Rain progress report (and a very unfinished build) (Patreon)

First of all, I want to apologise about how long it all takes… It’s quite a lot bigger than any other part of this mod, and I don’t really want to cut any corners. But now all the big questions are solved, so hopefully it should be an easier from here.

Here are the few main things added lately:

• First of all, I found a very neat way for online servers to set CSP as a requirement. The idea is basically to alter track ID in server config in such a way that original launcher wouldn’t find the track and somebody without CSP wouldn’t be able to rename the track to match. For extra layer of protection, it also alters “surfaces.ini” on server side. Also, with a similar trick I added extra flags for entry list, allowing to, for example, force headlights on for certain car (or all of them).

• Refraction in rain drops seen in previous videos now works in triple screen and both VR modes as well. But also, now glass shader can use it as well.

It’s not as accurate as that raytraced refraction, but as a cheaper and easier to cofnigure alternative solution for cases like above, or for tracks, it should work pretty well.

• Soft particles (similar technique is used for rain drops) now too work with triple screen and VR, only requirement now is to keep YEBIS enabled. 

• Added new particles effect for drops of water falling from cars (in collisions or just slowly over time). 

• Windscreen raindrops have been pretty much fully reworked comparing to that video (that is what took most of the time).

I also made a new Trello board so both you and I could monitor progress and keep track of features to implement: https://trello.com/b/6rVlBH9O/ac-patch-rain.

Now, if you would have some spare time, maybe you could help me with a bit of testing? This build is not ready at all (as you can see from Trello board, some important things like WeatherFX integration or quite a few physics things are still left to do), but it has most of visual stuff. I might have gotten carried away in a few places, so I wonder how big of a performance hit it is and how much I need to cut away for it to work properly on different GPUs. You can use built-in WeatherFX debug app (the one at the bottom) to enable and adjust rain, check timings for different effects and quickly disable them to compare. So if you have any performance issues, please send me screenshot of those timings and your GPU model, that would be a great help.

I attached configs for Brands Hatch, Nordschleife and Spa, and config for GT86 (which isn’t really necessary, wipers guessing should work on most cars now, but just to be sure). If you want to test windscreen raindrops, switch PREVIEW_WINDSCREEN in rain_fx.ini to 1, although I suspect it won’t work on Windows 7 right now (will fix that). Oh, and please don’t use those track configs as an example, their format will most likely change before the release to add protection from changes.

To test rain physics, you need a car with extended physics and rain preview physics enabled. Just unpack car’s data.acd, move it aside (so AC would use data folder), open “data/car.ini”, change HEADER/VERSION to “extended-1” (or “extended-2” if original was 2) and add below:

[_EXTENSION]
RAIN_DEV=1

All of this to ensure people wouldn’t use possible quirks of wet physics to get an unfair advantage with competitive racing (also, yeah, whole rain thing wouldn’t work at all online, in special challenges or if it finds RSR app active). Of course, those limitations are only for development period, I just want to be extra safe for now.

Thank you for all the support and, again, very sorry for how long it all takes, I’m trying to get it finished faster now.