New CSP is out:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Barely managed to finish the update in time, and unfortunately the public update will have to wait for another day or two, I need to do more testing and fix a couple of small issues first. There are quite a lot of new additions, and some of them might need more work.
Most important change is the update for the way tyre contact works. Thanks to Jackson Papageorge tyres now use multiple rays per cast properly, taking into account car tilt, moving contact point and more (update for Tyres FX taking it into account is coming soon). And I have to thank Intel for their Embree library allowing us to cast a lot more rays per tyre at once without a major performance hit.
(By default unless specified in car data extra rays per tyre are only added longitudinally for now, but server configs can override that option adding more latitudinal rays to keep things fair — cars do behave a lot better on curbs with extra rays.)
Another key change is a major RainFX rewrite. There were plenty of issues with the way rain worked, but the main one was that water thickness was too uneven, stopping aquaplaning and making driving in the rain too boring. So now the puddles generation has been redone, new version pays a lot more attention to natural height differences in laser scan for more accurate puddles arrangement and more even water distribution. Also, the logic of rain control has changed: now wetness parameter controls overall amount of water on a track, and water parameter controls puddles, allowing to simulate case with a small rain starting with large puddles left from the previously happening heavy rain. And the rain intensity is more linear and accurate now, with regular rain being around 15%, heavy rain around 30% and everything above 40% is pretty much undrivable. Old WeatherFX controllers, server plugins and replays should still work with a simple conversion function though.
A lot of visual RainFX features got an update too, to be able to better incorporate new rain intensity (trying to create that undrivable feel visually as well), fix long lasting like malfunctioning drops from wheels, as well as improve overall visual quality. Oh, and things now get wet in reflections and mirrors (although without rain drops yet, going to fix it soon).
If you’re using Dualsense or Dualshock gamepad (or one of Nintendo ones), new update adds proper gyroscope and accelerometer steering allowing to control the car more accurately and precisely. Dualshock also got improved support with functioning glowing bar and tuned feedback, and Dualsense now can do proper haptic feedback (basically, generating some extra audio stream to be used for feedback). Seeing how nice gyroscope works I also added a silly feature allowing to control the car with gyroscope of your Android or iOS mobile phone — still not quite as convenient as a gamepad, but maybe it would work better than steering with a mouse? You can activate it in GamepadFX settings, just switch AC input mode to gamepad, use script “Mobile” and start the race, and AC will show you how to set things up (due to how experimental it is, instead of making a proper app and trying to convince Apple to publish it I just used an expo.dev snack, but it seems to work, at least with an iPhone).
If you’re using a 4K monitor and find AC HUD too tiny and performance too low, there is an option now to scale the whole of AC in the fastest way (pretty much leaving scaling up to Windows composer). Can help a lot if you’re using a laptop. Oh, and also CSP now can handle change in AC window size live, as it should have been from the start (for some reason I never thought about resizing AC before).
Those are the most interesting changes, but there are more, here are a few:
• Sun shadows now can affect road temperature (can be enabled in general settings for offline or in a server config for an online race). Wouldn’t be a big difference on most tracks, but some tracks, such as Monza, can be fully shadowed for a half and lit by sun for another half, so it might be a noticeable difference.
• Triple screen mode now supports Extra FX (although in a limited way; TAA, for example, not quite working yet; and it would still be a major performance hit so you need to enable it separately in Extra FX settings).
• Anticheat part has been improved, now hopefully it should be a bit trickier to be able to hack into CSP itself.
• Mesh-based masking culling: tracks now can prepare a low-poly mesh that can be used for hiding things behind it without all the complications of arranging vertical walls with a config.
• A lot of fixes of all sorts, like improved rendering for new trees, fixes for ExtraFX emissive, fixes for advanced culling, a bunch of performance and stability improvements, better Wine support for Linux users. Ah, and Lua GIF player now supports animated WEBP as well (along with other improvements for Lua too).
As always, thank you so much for all the support! Public update is coming very soon, right after a bit more testing. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
