AC Stuff

Paul renaming dxgi to d3dd did the trick thank you so much!

this is getting better and better. i compared 0.17 to a project cars 2 night replay video, i don't see much difference tbh, in some cases this one even looks better.

performance issues i mostly have in replays with those cams which have a large view of all cars, which are far away, shading dynamic headlights. i think the performance in this case would benefit if the farest cars don't shade any headlight or a downgraded-headlight quality, not sure if that's possible.

heavy track for performance is f.e. highlands, but like mentioned above, it's mostly those far-away cams which hit the fps down to 40fps sometimes.

I repeat, do you have problems with the rearview mirrors with version 1.17 ??? or have I only them ???? thanks to those who will answer me

MZN25_ what is the version in that message? By the way, I’ve created a new Discord channel for troubleshooting.

ramokerat sorry, I can’t reproduce it, can you please send me a screenshot?

tajskapulapka I’ll add an option to disable speculars towards the end (it would require to rebuild shaders personally).

MaoZeTung yes, of course, it’ll be added soon.

JohnLabbo yes, I’ve just found that issue (after readjusting some things for a new coming version), now it’s even worse. Going to analyze how many cars are in shot or something, and optimize stuff based on this.

MaoZeTung what’s wrong with them?

x4fab So I tested all the VRC cars and for me, the MP4-20, MP4-22, F2007 and Renault R25 all crash as soon as I try to load them in game. All the other VRC cars work fine when this mod is activated except for these 4 cars. When the mod is inactivated they load just fine. Cant really show a screen shot, it just says race cancelled as soon as I hit GO.

ramokerat oh, I see, I think I can reproduce it! I’ll fix it.

I deleted and re-installed everything, now everything is ok with version 1.17

x4fab No I don't.

Growler hmm, so it’s not installed then, I think. Please make sure to enable this mod, or copy dxgi.dll and system folder (with shaders/win/… inside) to AC root folder manually.

blk95 see the first post in the thread - all links to all versions are there.

@x4fab
Sorry I could not test 0.1.17 - you are so quick in development I had to jump straight to 0.1.18 ;-)

• range of light illumination from headlights is now MUCH better than before but I feel it is still not enough
  Maybe for regular head lights of vintage street cars with conventional headlights it feels ok.
  It is definitely too short range for modern street cars with xenon or LED lights and it is 100% much too short still for endurance racing cars on a pitch black race track like Nordschleife @ 2200

I understand there is a compromise regarding different headlight technology / intensity of vintage streetcars to modern LMP cars with teh limitation that we also cannot have regular lights and far lights :-(
Maybe the range of teh headlights (if there will only be one static range allowable as per the engine limitations) could be adjusted BEFORE starting a session with a quick selection tool similar to selecting hide steering wheel, etc ? So we could create a headlight quicktool for each custom range in the CM quicktool settings and then before a session could simply select the range we want to race with ;-)

Currently racing a Porsche 935 at a pitch black Nordschleife is extremely scary ;-)

The illumination of the track to the sides feels great and is spot on in my opinion - thumbs up here!

EDIT: Just watching the replay of Porsche 935 K3 @ Norsdschleife - the headlight illumination distance is definitely still much too short - from seeing the replay it should be maybe 2x as long just by gut feeling.
How much of a performance factor is this?
Is there a way I could adjust this myself for testing purpose to give you a better feedback?

• The current cockpit illumination from other cars feels pretty nice - good job ! Maybe some fine tuning will be necessary once everything else is finalized but for now it is pretty good.

• I do not like the simplified mirrors. As it is in 0.1.18 you have barely any of the real life "blinding light in mirrors" effect - you know when you drive at night and a car behind you closes in the headlights of the other car will be VERY bright in your mirrors. Currently this effect is almost completely lacking - mirrors are too dim to feel real.

• "blinding effect" from headlights when facing the camera - is it possibly with the shader patch that headlights that face the camera within a specific narrow angle (say +/- 5deg) could get very high intensity and a large bright halo effect to create a "blinding effect" when looking straight into car's headlights or is this something that really is impossible - it would look just amazing and very convincing in replays (it has not much use in actual racing apart if this could be realized to be rendered in the mirrors themselves (AWESOME !)

• shape and transition from light to dark of headlights on road surface - ABSOLUTELY AMAZING !!!
  The current implementation of the progression from teh fully illuminated road surface to dark, non-illuminated areas look absolutely fantastic! Please keep it this way - great job (to be honest it looks much better and more realsitic than PC2 as it is right now ;-)

• head light "reflection illusion" on road surface:
  Currently the headlight reflections (I guess this is a canned "illusionary effect" at the moment ?) has a little too much of a mismatch - it looks like the distance between the two reflection patches on the road is increasing depending on the distance from car to camera. Currently this is out of sync and the headlight reflections are often too close together compared to the actual car's headlights - maybe this can be adjusted in the future.
  IT is not something that absolutely MUST be done so early in the development, just something that may be fine tuned late before reaching v1.0

• performance
  compared to the last version I tested (0.1.16) performance was MUCH lower.
  I ran a 36 DRM Revival mod car field at Brands Hatch GP @ 2145.
  While racing in cockpit view starting from teh rear I had ~70 - 105 FPS.
  While watching the replay the performance dipped down as low as ~25 FPS

I then switched off "Magic Bloom" in the Reshade menu in game and performance was MUCH more stable at minimum ~65 FPS in teh replay. I could not see any discernable quality difference between magic bloom on / off (it may be more important to use when doing high quality screen shots rather than being VERY BUSY running a Porsche 935 K3 at full boost in a tight field of Group 5 cars ;-)

I run:
ROG Strix 1080 Ti 11GB Gaming
i7 8700k @ 4.7GHz
32GB HyperX RAM
ROG Strix Z370-E Gaming
3x 1950x1080 @60Hz triple screen

Almost all settings maxed out (just medium smoke gen)
I use these two graphics mods:
https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/good-and-bad-weather-suite.19484/
https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/gbws-reshade.20468/

REQUEST:
Could you please create a standard Content Manager benchmark we could run that will:
- use a Kunos track with the heaviest graphics impact
- use a full field of Kunos race cars (latest GT3 cars perhaps ?)
- use installed dynamic lights shader
- run one full lap in cockpit view and one full lap in replay cam 1 view
save log file and copy relevant system components + graphics settings

This way we could easily share meaningful performance data.

That's all I can remember for now from this 1h test run with the latest version 0.1.18

menos I then switched off "Magic Bloom" in the Reshade menu in game

how to activate this menu to turn it off?

m3gt2 if you use this installation procedure:

• start with clean Assetto Corsa installation

• install dynamic lights shader 0.1.18 through Content Manager and activate the mod (Content / Mods / activate)

• install Peter Boese gbw Suite v2.1 through Content Manager

• install Peter Boese gbw Reshade v1.3 (read his install instructions on the download page carefully - only drop the shader folder and the two *.ini files into the Assetto Corsa root folder)

• start a session, leave the pits

• press SHIFT + F2 to enter the Reshade settings menu in game

• adjust to your liking

• disabling magic bloom has a VERY BIG positive impact on performance

For screenshots or sessions with few cars on track it might be nice to have (you can assign a keyboard shortcut through teh Reshade settings menu and quickly enable / disable it this way)

menos gbw Reshade ini uses Shift+F10 for the menu

leBluem Peter's pdf documentation and older versions did use F10 to enter the menu but on my installation as described above F10 does NOT work. F2 does invoke the menu instead. I do not know why that is - maybe Peter changed the key, maybe it is the sequence of installation or files involved (older Reshade files from the dynamic lights patch are partly overwritten by Peter's newest mods).

Also I remember on older gbW Reshade versions the F10 shortcut would be mentioned in the loading menu.
Currently NO shortcut is mentioned (not even teh working F2 shortcut).

It is safe to try both F2 or F10 while in a AC session.

menos

but I feel it is still not enough

This part is not that much about optimization (those lights lit up most of screen’s pixels at their current range anyway). While rearranging other stuff in v18, I made them a bit too dim, I’ll fix it.

Also, of course, all the ranges, color, position, etc. will be defined on per-car basis, and I’ll try to guess these values from Content Manager (it already can do a lot of guessing for lights in Custom Showroom).

The illumination of the track to the sides feels great and is spot on in my opinion - thumbs up here!

Nice, thanks, glad to hear it!

Currently this effect is almost completely lacking - mirrors are too dim to feel real.

Oh, that’s a great idea, I could just turn their brightness up, a lot. I’ll try.

That simplification mostly meant that other cars don’t have brake lights in there, don’t have flame lights, lights are merged and without speculars. By the end, all of that will be customizable as well.

"blinding effect" from headlights when facing the camera - is it possibly with the shader patch that headlights that face the camera within a specific narrow angle (say +/- 5deg) could get very high intensity and a large bright halo effect to create a "blinding effect"

Another great idea! I have to think about how it could be done, but I’ll try to come up with something.

Please keep it this way - great job (to be honest it looks much better and more realsitic than PC2 as it is right now ;-)

Wow, really glad to hear it, thanks! Although I was thinking about changing the shading model a bit, but I’ll try to keep it close to its current state visually. If you want, I’ll be putting some preview builds in that Discord server.

Currently the headlight reflections (I guess this is a canned "illusionary effect" at the moment ?) has a little too much of a mismatch

Hmm, maybe it’s because of merging? Or because for now I hardcoded settings for 911 Carrera S? About performance, replays might do badly because now, lights even delay merging if view angle is low, and there is no check on how many cars are in frame right now. Something to optimize later.

Also, of course, Magic Bloom can be very expensive, and, anyway, I’m working on cutting of Reshade as a whole (so it’ll be properly compatible with any filter injectors or, let’s say, Steam overlay).

As for benchmark, if you want, you can run a short benchmark in video settings, I guess you’d need to replace BENCHMARK.acr from Kunos for night mode though. But it counts FPS and shuts down after a specific frame, so values are pretty uniform. That’s how I measured FPS hits for various values for that updated video settings section.

m3gt2 I think it’s Shift+F2.

JMartinni oh, ok, I’ll just raise threshold. Usually front disks are lit much brighter, so it should work (values I saw were, like, 9.5 for front and 2.5 for rear ones, I’ll set threshold somewhere in ≈5 area). And, of course, it’ll be an option as well, no problem to move those values to some INI-file. Also, thank you for reference photos!

x4fab This part is not that much about optimization (those lights lit up most of screen’s pixels at their current range anyway). While rearranging other stuff in v18, I made them a bit too dim, I’ll fix it.

Also, of course, all the ranges, color, position, etc. will be defined on per-car basis, and I’ll try to guess these values from Content Manager (it already can do a lot of guessing for lights in Custom Showroom).

The headlight illumination does definitely not look too dim - the light exposure felt perfect !
As it is in 0.1.18 often it would also still overexpose (clip highlights) on cars in front - please do not adjust the exposure any higher than 0.1.18.

Just the range - how far down the road the headlights would illuminate the track and other cars could need adjustment.
As an example:

When you drive at Nordschleife down towards Fuchsröhre (foxhole) your headlights would currently only illuminate the track as far as the compression in the bottom of foxhole but not further up the hill (which it should).

From my gut feeling you could keep the headlights exactly the same in every way (they look amazing) just adjust the range of illumination to the front by a factor of x1.5 - x2.0 and I feel it would be more realistic.

Also: with lighting there is always a falloff of intensity depending on distance (the light from your headlight are most intense right in front of your car and fall off in intensity the further ahead you are looking.

Is this currently possible to simulate? I see a beautifully smooth transition from light to dark on the road surface which looks great but in terms of illuminated rendering (objects entering the illuminated range ) - is it just possible to have a static exposure value right now or is it possible to simulate a transition from very bright to medium bright to a little bright to fade out?

JMartinni Brake glow doesn't seem to really appear until the car is braking in a "dark" zone. Some of these photos seem to be in zones where it is already lit or somewhat lit (sunset/morning?).