Hi,
Sorry if this is a wrong forum to post in, but I have a question to any programmers... How hard is it to code light smoke/heat waves comming out of an exhaust pipe on a car? Lets say if your engine got damaged the person in back of you will be able to see that because the smoke will get a bit darker and the person will be able to take advantage of the situation? I mean can LFS word/engine support this? Can you image heat waves comming up from the race track on a hot day or after rain ?
Sorry if this was asked already, but im just curious.

Thanks for all the responses.
PS. was this done in any previous sim?

You'd need pixel shading.. and it would probably be most interesting to do it with every other pixel shading/eye candy polishing, like glowing disc brakes, metal/concrete sparks, dusty/dirty rims/bodywork, probably extra light sources for night racing, etc.

yea u right, whats cool is all that is planned for like s3 i think. By that time our systems will probably easily support all of these eye candy. Maybe some will come later for s2.

Yeah, you'd definitely need to use shaders for heat waves, but smoke from a knackered engine could be done just using the current tyre smoke system with a different coloured sprite coming from the exhaust or from under the hood.

+1 for the engine smoke

I hope we get engine damage for S2 Final

i think lfs would need dx8 or 9 for that...

AFAIK it IS DX8.

Yep, the Haze effect is actually a DX8 shader effect, IIRC.

colcob is right, i've simulated damaged engines in driving games before (not sim's like LFS) with a standard billboard particle system like that used for the existing smoke. It works quite well with the right texture & blend mode settings, and I use DX7 mostly.

i remember in S1 there used to be a bit of dust on the track just before the bridge on the straight (where the track dips) on blackwood.

if you watched the replay from the tv camera view or whatever you want to call it, you could see the dust/dirt flying around behind the car as it went over it.

what happened to this bit of dirt? i thought it was pretty cool the way it did it. BRING IT BACK!

If LFS did do exhaust/flames etc I'd like to see something that isn't billboard-based as it destroys the reality when the camera rotates... Just my £0.02

Billboarding is a bit old fashioned for these things. I suspect that the dirt / smoke particles are point sprites (technically billboarding I know, but more effective) and that any exhaust output would use a similar system where a collection of point sprites would be all acting together as a fluid body. i.e. like many games do flames, and other effects.

I've not heard the term "point sprite" before myself personally. Now i'm not ridiculing you here, I just don't get what's wrong about billboarding and right about point sprites and i'd like to know more?

It seems to me that the most logical thing for what a point sprite is would be a sprite which has a "handle" or "hot spot". This is, in actual fact, what a sprite is. If you put a sprite into a 3D world so it is no longer displayed at 1:1 ratio it is called a billboard. There are several ways to handle billboarding in terms of camera facing, but this is all down to the implementation and what you are billboarding.

Could you explain more about this point sprite system please? I'm somewhat confused?

Quote :

I'd like to see something that isn't billboard-based as it destroys the reality when the camera rotates

This is because of out-dated or "low system requirement" particle emissions systems. Some of the best effects that work with camera rotation in modern games are still done on billboards.

There's two parts to a smoke system for instance, the emitter (a tyre for instance) and the particle itself. LFS' particle & emitter system is, in my personal opinion, not very advanced - it's biggest failing is that it doesn't seem to rotate the billboard and therefore gives a very "this is one image after another" look to it - especially when you use the smoke hack to increase the density.

The other problem, again just an opinion, is it tries to create too much smoke/grass density with too few billboards by comparison to modern games.

The solution to poor billboarding on camera rotation is more billboards, not less, strangely enough. When using large area billboards using a high alpha level is important so that no single layer visibly "cuts" across the camera.

volumetric smoke and clouds. no old stuff.