New way to animate wipers, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and more (with preview build with rain) (Patreon)

First of all, I apologize for such a long delay. It’s silly, but I wasted three weeks working on a new way to animate wipers. Had to rewrite it a couple of times, but for most time I was working on creating a helpful tool which would allow to animate wipers easily.

Regular approach with letting car creators write an INI config could work, but setting those pivots and axis in there with nothing but trial and error is a bit too counterproductive. Plus, tool allows to animate meshes without separating pieces apart, so car creator would need a way to somehow assign different roles to different parts of a mesh. All of that is much easier to do with some UI.

Shame about time, but I think it was worth it, after all, it’s one of most noticeable parts in a rainy race. And, in my opinion, new system actually works better than the one we had before. Not only it’s much easier to set, but resulting animation is smoother and works better with RainFX. Also, wiper automatically snaps to windscreen surface, and tool has various options for more complicated constructions (like wipers of Abarth 595 with that fixed bit in-between, or this subtle rotation of wiper arm for Stradale).

In other major changes: new colored shadowing mode adds colorized shadows and ambient lighting for car interiors (only for car interiors to avoid a performance hit). Also, driver model will get a bit of fake ambient shadow in closed cars similar to Shadowed Wheels module, hopefully that would help with those glowing drivers heads. Reflections masking for interiors is also updated, now applied properly and more than to just a focused car. And default WeatherFX script got a small update as well, fixing few brightness values and improving clouds shape.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is also available now, although in non-VR modes you would need to enable postprocessing and FXAA (in AC video settings) for it to work. In VR any combination should work. Might help with performance, its Quality and Ultra Quality presets look surprisingly good.

There are quite a few other changes for people creating configs. For example, track conditions now can use expressions to combine several inputs or other conditions together. And cars now can have fully scriptable interactive textures — a neat new way to create digital instruments.

As for RainFX, now whole thing should be more stable, I finally tracked down one particularly nasty bug causing a rare but unescapable crash. Thermal parameters for new rain tyres should work correctly (at least not as broken as before), and a few other annoying bugs were fixed, like cars not getting wet properly. Tyres now take into account rubberness of the surface as well as painted lines on a track. Next on the TODO-list is to finally integrate drying/wettening racing line, try to get AI to work and work more on particles and other visual aspects. Oh, also, patched acServer now can alter conditions dynamically, including weather type and rain-related parameters. I’m still working on a system which would allow to get dynamic conditions to work with original acServer too.

In other plans: I’m working on a fix for Content Manager, that last update broke some things. Also, I finally started working on TreesFX! Can’t guarantee any acceptable results yet, but at least my initial idea of generating trees with Lua scripts seems to be promising so far (it looks nasty, but it’s just something to measure performance, and it took 0.2 ms to generate, so that’s a relief).

As always, thank you so much for all the incredible support! Again, I’m very sorry for such a long delay, I’ll try to do my best to post updates more frequently. I really wanted to finish new wipers and release them in one piece though, to make sure car creators wouldn’t be turned off by a system which would be broken or too complicated to use.