Tracks Road America 1.0
- Thread starter LilSki
- Start date
D
Deleted member 223075
-
Deleted member 223075
To much baloons kill baloons 
But yeah i'm not a big fan too
But yeah i'm not a big fan too
When you do it for a track do you make a new "layout" for them and leave the original models.ini alone? I only ask as depending on how the server is setup a different models.ini can trigger a checksum kick. I'm not a fan personally but you obviously can do what you want.
I tend to agree. It's not that I'm pathologically against balloons in principle... but I've been walking the earth for 41 years and I can probably count the number of days I've seen a hot air balloon on my fingers. Seeing a dozen of them at every venue in every session in every weather at every time of day is too much.
Nothing breaks immersion like a giant black hot air balloon looming 50' above the ground at 4am in a thunderstorm at LAC, and yet there they are.
Fully agreed with these gentlemen.
Yeah, I did that for the optional balloons/choppers I added to Spa as that's a track that's used a lot in online races (I think it was you that gave me the tip in the first place, actually). For lesser mod tracks I'll either do a separate layout or add an explicit warning about potential checksum errors if using the track online.
For the record, I've never had plans to add optional balloons to Road America and never will. That possibility was raised by somebody else. I appreciate that balloons aren't to everyone's tastes and that they fit some types of tracks better than others (and seem more popular with VR users), but as with car skins, physics updates, track skins etc etc they're of course completely optional and anyone can simply choose to ignore them. And if they come included with a track (@aphidgod mentioned LA Canyons) then it's a two-minute deal to remove them - but I guess that could cause checkum errors too.
I like it a lot! As far as AI - they tend to crash at 0.36 so a hint will make them aware of the tricky corner
And to the authors - I don't get it, making the inner parts of the track presentable and cutting us off with hollow bridges and tunnels. As soon as I felt happy that someone already did the cruize possible - I fell down. But thanks for getting it this far!
PS - Don't flatter youself with a lap of 1.48 because you will be up against this lot
Franchitti-fast AI
Code:
[BRAKEHINT_0]
START=0.32
END=0.35
VALUE=0.8And to the authors - I don't get it, making the inner parts of the track presentable and cutting us off with hollow bridges and tunnels. As soon as I felt happy that someone already did the cruize possible - I fell down. But thanks for getting it this far!
PS - Don't flatter youself with a lap of 1.48 because you will be up against this lot
Franchitti-fast AI
Last edited:
The infield wasn't technically ever supposed to be something you could get to. I just didn't have the time to block it off. That is why the bridges and tunnels are not physical.
D
Deleted member 197115
-
Deleted member 197115
Any chance to get at least some grass so GrassFX is not needed. From our tests on discord it adds 10-15% overhead.
Plus it triggers spectacular but not super realistic sandstorm dust clouds when cars drop wheels off the track. And that kills performance even more.
Plus it triggers spectacular but not super realistic sandstorm dust clouds when cars drop wheels off the track. And that kills performance even more.
The dust clouds are particle FX related, no? Irrelevant to grass_fx being enabled or not.
There are settings you can use to reduce the number of grass blades spawned, as well as the type of alpha used, which can be a big performance booster.
Scattering, layering and LODing grass objects is too time consuming... for the minority requesting this.
Last edited:
D
Deleted member 197115
-
Deleted member 197115
If you have ParticlesFX enabled, GrassFX triggers dust clouds, it doesn't happen on regular grass. We had thorough discussion on this on CSP discord, unfortunately there is no solution around that except disabling one or another.
Always thought GrassFX is just a compliment to track's vegetation, not a complete replacement.
GrassFX is meant to replace the...grass. The configs for existing tracks remove pre-existing grass if it's present. John and Kevin simply decided to skip adding something they wouldn't use anyway. 3D grass would add rendering overhead (I'm not sure about the 10-15% you quote, but it certainly wouldn't be zero), and the track is optimized for use with CSP functionality. It doesn't look particularly bad without it either. Also, it's free.
cerebralvortex
Premium
That might all be true, but there is some noticeable overhead with GrassFX which is more apparent while running in VR. While I think it looks great, I have to turn if off unfortunately to get my frame rates up. Not saying anything should change for Road America, it is up to the authors. But yes, I agree the cost of running it is quite high.
You are talking about 2 minutes to make grass vs maybe 10+ hours (in blender, 3DS might be faster) to put it down the conventional way and have it look half as good. I would much prefer to spend that time doing other things that matter to John and I than on something neither of us will ever use.
Those little strips of sticky-up grass were never a great solution anyway, and a lot of tracks looked better with them completely omitted IMO. GrassFX is such a better all-round solution.
I thought the performance hit was only supposed to be around ~5%? Might be wrong. I guess it can vary from track-to-track and on the grassFX parameters.
An upcoming track mod actually performs better with grassFX according to one of the devs/testers, because there were originally so many of the fake 3D grass tufts.
Purely anecdotal, but *shrugs*.
There are ways to make the old 3D grass look decent, I even did some tests once... using the variation shader slot in ksgrass and creating a variation texture that matched the ground texture underneath. But it was a lot of work, on top of the 10+ hours Kevin is estimating.
Or the multi-scatter 3ds max plugin, using a rgb mask to place different colored grass objects in certain places, but again, time consuming...
Anything more basic and rushed, it just won’t work with the current mowed lawn lines.
Also, there’s no law against someone else manually scattering 3D grass objects and injecting them with CSP config lines if it’s really that important to have
Last edited:
D
Deleted member 197115
-
Deleted member 197115
10-15% average measured is what I got on Road America track in VR, with occasional dips well into sub 90fps when cars in front were hitting curbs making clouds of dust.
leBluem measured same 10-12% loss from GrassFX in general.
The problem is that GrassFX is global settings, and once enabled applies to all tracks bringing that unnecessary overheard to allready vegetated tracks.
May be we will be able to control that in the future but not right now.
Anyway, thanks for a great track, even with GrassFX it performs better than older 3.6 version
Grass FX only overrides older 3D grass if there’s a line asking for it in that track’s config file. Delete those lines and they won’t be replaced
