Hello hello everyone,
and welcome back to Targa Florio!
I hope you guys had a good weekend! For F1 fans out there, it's a triple header week. I'm sure you've memorized Wilhelmus already by now lol.
But it's good to see Lando and McLaren putting up a fight in recent races. Maybe not as close as we hope it would be, but McLaren's pace is surely there. Unless Max and redbull are actually not running at full power to save engines. If I heard the commentator correctly, Max is already using his last allocated engine for the season. And it is very surprising considering we're only at the 10th out of 24 race!
Things might get interesting toward the end of the season. And don't count out the Mercs yet. they're showing good pace lately.
Okay now back to Targa Florio :D
Beni is working hard to process the photogrammetry scan from his last trip to Sicily. We got some chunks done and ready to be translated into the main track model. They came out really good and I'm really looking forward to drive on the new model in the Sim!
In the mean time, As I'm using the Special Stage as a test bed, I also looked at the current track and sorting out the models and assets that will be transferred to the new track.
This update focused heavily on performance improvement. We've created texture atlases wherever possible and rearrange the splitting of the mesh, and manage to significantly reduced the number of draw calls. And we also replaced a few 'expensive' shaders with 'cheaper' ones. Some doesn't actually need a multimap shader and using a simpler shader is enough, so it should contribute to less processing and more performance. It is showing good result in the test, so I hope this will improve your experience with the track.
Especially VR users. I'm aware that the track's performance had been poor in VR. I hope with this improved performance, more people will be able to enjoy the experience to it's full potential.
That being said, we do made adjustments to the landscape materials. Something that I learned when I was working on the Special Stage. It's 'cheaper' and I hope you find it better looking than the previous version :D
Here is the Targa Florio Update v.0.2.04
and here is the 3D trees file if you want to use the 3D trees in the track.
Please do keep in mind that 3D trees on this track have significant impact on performance, so in case you want to revert back to 2D trees, you will need to re-extract the main file and rewrite the content.
Well I guess that's it for today. I hope you guys have a great week!
Stay safe, stay healthy, stay away from snacking too much in the night! lol
and as always, thank you!
Abulzz