Tracks Sveg, Sweden

[LilSki]

Yea I should probably uninstall...

But can you tell me how I can adjust the path of the sun?

I can't remember off the top of my head. If someone does answer I'll get back to you when I get home.

 

[LeonS]

I can't remember off the top of my head. If someone does answer I'll get back to you when I get home.

muchas gracias

 

[Stereo]

AC unfortunately doesn't really do the path of the sun accurately. In data\lighting.ini you can set pitch and heading - pitch says how far the sun is from straight up (0 means directly overhead at noon, higher tilts it. or possibly vice versa with 90 straight up. should be pretty easy to tell), heading says which direction is north.

I forget exactly how it's mistaken, it's something like the pitch just tilting the plane it rotates around instead of acting like latitude. Consequently rise and set times are fixed (8am-6pm)

 

[LeonS]

Thanks. About what's wrong -- I would assume it goes in a straight line instead of the wavey pattern it has in reality:

But that's good enough for me. I'll play with that tomorrow. Here's some more screenshots. Trying out new angles.

 

[Stereo]

This is how I understand it, at higher latitudes the sun should go on the red path (offset by the earth's 23 degree inclination dependent on time of year, this is quite exaggerated), in AC it rises and sets 180 degrees opposed. I haven't tested in a while so I might have it backwards though.

 

[mantasisg]

I have tweaked lighting.ini in my track not long ago, I'm pleased with the effect. Except that now I'm getting major fps impact at heavily shadowed places, but only in the replay mode, I think. Be aware of that. I am taking out trees, reducing shadow planes.... Treewalls have been using no shadow casting right from beginning.

And I think that AC sun path is correct. I have set lightning in a similar way it would be in early spring, though my track looks like in an early autumn.

 

[Fat-Alfie]

Your track is looking great

It's really exciting to have another brilliant track modder as part of the community Keep up the hard work, and I can't wait to follow your progress.

 

[LeonS]

This is how I understand it, at higher latitudes the sun should go on the red path (offset by the earth's 23 degree inclination dependent on time of year, this is quite exaggerated), in AC it rises and sets 180 degrees opposed. I haven't tested in a while so I might have it backwards though.

The "real" thing in your graphic can't really be real though. In the northern parts of the world, the summer sun will sort of hover slightly above the horizon but go full circle in this wavey pattern (as in the picture I posted). In the winter it's the other way around and the sun will essentially hover right under the horizon. As long as you're not too close to the poles, I would assume the "perfect circle" in AC is a fair approximation. Of course, for this track it would be nice to be able to have the wavey pattern and go 24h, but we can just call it September and live with it

 

[LeonS]

reducing shadow planes...

As in, taking out the extra face for shadows at noon, or do you get rid of the trees' shadows altogether? I was thinking using shadows only on the outmost treewall and putting in a another "noon shadow" object that spans over the whole forest, creating just one large shadow. Would that bring an advantage in terms of fps? Since my tree-walls need to be partially see-through I don't want to get rid of the shadow completely.

 

[AccAkut]

that should absolutely be an advantage, having one object producing shadows instead of ...20.000 of them.

 

[LeonS]

that should absolutely be an advantage, having one object producing shadows instead of ...20.000 of them.

the tree-walls are... 4 objects that I would replace with one (per "block" of trees). I can't just replace all the trees shadows with one big one. I could however replace the shadows of some trees further in the back with an "invisible tree-wall texture"... but therefore I would have to get rid of the tree shadows first...

Can I have one tree with and one without shadow somehow, when both use the same material?

 

[mantasisg]

I don't think that it is practical to have treewalls to cast shadows. Also they might just make treewalls too noticable. AC stops rendering shadows or lods them out in a distance anyway, and it depends on a type of tree wall I guess, you have nice treewalls, and they should blend in with the rest of the trees. As for one single object - maybe ? Or just make the terrain at those places darker...

I have had an idea to make a movable large object to fake shadows created by clouds, but then I thought that it would be stupid on completely clear weather, and also wouldn't even work because the way shadows are endered.

And in order to have one tree to cast and other not to cast you have to have them as separate objects in editor. This means using additional KSTREE group, and thus increasing DIP and not wining anything.

 

[mantasisg]

@martinsh had same issues with Bikernieki, fps hits and frames desynchronisation.. Solved by reducing amount of trees, thus reducing amount of shadows. Donington 1938 should use that too.

 

[LeonS]

@martinsh had same issues with Bikernieki, fps hits and frames desynchronisation.. Solved by reducing amount of trees, thus reducing amount of shadows. Donington 1938 should use that too.

Problem is just that reducing the amount of trees isn't really much of an option for me. If I run into problems I could try reverting to putting them all into one object again and not using the kstree shader the "right" way. If that saves anything. At the very least it would allow me to use KSLAYER on them. We'll see.

 

[mantasisg]

You should be good, you could also manipulate lighting.ini to have shorter shadows. And I think that amount of trees is not the case, but when they are very dense and close to the track.

I don't think you should ruin your nice forest look either, looks very well. i'd take that forest and 60fps rather than very sparse forest and 70fps, I caped at 70fps

 

[LeonS]

I should ask Nvidia for paid ad placement. If the track is a burden on the GPU, there's your solution on the ad board :-P

 

[mantasisg]

That would be genius slogan

 

[LeonS]

The more they pay, the more trees I put on... ;-)

 

[LilSki]

I never meant for the whole "horizontal plane" thing to be "required". It is just something that may come in handy. I ended up not using it on Bridgehampton 2.0 since the design of the new trees didn't need it. If the sun isn't that high then there is no real need for it.

 

[WOKOWEN1]

Very nice work. Although I don't agree when you say doing a fantasy track is that hard because it allways depends on how much detail you want to put into it. Imagine having to build a real life track the size of yours from scratch with same amount of detail without having access to the real material textures or real objects dimensions etc...I can assure you you will need a few years just to complete it. Anyways thanks for putting so much effort to create the track. We need alot of people with your aproach in the community.