0.2.4-preview1

• Version ID: 3045
• Size: ??.?? MB
• Published: 2024-05-14

Changelog

New features, options and improvements

• WeatherFX: option to increase conditions limits allowing for controllers to set temperatures and wind speed outside of safe ranges;
• New experimental option in General/Development (at the bottom) enabling instant replays online;
• New apps switcher appearing with Ctrl+Tab (Tab button no longer shows leaderboard if any modifier is pressed);
• New taskbar: desktop icons are replaced with previews (use settings to select icons instead if needed);
• Default WeatherFX style:
  • New upper clouds layers;
  • Falling stars at night (pretty small chance to see them though)
  • Auroras look slightly improved;
  • All extra effects are now optional;
• Physics experiments:
  • Early collider activation is enabled by default again, this time much safer and uses number of wheels touching ground instead;
  • New experiment for tweaking car collider meshes: makes sure early collider activation won’t have any problems like before;
  • New experiment for expanding collider boxes vertically: decreases changes of a box phasing through the ground and, as a result, whole car passing through if falling flat;
  • New experiment for smooth transition to 0° steering angle when AC is paused (to make sure nothing would break because of sudden change like that);
• Radio update (in case you were missing music in AC, thanks to badradio.nz for the idea):
  • List of stations and the actual playback are now handled on CSP side, while Lua scripts can connect to it and control things;
  • Default list of stations updated, including more up-to-date ones;
  • CSP uses advanced API provided by radio.co and laut.fm to collect extra information about currently playing music;
  • Android Auto: playback moved to CSP side, support for new features such as album covers and track info (if available);
  • New Internet Radio app on App Shelf: automatically resumes playback on launches (optional, enabled by default), convenient UI to manage list of stations;
• Photo mode app:
  • Use mouse wheel for zooming when viewing a complete screenshot;
  • Screenshots with resolution multiplier use FSR for downsampling (unless zoomed in);
  • Hotkey for preview shot is working again, now switched to Alt+F8 (apparently Ctrl+F8 toggles mouse);
• Smart Shadows:
  • Option to compute splits automatically based on distance for simpler adjustments and better splits arrangement;
  • Option to draw shadows around camera instead of drawing them in front;
  • Shadows stabilization is greatly improved;
• New AI Spline Editor app: load an AI spline and tweak its trajectory and sides by dragging them around;
• New CPU optimization preventing loading of certain audio samples for other cars (might help a bit with 30+ car servers);
• New option in Small Tweaks to increase GPU priority of web browser backend processes (enabled by default, should prevent issues with HAGS in Windows 11);
• GUI: option to draw AC apps together with IMGUI UI for better interoperability and similar blurred backgrounds;
• ExtraFX: options to only use effects in replays;
• CSP Debug app: option to render car colliders;
• New pause: admins can restart or skip sessions from there directly;
• Traffic planner: copy a lane with an offset, specify vertical offset when exporting splines.

Extended physics

• SurfacesFX fixed and adjusted, new TYPE_HINT = GRAVEL for tyres and more gravel-related options;
• Differential bug (211 only) fixed;
• TORQUE_MODE_EX now disabled entirely for axle suspension types (prevents any potential issues that may arise from it);
• Some gyro FFB stuff with cosmic fixed.

Fixes

• Textures deduplication no longer freezes AC if one texture has failed to load;
• Cosmic suspension no longer crashes with AIs and custom track physics active;
• 30 FPS background limit should work now;
• Linear color space:
  • Heating materials glow properly;
  • Distant headlights glare is no longer affected by brightness multiplier;
  • Brake disk lights intensity adjusted;
  • Bounced light for headlights and brakes (non-ExtraFX one) works properly;
  • License plate lights are a bit dimmer, fallback emissive fixed;
  • nePBR shaders should look closer to how they looked before LCS;
  • Disabled LCS no longer should draw debug lines overly bright;
  • Issue with rendering breaking on some reloads with LCS enabled (and things turning blue) fixed;
  • Skidmarks with SkidmarksFX disabled should look a bit better;
• Default WeatherFX style:
  • Enabled LCS no longer affects lights range;
  • Tunnels brightness fixed, shouldn’t jump around anymore;
  • Fog above (hiding upper parts of tall buildings on some tracks) fixed;
• RainFX:
  • Drop hits no longer disappear for a frame from time to time, intensity is now adjustable;
  • Rain AI splines no longer created on tracks with splines longer than 50 km or with more than 100k points;
  • AIs can handle cars with street and semislick tyres, no longer spam logs if a Lua app stops AIs from visiting pits to change tyres;
  • AIs no longer change rain tyres on the last laps;
  • Issue with RainFX misbehaving if other cars are driven in areas unvisited by player before causing all sorts of problems fixed;
  • Fallback data in areas with no puddles computed has also been fixed (was using water instead of wetness often resulting in increased slipperiness);
• ExtraFX works again with MSAA disabled;
• SSLR should work better, especially with LCS active;
• [PITS_SPEED_LIMITER] SPEED_KMH=… no longer breaks ERS and such;
• Extra G/J in replays fixed;
• Look of Earth from space fixed, free camera no longer jumps around in space on smaller tracks;
• GPU constant buffers data is now 64-bytes aligned to work a tiny bit faster;
• Raycasting static meshes checks AABB as well for a slight speedup;
• Win keys stop Ctrl-based AC shortcuts as well;
• AI-activating shortcut working without Ctrl held down fixed;
• Hood/bumper cameras shaking adjusted;
• Advanced chunks optimization leading for tyre grooves to turn black on some tracks fixed;
• Fixing tyre grooves option that was causing them to turn black on some tracks fixed;
• Missing material variable warnings in log.txt should be muted now (pretty pointless warning anyway);
• Fix for a handshake for custom online servers;
• Cars should no longer spawn on roofs with aligned teleportation of custom tracks physics;
• Shadows not working properly on a distant square when sun is low fixed;
• Removed broken Python shared library option (it wasn’t of much use);
• SkidmarksFX: fading on loading fixed (config wasn’t respected), fading values are now printed in CSP log with Skidmarks fading prefix;
• Spotify music detection removed (wasn’t that reliable or informative, and everybody has moved to Windows 10 with much better music status system);
• Logic for disallowing overlapping of AC forms updated, now shouldn’t cause apps to jump around too much; overlapping highlight is fixed too;
• Users with non-latin usernames can be tagged by typing first latin symbol or digit instead and pressing Tab;
• CSP should be able to handle files in UTF-16/32 BE/LE with/without BOM encodings (might lead to change in behavior if you’d be using a car with some config incorrectly saved in UTF-16 and failing to be parsed before);
• App Shelf: main lua file is extracted last and renamed after extracting, should ensure there’ll be no failed installations;
• As seemingly proven to not cause issues, AABB for reflections option is hidden and enabled by default;
• GrassFX transitions are smoother;
• Collapsed apps with automatic sizing load their previous sizes properly;
• Mouse steering should work properly with pause menu;
• VAO-only and normals views are working with linear color space now (by switching to old shaders sets);
• New driver tags no longer stop working with paused race or replay;
• IMGUI glow in transparent areas fixed;
• GPU priority increased by default;
• Smoke interaction with fast driving cars adjusted;
• Skidmarks, grass and fake shadows should be better clipped for interior cameras;
• AC should no longer crash when a mesh selected in Objects Inspector has been removed;
• Other smaller fixes.

Configs

• Distant lights can pair with associated meshes with a new [LIGHTS_DISTANT_LAYER_…] meshes list and DISTANT_LAYER lights option stopping them from contributing to overall lights limit (docs are coming soon);
• Lights with large radius or fade-out distance now will end up in a separate 4 km chunks thing (previously it was only 800 m chunks, and fade-out distance wasn’t taken into account at all);
• Lights with fade-out or range larger than 4 km will count as dynamic and remain outside of chunks;
• New online option: CUSTOM_MOTION = 1, RESET resetting interpolation when car teleports (once tested and verified, will be enabled by default for all servers);
• Tracks: add alternative splines named ext_alt_fast_lane_?.ai to ai folder and CSP would use those for random cars for something like alternative paths NFS5 Porsche style (not used by track day car respawning for now);
• Use MATERIAL_FLAG_1 = 1 on MultiMap_emissive shaders to switch to UV2 for txEmissive;
• Use MATERIAL_FLAG_2 = 1 on MultiMap_NMDetail shaders to use alpha of txDetail as a multiplier for reflectivity as well;
• UV2 patches no longer load if generated from non-triangulated meshes (CM update filtering things on its side is coming soon);
• emSkipDiffuseMap for emissive shaders now takes values in-between of 0 and 1, allowing to limit txDiffuse contribution;
• Set emSkipDiffuseMap to -1 (or use CustomEmissive_UseDetailInsteadOfDiffuse mixin) to switch emissive shaders to use txDetail as a multiplier to txEmissive (instead of txDiffuse);
• Add a second argument 1 to CLUSTER_THRESHOLD for lights and such in track configs to switch to clustering in 3D (slightly slower);
• New [BASIC] INTERIOR_CLIPPING = … option for cars specifying if grass, skidmarks and fake shadows should be clipped for interior views (by default enabled for non-open wheelers);
• New FORCE_MINUS_TWO_LOD_BIAS thing for shader replacements (please don’t use unless really have to);
• New trees: AO baking now can be adjusted;
• Hidden experimental option general.ini/DEV/NANORT_SCENE_RAYCAST to build accelerating structures for faster mesh raycasting (might increase memory consumption and make first raycasts slow);
• Hidden experimental option general.ini/DEV/VIRTUAL_REPLAYS_ALLOCATION to use a magical VirtualAlloc function for replays instead of allocating small bits of memory and increasing them as more frames are being recorded;
• Trees Inspector now shows more details about selected tree;
• Volume peak: devices are filtered based on regexps in small_tweaks.ini.

Lua & Python

• Common API:
  • New string.pack(), string.packsize() and string.unpack() compatible with Lua 5.3 behavior;
  • New string.urlCheck(), string.urlNext() and os.parseDate() functions;
  • New ac.StructItem.explicit() modifier for preserving order of items passed into structure constructors;
  • New ac.onTrackPointCrossed() for measuring custom sectors;
  • Functions to work with view and projection matrices, including getting matrices from ac.GeometryShot;
  • ac.OnlineEvent() got an option to receive messages that could have been sent before app has loaded (also, issue with messed up data when receiving two messages at once fixed);
  • Time spend on executing Lua callbacks callbacks time set by functions such as render.on() is measured;
  • Calling ac.store('key', false) clears out a value to fix compatibility with some cars (please keep it mind it’s only meant to store strings or numbers though);
• WeatherFX:
  • ac.setWeatherLightsRangeFactor(): override default range multiplier based on lights intensity multiplier;
  • ac.useMinDepthResolution(): change the way depth buffer MSAA is resolved depending on what you want to use it for;
• State API:
  • Cars timing and sectors related info in car states online fixed;
  • ac.getSim().currentSessionTime and ac.getSession().hasAdditionalLap fixed in online races;
  • New ac.getCarPhysics().wheels[].discCoreTemperature for custom physics brakes;
  • New ac.getSim().isLinearColorSpaceActive for active linear color space fix;
  • New ac.getSim().currentVAOMode for current VAO debugging state;
  • New ac.getSim().cameraJumped will be set to true for a first frame after camera has been teleported;
  • New ac.getSim().isMakingScreenshot will be set to true if currently accumulating frames for a screenshot;
• New shared libraries (to avoid standard library to grow too massive and slow down scripts loading, extra functions are being added like this instead):
  • shared/sim/ghost: create new ghosts, reload them live and more;
  • shared/utils/chat: share setups in chat, change car color;
  • shared/utils/steam: access some of Steam API functions;
  • shared/utils/appshelf: any script can use it to ask user to install a trusted app;
  • shared/utils/binary: effortless and fast reading and writing binary data;
  • shared/utils/playing: override info about currently playing music, for example, if your app is playing something;
• Lua apps:
  • New ac.setWindowBackground() for changing background color and optionally painting titles black;
  • New DARK_HEADER flag for windows if background used is white (title text and icons will be black);
  • New itemValues: number[] field for ac.getSetupSpinners() for CSP entries using LUTs;
• UI & scene API:
  • ac.SceneReference:ensureMaterialsUnique() shouldn’t leak or cause crashes anymore;
  • ui.renderShader() respects IMGUI clip area;
  • ui.addSettings() uses name if ID is not set, for more reliable state saving;
  • New ui.onChat() allowing to replace entire chat app;
  • ui.onExclusiveHUD() can return ‘apps’ to let CSP know it can draw IMGUI apps;
  • Experimental functions ui.pushAlignment() and ui.popAlignment() for aligning UI without usual complications;
  • Dumped shader replacements, or replacements collected from a KN5 file, no longer affect CSP functional shaders (such as wipers) by adding a new LEAVE_FUNCTIONAL_SHADERS=1 parameter to config entries;
  • ui.MediaPlayer: FMOD integration improved (but the option is still hidden), unloading media works better;
  • New render.BlendMode.OpaqueForced (overriding disabled opaque blending for transparent passes) and render.DepthMode.WriteOnly values;
• Physics AI API: assign a new spline for a certain AI car (experimental);
• FFB post-processing scripts: new ac.disableLowSpeedFFBReduction(), just in case;
• ac.ControlButton:setDisabled(): AC hotkeys can be disabled as well (at least some of them);
• car::kn5::… textures should work fine with encrypted cars now;
• Encoded Lua canvases should be readable by ImageMagick;
• Small chance of a fatal crash on Lua script unload (if it was using logging or something like that in any disposing functions) fixed;
• Car physics scripts are better compatible with AC locking car controls.