LFS - Live for Speed, Graphics Progress Report: Kyoto

Live for Speed, Graphics Progress Report: Kyoto updates

Hello LFS Racers,

We would like to talk a bit about progress and show you some work-in-progress screenshots of the updated Kyoto track.

2024 has been an unusual year for LFS development. The mods system was a little out of control around the start of the year. Our programmer (Scawen) had to work quite a bit on the system to help improve the quality of mods and make sure they could be sustainable. Also for the mods, various updates were needed in Live for Speed and the Vehicle Editor to tie up some remaining loose ends. Fixes and updates were also needed in our hosting system. Eventually we were able to release version 0.7F at the end of July.

Outside of LFS, Scawen has been involved in a home project for a few months. This has taken away some development time but he will be developing again in the new year.

As regular LFS community members know, we have been working for some years on a new version of Live for Speed using Direct3D 11. It has a lighting system that positions the sun according to the date, time and geographical location. The physics system now runs at 1000Hz and this has been enabled by multithreading. The graphics and physics systems run in separate threads so they can use more CPU cores, allowing the greater demand in graphics (e.g. shadow mapping) and greater demand on physics due to running at 1000Hz. This has been discussed in detail in previous progress reports. All our tracks have been updated to take advantage of the new graphical features and to enable the use of dynamic shadow mapping.

We also have a new tyre model in development, that works well in some ways but is not ready for release. To complete it, Scawen needs to focus for some weeks or months without too many distractions. It is unpredictable how much time this would take, so he has recently reproduced the tyre model from the current public version, in our new version of LFS. We are currently calling this the 'Retro' version. It's the same tyre physics that has entertained us for all these years, but now running at 1000Hz and multithreaded with a few minor fixes. This was done as a way to enable the release of the new graphical version with all the updated tracks more quickly.

Eric, our artist, has spent most of this year working on the Kyoto Ring environment and has expanded the driveable areas in a similar way to the Westhill track. In open configurations, you can drive around all the access roads and a new high speed karting track has been added. He has also been through the other tracks, fixing some remaining issues to make sure they are ready for testing.

We cannot give an estimate for when the new version will be ready to release. There is still work to be done by Eric on Kyoto and by Scawen on the programming side.

We hope you like the screenshots and we wish you a happy and relaxing winter break!