0.8.8.1 bugs or problems and fixes

[boomer541]

I had a bug with a white square appearing over the brake lights using 0.8.8 and haven't checked it using 0.8.8.1.

Another bug was when running over the hill on my surfaces and sounds track the rough road wasn't rough. It appears to be a problem with road noise in the special.ini file. It doesn't work.

When changing cars the gauges don't appear and I have to rerun racer to get them back on.

Thanks for puting up this thread.

 

[Tiberius]

EDIT: Clicked wrong reply button..see post below Gizmo's..


EDIT 2: No, forum won't let me post again in this thread, redirects me to this post..so my post goes here:


I've been importing 3D work mainly so haven't driven around much, but a few things I've noticed (there's a couple others but I can't remember them at the moment):

- 2D gauges disappear for me too, but only after switching cars in the car select menu - switching cars in the quick race menu doesn't kill the gauges for me.

- I'm getting 3D gauges reflected in the env map around the front of the car, only on one car but maybe the 3D gauges need to be taken out of the env mapping as the light flares were?

- Sometimes setting 'fog rayleigh' in the console kills the rayleigh fog completely, sky goes black - definitely not a typo, happened several times now and I definitely typed it correctly - this has been happening for a few versions as I remember. Even if I try to get it back (like fog_rayleigh 0.002), I don't get any fog unless I exit to menu and load the track again.

What's happened to the track lighting? Can we get an explination? Seems like setting ambient and diffuse around 0.8 to 1.0 for each shader is about right now, otherwise everything is too bright..can someone confirm this?

Cheers, Bruce

 

[FiftyOrange]

I'm getting rectangular smoke on certain camera angles. On some views, it fine and cloudy. On others, it's just a spray of white rectangles growing then fading.

 

[GizmoPower]

Dido! Me too!
And movables dont work in replay! They dont even reset!

 

[cjjohnsson]

same here!

I'm also getting quite a lot of crashes in the game, and i have no clue why (QLOG opens up when it shuts down, the log file has a size of 9 MB -.-)

 

[EngineOfDarkness]

same here! (jumping on the bandwagon)

I also get some sort of weird rectangle in the lower left corner, dunno looks like a mirror or some weird thing... sometimes.

Also when I turn on auto_exposure it is like brightening up and down the exposure (looks like my monitor is flickering).

I'm using an ATI 4890 by the way.

 

[boomer541]

I get the rsctangle smoke at times also.

Another problem I found is with the hill on my Surfaces and sounds track. It disappears unless I get close to it. World set at 10000, visibility set at 2000. been doing it since 0.8.6, 0.8.5 was good. 0.8.6 was when that world size first appeared. Something for Ruud to work on! Other tracks have objects farther away appear ok.

Uploaded my Surfaces and sounds test track in the download section.

 

[Tiberius]

This isn't really a bug but more of a problem that I'd like to throw out there, see if anyone else has any thoughts..

After playing some other games, one thing hits me with Racer - there's a total lack of ambient sounds, like everywhere, and that really kills the realism of it..it's like you're playing Racer in an anechoic chamber rather than a 3D world

The problem at the moment is, that although you can add ambient sounds in TrackEd, there's two problems:

- No matter how high you set the sound radius, the sound always comes from the actual point where you placed the sound, and hence is very directional (no good for an overall ambient sound where you want the sound all around you but it always comes from the side where the actual source is).

- Sounds can't be overlaid it seems, for instance if I have an overall ambient sound with a radius covering the whole track and then another sound within that radius (for instance a waterfall), the first sound seems to cut out the second one entirely. Racer doesn't seem to be able to mix ambient sounds like it does with car sounds.

Another thing I was thinking, I was looking at some code from some other games and it seems that they mix the sounds at 48khz, Racer.ini seems to be set to 44.1khz and setting it higher just makes the pitch of the sounds higher. I have problems getting sounds to sound 'good' in Racer, the soundset and mixing part is fine but the audio quality just never seems quite as good (compressed more?) as it does if I play the sounds in a regular sound editor, or am I imagining this?

Cheers, Bruce.

EDIT: Seems the sound mixing is working now (at least I think it is), I have the Racer starting horn sound as an ambient sound with radius 10000m and a car idle sound nearby and they both seem to mix okay, but I'm still wondering about the other parts of my question .

 

[tormento19]

Some bugs in Racer v0.88 (also see on v0.87, so knowed bug!):

- Dials dissapearing randomly
- Interior of some cars with wrong lighting

Screenshot of Racer v0.86 vs v0.88

View attachment 20973View attachment 20974

Also the car list on the selection screen should have more capacity, the 250 limit (i think) that Ruud selected isn't enough for many users that have more cars!

And finally, getting 0.5 FPS on some tracks, and it don't work even deleting the collision.bin file

 

[Tiberius]

A few more small bugs:

- Objects using alpha_to_coverage aren't transparent in the env map or the mirror, I guess this is because those views don't use multisampling? Seems if I also have a regular alphafunc= line they then do render OK, is it alright to have alpha_to_coverage and alphafunc in the same shader layer or are they gonna cause bugs?

- Car shadow bleeds through some alpha'd surfaces (like grass) which are close to the car - only seems to happen when the camera is close to the ground. Not a major bug at all but thought I'd mention it.

- Still getting some 3D gauge needles rendered in the env map, again not a major problem, seems to be mainly caused by the position of the needle.


- Finally, what's up with the lighting in 088? Everything is retinal burns bright, everything is lit up like a Dutch brothel at midnight with ambient light :tongue:

Ambient needs to be scaled by the sun amount I think, so you get something like ambient=0.8 on a clear sunny midday, dropping to about ambient=0.2 at night - at the moment ambient seems to be staying around 0.8-1.0 no matter what. Not sure whether it would be possible but the rain and snow curves work great, would it be possible to get light levels mapped into a curve in the same way? For instance a curve with X axis from 0-24 (hours), Y axis from 0-1 (or even higher) for light level, the whole scene lighting controlled 3 curves for ambient, diffuse and specular light.

 

[Stereo]

- Finally, what's up with the lighting in 088? Everything is retinal burns bright, everything is lit up like a Dutch brothel at midnight with ambient light :tongue:

The default ambient= (for shaders that don't explicitly define it) was increased from about 0.1 to 1.0, so a lot of track special.ini are throwing way too much ambient light in to compensate. It might need some work I guess (and I haven't tried time of day yet) but around ambient=0.7 0.7 0.8 in Carlswood gives me a bright overcast day.

 

[Tiberius]

The default ambient= (for shaders that don't explicitly define it) was increased from about 0.1 to 1.0, so a lot of track special.ini are throwing way too much ambient light in to compensate. It might need some work I guess (and I haven't tried time of day yet) but around ambient=0.7 0.7 0.8 in Carlswood gives me a bright overcast day.

I'm trying to stick to Racer's time of day so that's where the problems are coming from for me at the moment - static lighting setups are fine if I tune the light levels but time of day is throwing far too much light I think.

From what I can see, at midnight (time 0000 in console) with time of day turned on, the track is getting around 0.6 ambient, really 0.1-0.2 is where it should be I think. Turn the sun's ambient down in the console and it's fine, but change the time again and it's back up to around 0.6 and everything looks way too brightly lit.

The lighting will look great when it's right, it's just getting all the levels in the right places.

Thing is, we've gone from really dark, toned down lighting back when HDR first came in, from there we've now gone to really bright over-contrasted light, the light levels I'm seeing here are so bright that you can see artifacts (artifacts from the bloom effect I think?) on bright surfaces like the road shaders. Carlswood isn't so bad but chuck in a track which doesn't use vertex lighting and I need to start turning the shaders down - otherwise everything looks radioactive

 

[Tiberius]

Another bug, is anyone else having issues with TrackEd?

A few nights back I tried adding track cams to one of my beta tracks, on a high poly track I just can't place a single track cam keyframe because TrackEd can't find the road splines (I click on the green dots but the screen still says 'spline -1' and it won't let me place a camera anywhere (I tried a lot, over every single road spline). If I remove everything except the road surface it seems to work enough for me to place the cameras but it's near impossible to do good cameras if there's no terrain, objects etc. This is a high poly track, probably 250k polies total, one face per 2m for the road and roughly the same for the surrounding terrain, but it renders and drives fine in Racer itself, it's just TrackEd that's having the problems placing the cameras.

Also I'm getting crashes sometimes when I try to reload tracks (even reloading Carlswood crashed it a couple of times for me), sometimes when I start either TrackEd or Modeler, all the buttons are marked with '-op-' and it won't work until I restart it.

 

[tom160]

I have got vista sp2 on my laptop, and i have recently downloaded 0.8.8. I went on it, and this message came up.
View attachment 21264
what do i do?
how do i fix it?

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'm trying to stick to Racer's time of day so that's where the problems are coming from for me at the moment - static lighting setups are fine if I tune the light levels but time of day is throwing far too much light I think.

From what I can see, at midnight (time 0000 in console) with time of day turned on, the track is getting around 0.6 ambient, really 0.1-0.2 is where it should be I think. Turn the sun's ambient down in the console and it's fine, but change the time again and it's back up to around 0.6 and everything looks way too brightly lit.

The lighting will look great when it's right, it's just getting all the levels in the right places.

Thing is, we've gone from really dark, toned down lighting back when HDR first came in, from there we've now gone to really bright over-contrasted light, the light levels I'm seeing here are so bright that you can see artifacts (artifacts from the bloom effect I think?) on bright surfaces like the road shaders. Carlswood isn't so bad but chuck in a track which doesn't use vertex lighting and I need to start turning the shaders down - otherwise everything looks radioactive

That is the new ambient/diffuse defaults.

They were 0.1 0.8 or something, but now they are 1 1 iirc (Ruud mentioned it, is it in a changelog?)

Ideally all that really needs to happen is track special.ini be altered to reflect this.

TOD is clearly setup for the old values, so is generating too big a values. Easy to fix at Ruuds end I guess...

What would be nice is if TOD was an algorithm we could set, with lots of other special.ini values to get generated too.

I'm not sure how, but a little like a script where we have the inputs (time, north position, position on globe/earth, fog), and then from those values a big equation (which we can edit), churns out the ambient, diffuse, mie and rayleight terms, and sun position

Mmmm, optimised TOD


Then all we need is a way to make it do vertex lighting and baking on the fly as well

Dave

 

[opelman]

Dynamic shadows not work correctly. Every time when i end the race and go back car selection it tilt.

 

[boomer541]

I tried a track that was too bright and tried reducing the intensity in special.ini, went from 250 to commenting it out and testested a pixel.

The test pixel only changed by a value of 1 out of 256.

I guess the lighting needs to be deciphered by some body! I'll look in the documentation on www.racer.nl.

 

[luthobu]

Bugs and errs

v0.8.8 changes: Increased Win7 compatibility; with Aero theme, dialogs would stay hidden behind main window(s). /But/.. without Aero Racer only shows a black screen (yes, some of us prefer the KISS principle), meaning that "without the Aero theme, dialogs will stay behind main window(s)" - or? FWIW, I run 0.8.8.1.

Edit 07.02.2010: F12 gives black screenshots. Top mirror not visible at all. Tracked and modeler not showing buttons (black only).

 

[Tiberius]

One thing I've been thinking, this is extremely unlikely to happen I guess, but is there any way that some basic variables like control inputs, velocity, RPM, time etc could be floated to enable realtime calculations in the car.ini? I realise that Racer only treats the car.ini values as a lookup so reads them when you load the car and doesn't try reading them again them until you reload the car, but think of the possibilities.

You could do auto shifting based on throttle/RPM, CVT type transmissions, brake fade (some function of max_braking and brake heat?), turbo lag, speed sensitive steering, even tyre grip levels varying with temperature. That's just the start, you could add a lot of features just by being able to do some basic maths on variables, like you can with Cg shaders..

Something like:

shift_rpm = max_rpm - (4000 * (throttle input*-1+1))

would give a reasonable approximation of shift points on a gearbox, (at least I had it working on the G25 with fudged RPM values) - really basic stuff but would work really well with some development.

I've been trying to learn some really basic programming, I've been starting to create a basic plugin - at the moment just something simple to simulate auto shifting and brake fade, a bit of a test to see what can be done. I can pull/modify control inputs fine but there's no way at all that I can see to get variables out of Racer, I spent a lot of time trying to get something useable out of the telemetry output but at best it gets written every 5 seconds, sometimes not at all until you quit back to the menu - the data it's writing just isn't current enough to use for anything in real-time. So in that respect I've hit a total dead end, I can get modified control inputs into Racer but can't get anything useable out.

Would take a huge rewrite of code if it were ever to happen I suppose, something which would be very unlikely to happen?

Probably a total dead end but thought I'd throw it out there..

 

[Mr Whippy]

One thing I've been thinking, this is extremely unlikely to happen I guess, but is there any way that some basic variables like control inputs, velocity, RPM, time etc could be floated to enable realtime calculations in the car.ini? I realise that Racer only treats the car.ini values as a lookup so reads them when you load the car and doesn't try reading them again them until you reload the car, but think of the possibilities.

You could do auto shifting based on throttle/RPM, CVT type transmissions, brake fade (some function of max_braking and brake heat?), turbo lag, speed sensitive steering, even tyre grip levels varying with temperature. That's just the start, you could add a lot of features just by being able to do some basic maths on variables, like you can with Cg shaders..

Something like:

shift_rpm = max_rpm - (4000 * (throttle input*-1+1))

would give a reasonable approximation of shift points on a gearbox, (at least I had it working on the G25 with fudged RPM values) - really basic stuff but would work really well with some development.

I've been trying to learn some really basic programming, I've been starting to create a basic plugin - at the moment just something simple to simulate auto shifting and brake fade, a bit of a test to see what can be done. I can pull/modify control inputs fine but there's no way at all that I can see to get variables out of Racer, I spent a lot of time trying to get something useable out of the telemetry output but at best it gets written every 5 seconds, sometimes not at all until you quit back to the menu - the data it's writing just isn't current enough to use for anything in real-time. So in that respect I've hit a total dead end, I can get modified control inputs into Racer but can't get anything useable out.

Would take a huge rewrite of code if it were ever to happen I suppose, something which would be very unlikely to happen?

Probably a total dead end but thought I'd throw it out there..

Great idea and kinda what I've wanted to see for ever.

Or even put in a variable that you define. Ie, shift_rpm = script/var_myshift

And then define var_myshift in a script folder using simple maths and variable i/o

Ie, imagine having all those variables available on the debug screens to control other things. Even better might be to generate user inputs upon certain conditions.


You could for example then watch slip ratios at all four wheels, and steering angle input, and watch wheelbase and track, and then calculate some rudimentary stability control by having the braking values per wheel set appropriately in real time, and the brake applied.

Even without input control, you could at least do better ABS, so alter the brake balance depending on current slip ratios.


Loads and loads of potential, and those scripts that develop really nicely could then be wrapped up by Ruud as 'default' features you can toggle on and off, run in a more streamlined fashion inside the sim engine proper.

How about making the 'flare' objects rotate in direction and/or flash vs sim time, so you have lights for an emergency vehicles...


Too much potential for fun stuff. Ruud could make Racer lots better by off-loading ideas/development of features to the community. Almost make the whole UI open source, so we can interfere...

I have loads of ideas for simple little trinkets of code that could make things more interesting.

Cripes, you could create a var for a turbo, and add in feigned turbo lag with a few variables.

You could add a fake tyre temp var based on some inputs, and then adjust a2/b2 variables with it.

So much power, but it's all locked away


Dave