New preview build with rain tyres (Patreon)

Finally, I think I managed to fix most of the bugs, so now I can continue working on RainFX. And here’s the first new thing: rain tyres! If during loading CSP would detect any slick tyres, it would automatically add a new set of rain tyres, which would be much more efficient at moving water away from contact point, ensuring better grip. Apart from different water moving properties, at the moment it’s a simple copy of softest tyres set, but more tweaks, of course, are coming soon. 

Also, now existing tyre sets get different water moving properties as well. Slicks now count as tyres with no treads, semislicks are less efficient at moving water away, and the rest are the most efficient. Type of a tyre is guessed based on its name, and it might need more adjustments later as well, but it should work well enough with most cars already. And, of course, intermediate tyres are coming soon too.

Different normals for rain tyres are also created now, and their generation is fully procedural, in the future it should allow to not only create a lot of possible types, but also slightly alter same patterns if applied to different cars to increase visual variety. And, by the way, physical properties of a tyre depend on pattern shape as well.

At the moment, however, shape needs to be chosen via config. I already prepared a few configs for SF15-T, F138 and Tatuus, but it’s not quite how I would want it to work, instead I’ll focus on adding some sort of generic configs which could apply to all cars at once, and those would be able to estimate an appropriate pattern automatically. 

Also, speaking of bugs to fix, RainFX physics was pretty broken in previous build, but it should work better now. And, if you want to get the optimal experience, please use WeatherFX debug app with 50%/100%/50% rain debug configuration for now, that’s another thing which still needs some polishing on WeatherFX controllers side.

A couple of other changes: rain now removes windscreen dirt as it should (proper dynamic dirt is in plans, but might take more time to get it right), and now you can run online servers requiring clients to have WeatherFX and RainFX activated (more on that a bit further down).

Next thing to focus on now is to create a way to protect RainFX configs from being altered in online races, thus ensuring a fair competition, as well as continue working on visual part of it all. Also, have to take a look into AI and see if they can be tweaked to be capable to deal with rain.

Thank you all for your incredible support! I don’t even know what to say, I could never expect anything like that. Thank you so much!

How to install this preview build?

Simply extract dwrite.dll and extension folder to AC root folder, or drag’n’drop archive to CM and agree to install it from there.

How to get rain physics to work offline?

With newer Content Manager version, please activate this option here, and it would add a new checkbox here. Please be extra careful with it though, as it would alter car’s data before each race and in rare circumstances, it might fail to roll the changes back once race ends. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to have rain physics applied to all cars.

How to run an online server with rain?

New Content Manager versions got an option to set a CSP config for servers here. Use it and add this section there. 

(The way it works, it would encode that config within server’s welcome message in such a way that it wouldn’t be visible in both original Assetto Corsa and Assetto Corsa with CSP installed. You don’t need to run server from Content Manager, you can also have welcome message prepared for one server config and reuse it on any other.)