a significantly different place than it was at the beginning. (This was a great way to make racing on a short-track dirt oval more interesting and challenging, although the really casual user might not have noticed it.)

Now of course this was all achieved through "canned effects", and what was really happening was that racing occured across five or six subtly different tracks as time went on. Nevertheless it was a cool effect and something similar could surely be done on an LFS rally-X track without the sort of CPU-intensive graphical issues that actual modelling of bumps and ruts would involve.

but you can't compare a dirt oval with rallycross tracks. especially the transitions from dirt to mud/gravel and vice versa. there are too many different lines on a rallycross track with the different cars. the 'damage' these cars deal to the track is also very different.

don't get me wrong, i would like to have something like this, but i don't think it's possible yet.

first of all i would like to have a nice simulation of the dirt on the tarmac.

Sega Rally Revo (an arcade game) is going to have the feature discussed in this thread.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/708/708074p1.html

Quote :

More interesting, however, is how each car will shift polygons in the roads themselves. They create patterns and waves as they bend when driven upon.

We watched as the producer circled around the same patch of dirt over and over again. As he did, the heavy rally tires dug various grooves into the ground. By switching cars, from a light to a heavy one, the grooves dug were deeper and more profound. The earth didn't regenerate or reform, it stayed the same. When the car was slowly rolled over it, the shocks perfectly reacted to each groove with great precision. Imagine now that the course you're going to play on has multiple cars racing across the same surface multiple times, creating distinctly different terrain obstacles each lap. Not just your car, either, the AI cars, too.

well i played the recent sega rally part.....and it's soooo bad, i wouldnt expect very much !

We have deformable cars, which is pretty much the type of system needed to make this, i think.

"All" that needs to be done, is to add this same deforming system used to crumple the cars onto the mud sections. When a wheel travels over it, you deform the "mud" and you make ruts.

For simply visual purposes though, a custom height map would work fine to add some "pre made" ruts onto the track.