The sim that has been active among us for the longest time continues to progress but with a not very defined course. A few years ago it seemed that the incorporation of some brands and real circuits was going to define what had to be the last part of the simulator, the so-called S3, but nevertheless it has ended in an extension of scenarios and graphic additions that do not end up reaching the users.
Today we have one more sample of the current progress. This time a gigantic extension of South City, which seems to want to give us a functional London for us to roam around with, or to create infinite layouts on the new roads.
Hello Racers,
It has been a while so we’d like to tell you what we’ve been doing and some plans. You may have been expecting a report about Fern Bay. But Eric had so many ideas for new ways to link up roads at South City he wasn’t ready to stop. The result: more roads and variety than any of us had expected!
You can now continue straight on over the bridge near the pit lane exit and join a dual carriageway that goes all the way round the old South City and meets the existing dual carriageway, past the multi-storey car park, over the old roundabout and out of town. At the end you can turn right and follow another big road that goes around the old unfinished industrial area and encloses a new park which has its own internal road.
From there you can drive back round to more new roads linking up with the older part of South City where a lot more roads have been made driveable. It’s hard to describe but here are some more screenshots and a video.
All this takes a long time and there are still holes to fill and buildings to complete in the new areas. But Scawen has also had a lot to do on the programming side. Since the public update 0.6V in February, he has tried to finish things in the lighting system. As one example, we now have a new lightmap for cars, other moving objects and layout objects. It makes use of the occlusion octree, described in our previous report, that covers all the driveable areas. Now it has been extended to provide directional lighting information for the sky and artificial lights.
We want the community to have the new version so we are trying to get to that point as quickly as possible. To do that, some things we want to do can wait until after the release. For the first version, Eric plans to focus on finishing South City and Kyoto while Scawen works on the tyre physics. Fern Bay and further graphical improvements can be done after the big update.
We hope you like the pictures and video!
More Previews here: https://www.lfs.net/report-may2021-so
See you on the track!
