No Flares Reflected in Mirrors

[graysonk95]

Since their inception, videocamera mirrors have not reflected beacons or flares.

You'll have to take my word for it, but in this scenario the Magnum has its lights on and my HDX has its 4-ways on, but none are reflected:

In the case of beacons, you can see the ambient lighting they give off, but you cannot see the flare itself.

[ohlidalp]

This doesn't surprise me.

Flares in RoR are "billboards" - flat squares (2 triangles) oriented towards the camera. These billboards are not "attached" to their vehicles in any way - instead, upon every mainthread update, RoR reads positions of configured nodes and scales/positions the billboard. Upon start of new update, all bilboards are reset. That's, by the way, reason behind the "huge flash in the corner" bug.

It wouldn't be hard to bring flares into mirrors, but there will be some FPS cost. Mirrors are already FPS-killers: DirectX9 + OpenGL2 both have very CPU-expensive draw calls, and every mirror multiplies the amount of draw calls per scene. To make stuff worse, RoR never stops updating the mirrors, even if they face away from the camera or are not in the scene at all! Not to mention the rendering resolution of the mirror could be dynamically adjusted depending on player's camera distance, and the color depth could be just 16bpp instead of 32bpp... bah! There's a lot of things to tweak.

RoR needs an in-game graphics settings panel. I imagine putting it on the side of the screen so the player can tweak his details and see results (including FPS) in real-time.

[graysonk95]

FPS cost from flares likely wouldn't be relevant for those of us with reasonable builds. If you can enjoy the game with mirrors, you are already ahead of 75% of players likely utilizing mommy's laptop to play, barely reaching 15fps on minimum settings.

I do like your idea. Some more graphics tweaks would greatly benefit mod makers, though. Especially the ability to toggle videocamera mirrors, given how they slay framerate. That would save at least vehicle makers from needing to model special mirrors for FPS purposes.

This may be unrelated but, I have often wondered at what point the recommended specs for RoR will be updated? The RAM requirement is measured in MB, the recommended graphics cards are almost a decade old, and the newest Core 2 Duo is 5 years old. At what point will they be updated from what is "recommended" to run a textured submesh box, to what is recommended to run a modern vehicle? Realistically, someone new to the game will not want to first spawn the original Dodge Charger. They want one of gabester's vehicles they saw being crashed on the YouTubes. How well will a Core 2 Duo, 10-year-old GPU, and 2048MB of RAM handle that? They may be the minimum possible requirements, but they are far from recommended.

[Hiradur]

This may be unrelated but, I have often wondered at what point the recommended specs for RoR will be updated?

I'm thinking about deleting them and only state the bare minimum to run RoR. RoR is quite diverse and it's too complicated to say who can run what. I remember running a Gavril MV4 on a Core 2 Quad system just fine. RAM requirement heavily depends on your OS. Many Linux distributions only occupy 100-400mb RAM so you could probably run RoR on a system with only 512mb of RAM if you choose the right OS. With the recent performance improvements it should run much better even on low end systems (I measured a performance increase of 30% on a 2010 netbook).

EDIT: I think with the archiving of the forum we lost permission to edit the home page.

[ohlidalp]

This may be unrelated but, I have often wondered at what point the recommended specs for RoR will be updated?

Ehh, we have recommended specs? Where? :blush:

I'd say we just delete them. Info like this is hard to evaluate and gets outdated fast. Further, recommended specs are a purchase guide - is it worth buying the game? We don't sell, we don't need purchasing guides.

My idea of RoR is making it configurable enough to run on practically anything. Currently a lot of effects are hardcoded, but I'm already planning to change that. Physics, by definition, depend solely on player's choice and per-mod info, so they can't really be incuded in recommended specs.

[Hiradur]

Ehh, we have recommended specs? Where? :blush:

http://www.rigsofrods.com/content/

[ohlidalp]

Removing from v0.4.8 because it'll take a while to fix properly.

I already have know pretty well where's the problem but solving it in some easy way would likely hurt FPS more than it's worth. Long story short, at the moment all flares on all vehicles are always updated, even if the vehicle is nowhere near player's area of view. Updating everything also for videocameras would make it order of magnitude worse.