Visual part is finished, and another preview build (Patreon)

UPD 1: Seems like there are a lot of bugs for some reason, very sorry about that, working on a fix right now.

UPD 2: New build is here (separate post because it was just too broken).

Very sorry for such a long delay, a lot has been done since. Now, visual part is pretty much finished, only thing that is left is to rework puddle generation (tracks need to have a parameter for how well water is draining, so racing tracks would have much fewer puddles).

Main changes:

• Rain drops reworked once more, especially on cars. Now they react to car speed, especially important for open wheelers. Also, rain drops on wheels or animated doors behave as they should, following objects (for now, only supports doors if they’re named “DOOR_L” and “DOOR_R”, I’ll work on that more).
• Puddles mapping changed a bit to get a more varied look;
• Water splashes and… well, not sure what to call them, different kind of splashes obscuring cars in front of you, like some sort of water clouds. And more droplets in general, from wheel arches, from wheels of open wheelers and so on.
• Improved rain occlusion for cars, with various bugfixes, smoother gradient and now taking driver into account as well, also, now heated areas get dryier for cars that are really heated up.
• Reworked rain shading to speed things up a bit and improve general look (whole thing still looks a bit messy, but much cleaner than before);
• Effects such as wet tyres, splashes and so on don’t require extended physics with that flag to work anymore, first step of getting rid of that whole patching thing completely;
• A lot of other aspects, such as windscreen raindrows, were tweaked a bit here and there to improve general look and behaviour;
• Lots of fixes of all sorts.

And a few unrelated to Rain FX changes coming with a public update soon:

• Optional accumulation DOF, can be combined with regular post-processing DOF in certain proportion (I found this to give the better results);
• New more accurate sky shader;
• New shader for tyre marks (the ones set in groove.ini), with a bit of reflections and rare oil spills for badly damaged cars (definitely need to move it to a different place, but so far can’t think of a solution which wouldn’t damage the performance);
• ASSAO by Intel as an alternative to HBAO+.

There are still a few things to fix here and there — for example, it seems like rain drops flying off front wheels get too much water on camera making open wheelers a bit too difficult to drive, I believe it shouldn’t happen, so I’ll rearrange a few things — but apart from that and puddle thing I mentioned at the start, now it’s time to move on and finally work on WeatherFX/Sol integration, proper audio support, physics and AI. 

(There is one other visual feature I would like to add, shown well here (that sort of uneven fog-like effect), but I’m not sure yet how it could be done more effectively. And, of course, a lot of added effects could use more work, but that can wait until after the release, as I’m not sure at the moment how to improve them effectively as well.)

Oh, and almost forgot, lower quality options for better performance! But that shouldn’t be a problem to add.

Please don’t look for rainbow for now, Weather FX script needs to set it. You can uncomment rainbow-related lines in “weather_application.lua” though, lines 120–122. But proper WeatherFX integration is coming soon now.

Thank you so much for your support! As always, sorry that it’s taking so long. But it’s almost there now.