Hey, I don't use this forum much, so I'm hoping these ideas haven't already been posted.

Personally I am a cruiser, and also a racer. One idea I had would benefit the whole of the LFS community, though it may not be seen as a benefit. This is that on the side of the number plate's, we have the country that the user is from (like a country code), shown as a sticker of the country's flag, which they select in-game when they first join LFS.

My second idea would be a setting for night. This would be where it would be a dark sky, and low lighting, which means that we would have to use our headlights to see. (would it be possible for the headlights to work in-game. ie, so that they light up the track).

Sorry if these idea's have already been mentioned. If they have, feel free to lock this.

Others may post here with their ideas if there isn't already a S3 suggestion thread (apart from tracks and cars)

pls delete, just seen the thread

Your first suggestion may be useless and trivial, but I think it'd be quite a cool addition.

The second would be very cool, especially for 24 hour endurance races. Technically however, it's a hell of a lot of work.

In terms of graphics, daylight is easy to render. It's generally approximated to being light from a fixed direction everywhere on the track, meaning illumination depends on the angle of the surface relative to an arbitrary direction, not a relative direction. Even with shadows, it's lighting in it's simplest form from one light source.

When night time comes around however, the lighting procedures for headlights, floodlights, etc. are more complicated, and to make things worse, there's LOADS of them. This is one of the places where Rfactor suffers in night time racing. The whole game slows down A LOT once the sun's gone down.

Think of it this way. The cost of rendering the scene is scene complexity X number of lights. When the only light source is the Sun, then it's quite fast to render the scene. When it's two headlights per car, that figure gets larger astranomically.

I'm sure it's possible to get it running smoothly, I can think of a few ways to do it myself (occlusion culling, only run lighting calculations on objects close enough to each light, a combination of static and dynamic lighting, rolling back LOD ratios in the dark, etc.) but it's still a lot of work. And at the end of the day, the devs just have to decide whether it's worth the trouble.

Oh, and before anyone comes in here and suggests deferred shading, although it does scale well to multiple light sources, deferred shading doesn't support transparant surfaces. Can a racing simulator really live without transparant windscreens? Besides, there's plenty of data which can be reused between lights.