> >Greg would probably not care. It is so unthinkable for us to imagine
> >what he is experiencing, you are quite right, I wouldlike to see weather
> >too, but only if it could be done in a proper way.
> I'm sure they could do it in a proper way. Sounds to me like we are just
> getting excuses from Papyrus.
pathetic to try doing real rain modelling on. But then I'm a programmer,
have been since i was 11, over half my life, and I've spent a lot of
time dabbling in progrmaming my own simulation software, and when I
think of trying to simulate *realistic* rainy conditions myself, I
immediately know that it'll take a very powerful computer to model
the sheer complexity required. Even when i start thinking up tricks
and optimising tehcniques on how i might improve speed and performance
of the modelling i still realise that you'd need some at least at
the very top range of today's current machines at a guess but I
dare not assume that today's machines could really do it properly
until i'd actually sat down and spent a while trying to implement it
to see just how well it really performed.
You'd need to model the entire surface of the track to at least a
resolution of half a foot to be able to model the drier and wetter
patches of the track - Papyrus will be wanting the ability to drive
a drier race line into a wet track, having actual surface water and
rivers accross the track. I estimate the surface area of the Watkins
Glen track to be around 400,000 square feet, and we want four patches
of surface per suqare foot, so the computer will be having to scan
over 1,600,000 patches of track surface updating the current state of
the water level, evaporation, water flow, etc every clock tick of the
sim. As a car drivers through this surface the computer will have to
dynamically redistribute the water away from the patches the tyre
passed through in the form of spray which will then resettle slighlty
offline. Modelling all the spray from the track realistically would
not just be moving it directly from the patches the tyre crossed
onto the patches besides, but to actally lift the water into the air
and let it get blown in the disturbed air and see where it lands to
re-wet the track. this modelling will be really *** on cpu use too.
You already see the framerate hits GPL gets when a single car produces
a lot of smoke from a big tyre lockup, and you know that a race car
on a wet track produces a hell of a lot more spray than that amount of
smoke, and all cars on a wet track produce spray at every single
moment they are on wet track, not just at wheel lockups... i would
expect a framerate of maybe 1 or 2 fps at best. And the passage of
rain clouds would be modelled properly, how else do you get a patch
of rain pouring on one side of Spa Francorchamps but nice sunshine
on the other? imagine belting down a huge straight in Belgium and
seeing a huge bank of shitty dark clouds coming up and you slam
into a wall of rain from a solid downpour, at 300kph.... and of
course with the right wind that rain could get blown all the way over
the rest of the course too and leave nice sunshine over a wet-but-
drying track with steam rising. ok, getting *** here:) could you
imagine how cool it would be to race through a wet track in sunshine
with a lot of evaporation impairing your view down the track on long
straights?
etc.. etc... etc.... i could go on and on getting more detailed in
the process of just how i'd like to model rain and a wet track in
realistic detail.... and then reconsider thinking that Papyrus are
just being lazy rather than having a genuine reason for not
implementing realistic weather in this current generation of
computers. They could of course implement a cheap, unrealistic
weather that is exactly constant at any given moment over the whole
track, like in every other car sim i have ever seen that models
weather, but that cheapness would simply not match the realism
of the rest of the sim, so would be very badly out of place. it would
ruin the whole effect.
Grant.