You guys were pretty much all agreeing on the brightness being too much, specially around noon.
I also had this problem in rFactor 2, my favorite time to race is dusk or dawn, so I hardly ever race around noon or so. Unless I start early and with time acceleration.
The thing is, as I'm setting things, I remember stuff that people once told me, like how bright the sun can be etc, and white highlights under bright sun, etc, so I was pretty much after this type of look.
However, when someone sent me two screenshots, one on a Kunos track, and one on mine, around the same time, I understood clearly :)
So I have lowered the specular values and some ambient and diffuse values a bit, and I have to agree, it's much better :) Both at noon and dusk/dawn.
Still not finished, I keep on seeing a thing or two that pops out...
I also set the tatoos and sand overlays on the grass to alpha blended instead of AT. The result is staggering :) The sand over grass dont look that bad anymore, it's better blended and isn't fully opaque either, so it turns out pretty good considering how bad they looked!
I remember back in rF2, those things were the same, they looked horrible with alpha chroma and looked good with alpha transparency.
I will probably have an update with those changes in tomorrow, if anyone interested, once you see the video, let me know.
Any thoughts on how we could keep the distribution simple regarding updates?
I have thought about a dropbox share, but that would imply that you guys all have dropbox? What do you think... BTSync could work well as well.
Let me know what you would like.
Thanks for working on the lighting, it will help a lot the looks at midday racing. Of course playing the track at 5 pm looks very good already.
ReplyDeleteAlso those transparent looking trees could use some tweaking if possible, but I have no clue what work that would involve, of if they can be made better, without replacing them totally.
Dunno, I have dropbox, it would be fine for me, but as updates will be the full file every time with just replacing the track folder in AC, it won't be a problem posting updates on mediafire or other site of the kind, with decent transfer speed.
Indeed, midday racing is now much better with v0.17 as you can see in the video I posted not long ago.
ReplyDeleteThe trees... yeah I know...After looking at the AC Forums, I've come to understand the trees in AC aren't top notch at the moment, many have problems with trees that were looking perfect in another sim, and in AC there is some issues with them.
I will try to refine the alpha mask and see how it can help. I have noticed that my grass (those 3d blades around, which comes from gametextures, and therefore pretty high quality, and their mask, using the same tree shader look perfect with no artifacts or fringes or whatever you call this around them.
But some trees and branches are very thin and the base texture low, at 512x512 I believe, so I'm not too optimistic.
From a distance they look fine, and even better than my billboards.. since there is volume about them, and the shadows are more interesting. However, they look bad up close or when you focus on them.
If the project moves forward and I receive some more donations, I have thought about subscribing another month to gametextures and send them a few textures from evo that I would like replaced with high quality 2048 ones. Like some tree branches, the grasses and hills textures and everything that screams low res. Fortunately, most default textures are fine, such as tarmac, guardrails, curbs, etc...
We could certainly use an high res karussel tho.. the second one is ok, the first one is meh... the image is lower res.
Regarding distribution, I will give BTSync a try. It might be a bit more troubles for everyone to start up, need to install it if you dont have it, but once it's done, you forget about it, and updates are delivered straight to your computer as soon as I release it :)
If somebody from gametextures is nice enough to give you a more pro feedback on implementation of these trees, you could ask them to, with some sample pics.
ReplyDelete