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.