IndyCar Racing II: The Rendition Experience

USCTrojan4JC said:
Just curious if work on this is still ongoing or if you're taking a break (which is completely fine!), sharangad.
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This is going like a rocket ship. I've got more SPDY3D games going now. None of them are 100 pc yet.

Whiplash
Rebel moon
Tomb Raider
VQuake is almost runnable.

There're also performance problems. Because of gpl licensing the game window has to be in a separate app to dosbox which means you need a decent quad core and a discrete gpu (Intel HD integrated graphics aren't good enough). I would release it in its current state, just to get something out but the cpu load issue means even on fast systems pipe comms can faik/produce garbage.

ICR2 is probably the most functional game out of the lot but the enhanced levels have disappearing textures with rendition enhanced levels, fogging is randomly wrong on solitary polygons and dust clouds are missing.

If you guys want to give it a whir I'll release an alpha version later today and you can see how well it runs on your system.
 
sharangad said:
This is going like a rocket ship. I've got more SPDY3D games going now. None of them are 100 pc yet.

Whiplash
Rebel moon
Tomb Raider
VQuake is almost runnable.

There're also performance problems. Because of gpl licensing the game window has to be in a separate app to dosbox which means you need a decent quad core and a discrete gpu (Intel HD integrated graphics aren't good enough). I would release it in its current state, just to get something out but the cpu load issue means even on fast systems pipe comms can faik/produce garbage.

ICR2 is probably the most functional game out of the lot but the enhanced levels have disappearing textures with rendition enhanced levels, fogging is randomly wrong on solitary polygons and dust clouds are missing.

If you guys want to give it a whir I'll release an alpha version later today and you can see how well it runs on your system.
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Thanks for the update. Please take your time. I was just curious what was going on since there haven't been any new ICR2 videos lately.
 
It does look like it is running double speed at 60fps. Maybe the physics are tied to the 30fps clock rate.
 
Tim Wheatley said:
It does look like it is running double speed at 60fps. Maybe the physics are tied to the 30fps clock rate.
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Pressing alt+x switches to demo mode, where the framerate is uncapped. It's a feature of the game. Actual hardware can do this as well. Until now it didn't work properly with rready. The framerates were low.
 
Unless I am misunderstanding though, it's not a useful feature for the game? Though it's great it works as the real hardware would.

For example at 30fps 10mph is 10mph.
At 60fps 10mph is 20mph.

Does that explain what I mean?
 
Tim Wheatley said:
Unless I am misunderstanding though, it's not a useful feature for the game? Though it's great it works as the real hardware would.

For example at 30fps 10mph is 10mph.
At 60fps 10mph is 20mph.

Does that explain what I mean?
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Yeah. You're right. It's unplayable at high rates. Normally the framerate is capped st 30 fps. The reason I posted this was because demo mode ran at 30fps when it wasn't supposed to. In a previous vid, the framerate rarely moved past 30. Which means the wrapper and dosbox is achieving much better compatibility with real hardware.
 
Tim Wheatley said:
That mirror is such a great update from the last one!
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I thought the old mirror was disgusting. :)

At the moment in my videos the icr2 mirrors share a full res image. I think it's safe to downrez to 1/4. ICR2 has relatively titchy mirrors so lowering the res shouldn't be a problem.
 
Would there be any way to make the mirror optional to be at the top of the screen on ICR2? That's not in the real game (I think?), but I noticed you did it.
 
Awesome. Apart from the emulation itself a virtual mirror is such a big value-add for the game. :) In fact any racing game would maybe benefit from an OPTION to enable a virtual mirror.
 
@sharangad Just wanted to say it's amazing what you are doing, please keep up the great work. I echo the others in saying it would be great to have a virtual mirror.

Based on how the game is able to run so fast on the Alt-X mode, would it be fair to say that there likely won't be any frame rate issues even when using the more complex tracks and carsets? On regular DOSBox and slower systems, if I am using the most complex tracks that we have (generally the ones with many textured polygons all visible at once) and the carsets with more detailed car models, I may get FPS less than 30.
 
skchow said:
@sharangad Just wanted to say it's amazing what you are doing, please keep up the great work. I echo the others in saying it would be great to have a virtual mirror.

Based on how the game is able to run so fast on the Alt-X mode, would it be fair to say that there likely won't be any frame rate issues even when using the more complex tracks and carsets? On regular DOSBox and slower systems, if I am using the most complex tracks that we have (generally the ones with many textured polygons all visible at once) and the carsets with more detailed car models, I may get FPS less than 30.
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I take it these are fan made car sets and tracks? If you post links to at least a few of them (along with instructions) I can test them and maybe post a few videos.

If it's the graphics which are slowing dosbox down rready won't have any problems there, it's running on the gpu. Rready will work fine even on a prehistoric gtx460 (a user consistently gets 60 fps wurmth SODA on a 460, presumably at 1080p) . Rready is cpu constrained, more so for working with dosbox. Dosbox-Rendition, and the renderer Dosclient (which loads up rready) need a quad core at the moment because of the communications problem. Due to gpl 2.0 licensing I can't integrate rready directly with dosbox and render in its own window. So I wrote dosclient which is also gpl2, but to which I as the author can grant a license exception to use close source libraries (rready). Dosclient renders the graphics and sends back keyboard /mouse input back to dosbox.

I have managed to get icr2's intro running at 30fps on a haswell pentium dual core (3.4 ghz, no hyperthreading) but the actual game runs at 7 fps on integrated graphics HD 4000 gen.

I don't think custom cars and tracks pose a problem.
 
I have a public test build that a dedicated tester on Vogons is testing:
https://1drv.ms/u/c/5277ef8d4f2a9dcf/ETzpkc4g … 6h8pdw?e=be4aWD
MD5: 486268db1f29f81ff63bf4e71d874948

It may have stability issues.

Extract dosbox into a dedicated folder and rready into it's own. All future releases of dosbox need to go into the same dosbox folder.

Extract RReady and run rlauncher. Go to the win apps tab and hit the add button, browse to the dosbox folder and add dosbox.

Configure resolution settings from rlauncher use max as the fullscreen res forced fullscreen isn't needed) . And hit the run/launch button with dosbox selected.

Dosbox-Rendition uses its own config file (in %localappdata%/dosbox. Run and close dosbox and it should there).

You will need at least a quad core. I'm interested in how it performs and what problems you have with it. If it's unstable, let me know and I'll add my stability fix (100% stable at the cost of some performance)
 

Microsoft OneDrive

1drv.ms 1drv.ms
MD5: adfb01aaeadf68dd77fe656c6eefb14f

Mouse thread instability fix. Also adds this section to dosbox-Rendition.conf:

[rendition]
# threadsafe: Thread safety seting for dosbox

threadsafe = true

Also makes the default priority for dosbox SDL, higher, higher.

I highly recommend you add this in for stability. I don't know what nasties lurk with this settings, but please feel free to test and report back,
[rendition]
threadsafe = true
 
With threadsafe=true, in ICR2 the [ALT+X] demo mode will have garbled sound. I'm working on fixing that, along with a lot of other things.
 
Yet another ICR2 vid, this time testing the new generic upscaling render to texture code (which doesn't work and isn't in this video). But to test the damn thing I added a central mirror to see why the wing mirrors had garbage. So here's the central mirror and I think I'm going to keep it as an option for ICR2 as requested by you guys:


I think I know why textures are disappearing in ICR2. It migh in fact be what's breaking my new render to texture code.
 
I have tried the latest version you posted. This is what I'm running it on - sorry this is a rather ancient and not a gaming rig by any means:

Windows 10 Home
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
16 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745

My Rendition settings:
1715497051526.png

Observations:
- Firstly, it pretty much works the same as you've shown in the demos. It's really cool to see the game such high resolution, even with all the bugs so far.
- Upon running the game, it goes into full screen mode and I can confirm it is rendering 3D graphics in 1920x1080 for me.
- It seems like I can make it go back to 640x480 if I push Alt-Enter to put it in windowed mode. If I switch back and forth, it messes with the cockpit and the UI, usually making them black or disappear.
- Tracks are getting progressively darker into the distance, and the sky box is also dark (perhaps the game thinks the sky being drawn at a distance and darkening it like the other faraway objects)
- Custom tracks are often giving "Insufficient memory to load track" or "Problem loading track" errors. However, this could be more of a problem with the game or the tracks, and because I believe nearly all fan-created tracks were never tested with the Rendition version of the game, even if they work perfectly in the regular DOS or Windows versions.
- When the fan made tracks load, some (but not all) nearer textures are rendered as a black and white texture. Example below where the Goodyear and Bosch logos turn into black and white bars. This may have something to do with the .MIP texture switching from the low-resolution version (which works fine) to the high-resolution version (which turns into the black and white bars).
1715497757194.png 1715497775419.png
- I believe you are already aware of sometimes the sky doesn't show up or it disappears.
- Complex carsets are not loading - I tried a couple that Pavel had posted on his folder recently. Again, this may be attributable to the fact that most mods have not been tested with the Rendition game.

Here are some custom tracks I tried:
Detroit 1991 by me (https://icr2.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=1330&pid=13136#pid13136) - "Problem loading track"
Indianapolis 1992 by Pavel (https://icr2.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=1419) - "Insufficient memory to load track"
Meadowlands by Pavel works except for the texture issue I highlighted above.
Nashville by me (https://icr2.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=1355&pid=11743#pid11743) - it works until the game crashes along the return trip across the bridge
The Lola1990 and Reyn1996 carsets do not load - error message is "Not a valid carset"
 
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Thanks for that @skchow.

I'll fix those bugs. The sky /track darkening is a fogging issue. The game subtly applies fogging to create cretae weather and the view distance. I did notice that it doesn't look quite right, lilke in the Rendition vids floating around.

The cars/tracks I'm not sure about but I will test them out to see if I can get them going. I can also ask a Rendition owner to test the stuff out on physical hardware. It may be that the Rendition version of the game only accepts certain texture sizes. A user on Vogons got Rebel Moon Rising (which isn't a Verité compatible game) to run on the Rebel Moon engine (which is) by resizing the weapon textures. The texture size limitation wasn't, at least as far as I can tell, a hardware limitation, but hardcoded parameters in the Rebel Moon engine.

How does it run on your GTX 745 @1080p?
 
sharangad said:
Thanks for that @skchow.

I'll fix those bugs. The sky /track darkening is a fogging issue. The game subtly applies fogging to create cretae weather and the view distance. I did notice that it doesn't look quite right, lilke in the Rendition vids floating around.

The cars/tracks I'm not sure about but I will test them out to see if I can get them going. I can also ask a Rendition owner to test the stuff out on physical hardware. It may be that the Rendition version of the game only accepts certain texture sizes. A user on Vogons got Rebel Moon Rising (which isn't a Verité compatible game) to run on the Rebel Moon engine (which is) by resizing the weapon textures. The texture size limitation wasn't, at least as far as I can tell, a hardware limitation, but hardcoded parameters in the Rebel Moon engine.

How does it run on your GTX 745 @1080p?
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The performance is great - even with 32 cars visible at the enhanced Elkhart Lake. Not sure what FPS but it is silky smooth and feels better than standard DOS mode. Honestly surprised to get this performance on my nearly decade-old PC with a GTX 745 which isn't even a gaming card.

The fact that some of the custom tracks work and some don't - I can also try to compare those and see if I can figure out some clues to why. With regards to insufficient memory, I once did some testing on a PC with a Rendition V2100 card, and I believe it tends to happen on tracks that exceed a certain size or possibly contain a .MIP file that is too big - the latter theory is because I was able to make a track work by replacing certain textures with smaller ones. However I have since put that PC away in storage and don't have it readily available for testing. I am wondering if it is a problem with the CART.EXE not being able to handle certain file sizes or if it is the Rendition hardware - if related to Rendition, would it possibly be something that can be fixed if, say, you increase the amount of video memory available?

A couple other items I forgot to mention: The helmets are cycling different colors as they are viewed from different angles. And in the menu screens, I am getting a bit of lag/sluggishness when navigating through the menus - I don't think it's my PC because I don't have that problem with the normal ICR2 running on DOSBox (I use DOSBox Staging). But as I mentioned, once I'm driving in the game, there is no lag - the driving is great.
 
Wow! I'm glad it runs great, the racing sections at least. I'll be optimising performance some more.

The colour cycling helmets is a feature of the game, it's the same on original hardware

The menus are sluggish even on faster systems. It uses a horrible variable length sprite rendering call to draw the menu, but I will optimising it further.

RReady supports 128MB of RAM for Windows (RRedline) apps, low level limitations can be masked by the high level API. Unfortunately because of hardware limitations (Spdy3d is very close to hardware) DOS Rendition games can only support 16 MB of RAM. This is around 4 times what the original boards came with.

If you look at the cartrend.bat or cartfast.bat batch fikes (indyfast/indy Rend), there's an environment variable for Ram. I think it's set to 4 mb. I have been able increase it beyond 8 mb. I haven't tested it in a while.

You could try increasing it to 8 and testing your levels.

In case you're unaware:

[alt+m] cycles the mirror detail. The sky doesn't disappear when high res mirrors are turned on, but other textures might.

[alt+w] cycles weather/fogging.

[alt +r] show framerate.

[alt+x] demo mode. Mirror detail can be adjusted after this.

There's also framerate indicator built into rready. It's next to the vsync option under resolution settings.
 
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