Lots of fixes (Patreon)

For the final stretch we focused on fixing bugs, trying to get something more stable than usual. So, there aren’t too many new features, but there are still a few.

• Windscreen reflections: a new still experimental feature of WindscreenFX adding live dynamic reflections for windscreens. The technique is somewhat unconventional, but it should produce reasonable results for most cars, and the rest can always be fixed with some configs. One drawback at the moment is that activating this effect completely removes windscreen dust and dirt (those dust textures already had dashboard baked in, so they don’t fit that well anymore), but that will be fixed soon with a new dynamic dust and dirt accumulation on windscreens.
• Rain physics deceleration in puddles is more accurate now.
• Servers now can enforce drivers to use the same rain physics configs, should finally allow to use rain in competitive scenarios properly.
• New AgX tonemapping function: as others, available in post-processing filter editor, this one is one of the more interesting of functions available, it does a much better job at preserving hue for overly bright areas compared to most of other functions.
• Track occlusion walls (previously used for rendering) now can also be used to occlude audio as well, also a pretty experimental thing.
• Default WeatherFX style got a few updates for its optional post-processing, overcast weather and clouds, which should help with performance as well.

Settings were rearranged a bit as well, but more rearrangements will be done in the future to make things more user-friendly and usable. As for the fixes, there are a lot, most notable is the sound of blown tyres at the session start will be gone now. Single Pass Stereo should be compatible with refracting headlights and NeckFX helmet, shading of new trees, grass and smoke was fixed, AIs should act better in the rain and not drive to pits when it’s not necessary, a bunch of issues with disappearing geometry were fixed, and more (here is the full list).

With all that, I believe this build might finally be stable enough for the public release, but if not, 0.2.1 will be out soon to fix things we might have missed.

Thank you for all the support! Here is the new preview (as usual, the same as the public update, but with RainFX). And now it’s finally time to get back to adding more new features. 🥳

UPD: Sorry for the mess up with uploading wrong build, this one has rain.