Problems with lightning / reflections

[MirceaKitsune]

Hello there! I've been following the project for a while, and remember posting on the old forums as well (sourceforge). Although I consider many things far from ready, I love where this game is going, and have good hopes for it I did development on open source games in the past, but am quite bad at it. It's usually a miracle if I find anything I can improve by myself, but it happens sometimes. Just thought to let you know, in case I can do anything simple help.

Anyway, I tried the latest beta today. Can't say I've seen a lot of differences, but I'm interested in the new lightning / reflection system. At first I've come across , which left me quite surprised since I wasn't expecting such graphics to be possible yet. Then I seen the Shift + F1 / F2 / F3 shortcuts in help, and decided to give them a try. I managed to switch the lightning types, but it seems to look very wrong for me. I read that the devs are looking for help with OpenGL (sadly I can't offer that, but I would if I knew) so I thought to post my experience here, if it helps with debugging or anything.

Shift + F2 or Shift + F3 changes the brightness and blending type of the env-map on cars, which is probably normal. Shift + F1 changes the world lightning, but most of it looks quite buggy to me. It might be video card dependent, since in the video I linked it looks ok. My card is an ATI Radeon HD 6800 series, and I'm running Windows 7 64bit. The first two types simply invert the lit areas and shadowed areas. These are the modes in which I could switch the lightning, the first being the normal / initial one (no shadow maps in it however):









That feels to me as if Speed Dreams doesn't like my video card. I'm posting this to help debugging, but also to ask if anyone knows what I could try to get it looking right. Or does it look this way for everyone, and it's normal? Though again, it looks different (and pretty awesome) in that video I linked, so I think it might be dependent. Let me know if I can test anything else and give more feedback.

As a separate question: Are dynamic reflections coming in the next version? Or will env-maps stay the only alternative for car reflections? I personally find reflection textures very bad for car reflections, and would love to see the second feature in the Torcs engine.

[Haruna]

The lighting debug stuff is exactly just that, debugging and testing. The default lighting is actually pretty okay, but environment mapping is probably not dramatic enough.

Also, to incorporate dynamic lighting and reflections would require a rewrite of the graphics engine (it's a poorly optimized piece of shit as it stands, but we don't have anyone who has the time to do this).

[MirceaKitsune]

Oh, ok. Glad I posted about this then, if my experience helps debugging.

And that's sad to hear. I was hoping new versions might have modern post-processing effects and stuff (like bloom and gloss and motion blur). I don't know the code though, and if it's that much work then it might be long perhaps.

[rajonmestra]

Such a piece of art on your part. The pics are very detailed although the lightning were quite dimmer. I actually saw one similar to this but just hooked up with the thing you have. Anyway i love to see the second feature in the Torcs engine as well.