Assetto Corsa PC Mods General DiscussionPC 

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racinjoe013
Don't usually do things like this, but I just spent the better part of the last two days wasting my time re-sizing and re-saving car skins and i'm a bit frustrated.

Do car skin makers understand the concept of files sizes and GPU memory?

I noticed in MSI Afterburner that I was pushing past my 8gb of GPU memory and thought it was something I did when modding a track. Turns out it was the car skins and I wasn't even using that big of a field. Only about 25-30 cars. I started to look through the skins folders and noticed some really huge file sizes for the textures used in most of the skins. Some of it was due to larger than needed texture resolutions for silly things like chasis AO's, tyre blur textures, NM files, etc. Most of it was due to choosing the wrong dds format when saving. There were files saved in a dds format that made the file size 4 times bigger than it should be. Thankfully after a massive amount of time spent, i'm back down to 5-6gb of GPU memory for a field of 30-32 cars.

OK, rant over..... :)
Click to expand...
Co-sign, it's one of my biggest pet peeves. 8K skins, even on a 90 class GPU, is totally unnecessary and an explosion in file size for materially zero visual improvement in Photo/CM Showroom mode and a pure degradation when racing due to lower frames/LOD management. All for detail you couldn't even notice if you paused the game, hit F7 for free cam and zoomed right up to another car.

Some of these skins are hundreds of megabytes on their own (!) - and even worse, some of them fold in zipped source files for 8K interiors - which means there are technically duplicate files in each download! I've seen one skin for one of the VRC protos eclipse 500 megabytes. One skin.

Obviously Compactor helps, but it's a widespread problem - and there are some truly heinous skinners on RD guilty of this. Clearly they don't actually race the cars they skin.

I've strangely found "3K" to be my favorite mix of file size and quality - but even on an LG OLED, 2K skins when racing are perfectly fine. If I ever start skinning, I'll likely offer multiple choices between 1K and 4K.
 
X90
[edit] Clearly they don't actually race the cars they skin. [edit]
Click to expand...
Jeremy Strong Yes GIF by SuccessionHBO

We don't race with our noses pressed hard on the car bodies so yes, 2k/3k is more than enough.
Problem is, you have to take account of the possible drama of pointing it out in a review.

I dream of a on-the-fly skin degrader/resizer in CSP.
Lately, (if I got it right) CSP is able to control (change) skins too, right?
 
So true. I resized several skins a while back.

There is no way they are doing 40+ car grids full of 4k-8k skins.
I figure most are probably nerds just driving a car around and taking screenshots.

When you are racing I find 2k is fine. I'm not trying to read the brake temperature sticker on someone else's calipers while going through the esses side by side at Road Atlanta.
 
racinjoe013
Don't usually do things like this, but I just spent the better part of the last two days wasting my time re-sizing and re-saving car skins and i'm a bit frustrated.

Do car skin makers understand the concept of files sizes and GPU memory?

I noticed in MSI Afterburner that I was pushing past my 8gb of GPU memory and thought it was something I did when modding a track. Turns out it was the car skins and I wasn't even using that big of a field. Only about 25-30 cars. I started to look through the skins folders and noticed some really huge file sizes for the textures used in most of the skins. Some of it was due to larger than needed texture resolutions for silly things like chasis AO's, tyre blur textures, NM files, etc. Most of it was due to choosing the wrong dds format when saving. There were files saved in a dds format that made the file size 4 times bigger than it should be. Thankfully after a massive amount of time spent, i'm back down to 5-6gb of GPU memory for a field of 30-32 cars.

OK, rant over..... :)
Click to expand...
Likewise, I almost always resize car mod skins.

When you download a car mod larger than 1GB, it generally doesn't look good for the performance of your machines.

Generally the skin, resize to 2k (2048x2048) for good racing performance. Or if the car's 3D model doesn't exceed 150,000 polygons with LODs, I leave the textures it at 4096x4096.

or rally cars which usually only have a few skins. (less than ten) or which races alone on the rally circuit/special
 
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Is anyone else getting most of the AI opponents in their races stuck on the grid during the race start? Just about every race I do now, half the cars get stuck on the line and the other half either crash into them or trickle through slowly until the stuck AI teleport to the pits.

It seems to happen with both modded and kunos content, on modded and kunos tracks. Just randomly I guess.

This is definitely a CSP issue for sure, but every recent version I try and everything I turn on and off in the new AI behavior extension doesn't change anything.

It's really making AC unplayable these days.
 
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racinjoe013
With regards to car skins, does anyone know why RSS used a lot of png files instead of dds files for their skin textures on the rss_gtm_furiano_96_v6?
Click to expand...
The reason hasn't been clearly articulated by RSS, but here's the TL;DR I was able to piece together, cos I was also interested. The trend is spreading btw, the HSS Matra launched in early access with PNG skins.

Pro: PNG's can be much smaller, simpler to work with, and in some cases avoid artifacting (like striation). Also, as textures get ever bigger, Photoshop (the fat Adobe crumbling tower) and whichever 3rd-party extension is chosen to make it work with DDS, on the vast majority of painter PCs, is being pushed to the edge, esp in large DDS saves.

Con: PNG doesn't support alpha channel (which is apparently responsible/capable of effects like chrome, matte and the second coming, and while I do understand the mask, I have yet to find someone who can explain that clearly, without marketing-speak), so transparency needs to be incorporated directly into the image.

Sidebar.Here's a interesting trick. Create a PNG, and then just edit the extension to DDS.
AC will convert that to an uncompressed DDS, on the fly, and use it (ymmv) :dunce:
 
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andrevr
The reason hasn't been clearly articulated by RSS, but here's the TL;DR I was able to piece together, cos I was also interested. The trend is spreading btw, the HSS Matra launched in early access with PNG skins.

Pro: PNG's can be much smaller, simpler to work with, and in some cases avoid artifacting (like striation). Also, as textures get ever bigger, Photoshop (the fat Adobe crumbling tower) and whichever 3rd-party extension is chosen to make it work with DDS, on the vast majority of painter PCs, is being pushed to the edge, esp in large DDS saves.

Con: PNG doesn't support alpha channel (which is apparently responsible/capable of effects like chrome, matte and the second coming, and while I do understand the mask, I have yet to find someone who can explain that clearly, without marketing-speak), so transparency needs to be incorporated directly into the image.

Sidebar.Here's a interesting trick. Create a PNG, and then just edit the extension to DDS.
AC will convert that to an uncompressed DDS, on the fly, and use it (ymmv) :dunce:
Click to expand...
Waaaaayyyy back in the day (yes I'm old), DDS was introduced because it was faster for the game engines to read than other formats, although I don't recall PNG being a common format back then, it was more JPG and BMP in particular. ACC works on PNGs if I recall, although it does have transparency because you create 3 seperate images which combine together on the car if I recall? :confused:

If you are a GIMP user its faster to export PNG as it combines all the layers automatically whereas with DDS you have to remember to tell it to combine. Also a ridiculous number of versions of DDS now too.

Going back to the conversation about skin sizes, I find this amusing as a modder, you really can't please everyone, plus a lot of AC users seem to have become obsessed with taking amazing screenshots rather than using it as a racing game, and that's where things have gone belly-up. I know I cannot run a grid full of RSS cars, they are just too heavy and its purely to please the screenshot nutters.
 
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JK1977
Release :next weekend

+ Audi R8 LMS Ultra (Racerroom)
View attachment 1441870
View attachment 1441867View attachment 1441868

Audi A4 STW
Click to expand...
Hi, I really like your work but isn't this R8 Ultra already made by KS on the base game? I personnally don't see the point of making another one knowing we also have CF's extension for it that gives us almost every single wing configuration etc...

There are so many cars lacking in AC so I really don't understand why modders keep making what we already have.
Maybe my way of thinking is wrong I don't know
 
racinjoe013
Don't usually do things like this, but I just spent the better part of the last two days wasting my time re-sizing and re-saving car skins and i'm a bit frustrated.

Do car skin makers understand the concept of files sizes and GPU memory?

I noticed in MSI Afterburner that I was pushing past my 8gb of GPU memory and thought it was something I did when modding a track. Turns out it was the car skins and I wasn't even using that big of a field. Only about 25-30 cars. I started to look through the skins folders and noticed some really huge file sizes for the textures used in most of the skins. Some of it was due to larger than needed texture resolutions for silly things like chasis AO's, tyre blur textures, NM files, etc. Most of it was due to choosing the wrong dds format when saving. There were files saved in a dds format that made the file size 4 times bigger than it should be. Thankfully after a massive amount of time spent, i'm back down to 5-6gb of GPU memory for a field of 30-32 cars.

OK, rant over..... :)
Click to expand...

X90
Co-sign, it's one of my biggest pet peeves. 8K skins, even on a 90 class GPU, is totally unnecessary and an explosion in file size for materially zero visual improvement in Photo/CM Showroom mode and a pure degradation when racing due to lower frames/LOD management. All for detail you couldn't even notice if you paused the game, hit F7 for free cam and zoomed right up to another car.

Some of these skins are hundreds of megabytes on their own (!) - and even worse, some of them fold in zipped source files for 8K interiors - which means there are technically duplicate files in each download! I've seen one skin for one of the VRC protos eclipse 500 megabytes. One skin.

Obviously Compactor helps, but it's a widespread problem - and there are some truly heinous skinners on RD guilty of this. Clearly they don't actually race the cars they skin.

I've strangely found "3K" to be my favorite mix of file size and quality - but even on an LG OLED, 2K skins when racing are perfectly fine. If I ever start skinning, I'll likely offer multiple choices between 1K and 4K.
Click to expand...
and also sometimes there are multiple versions of a car number, eg 3 skins with number 1 , 3 with number 2 , etc.
If I do a quickrace , I don't want to have multiple opponents with the same number...

An example is the ts_peugeot908_hdi_alms_lms , with a whopping 1.6GB skins folder ,
I kept 1 of each and got the skin folder down to 400 MB that way.
Still able to enjoy the mod... even more so now! :cheers:
And I don't blame the modder / creator for sharing all the skins btw, just saying that's another way to save you some space


I also sometimes use a batch file to change the dds files (ommitting the mipmaps can reduce the size and using compression also ) , with the help of andrevr , I came to this batch file :

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
echo Starting the processing of folders...
for /d %%F in (*) do (
echo processing folder %%F
mogrify -format dds -define dds:mipmaps=0 -define dds:compression=dtx5 "%%F\*.dds"
)

echo Done processing all folders.
pause


Running this in the skins folder will go through each skin folder and do dtx5 compression and remove mipmaps.
EDIT:
This saves diskspace , not gpu ram though... so actually all this is not really relevant to your posts. :lol:
 
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JK1977
Release :next weekend

BMW 320i STW
View attachment 1441871
View attachment 1441872


+ Audi R8 LMS Ultra (Racerroom)
View attachment 1441870
View attachment 1441867View attachment 1441868

Audi A4 STW
View attachment 1441865View attachment 1441866
Click to expand...
What are the differences with the current version of the BMW 320i STW and Audi A4 STW that are available from PM3DM

BMW 320i STW BTCC

The car and skins aren't made by me. All credits to the original creators of the car and skins. This is an updated version of the PM3DM car with a new interior (made by FSR?). Some time ago I've updated this version for me. I added all skins...
www.gtplanet.net www.gtplanet.net
 
Rivanov
What are the differences with the current version of the BMW 320i STW and Audi A4 STW that are available from PM3DM

BMW 320i STW BTCC

The car and skins aren't made by me. All credits to the original creators of the car and skins. This is an updated version of the PM3DM car with a new interior (made by FSR?). Some time ago I've updated this version for me. I added all skins...
www.gtplanet.net www.gtplanet.net
Click to expand...

They are finished unlike PM3DM
 
racinjoe013
Don't usually do things like this, but I just spent the better part of the last two days wasting my time re-sizing and re-saving car skins and i'm a bit frustrated.

Do car skin makers understand the concept of files sizes and GPU memory?

I noticed in MSI Afterburner that I was pushing past my 8gb of GPU memory and thought it was something I did when modding a track. Turns out it was the car skins and I wasn't even using that big of a field. Only about 25-30 cars. I started to look through the skins folders and noticed some really huge file sizes for the textures used in most of the skins. Some of it was due to larger than needed texture resolutions for silly things like chasis AO's, tyre blur textures, NM files, etc. Most of it was due to choosing the wrong dds format when saving. There were files saved in a dds format that made the file size 4 times bigger than it should be. Thankfully after a massive amount of time spent, i'm back down to 5-6gb of GPU memory for a field of 30-32 cars.

OK, rant over..... :)
Click to expand...

I usually do 4K as standard (with resizing to 2K on request), but I do take care to compress with BC1. There are some who don't compress their dds files, ending up with 40-70mb filesizes which is ridiculous!! 4K allows me to add as much detail as possible in the liveries, 8K seems overkill in general.
 
Ale2Passos
Hi everyone! Can anyone help me with this problem? After updating to the latest version of PURE (2.57), the game looks like this and Pure Config doesn't work. I've already tried reinstalling everything, but that didn't fix anything. I've also tried deleting the weather_fx.ini files, but that didn't work either. Also, when I select Pure Gamma in Weather FX and enter a race, when I exit, the Pure Gamma option automatically changes to Pure LCS. Finally, the FPS drops drastically, never going above 13 or 15.

Click to expand...

No one can help with this please? I have already tried everything without positive results.
 
Last edited:
jac0
and also sometimes there are multiple versions of a car number, eg 3 skins with number 1 , 3 with number 2 , etc.
If I do a quickrace , I don't want to have multiple opponents with the same number...

An example is the ts_peugeot908_hdi_alms_lms , with a whopping 1.6GB skins folder ,
I kept 1 of each and got the skin folder down to 400 MB that way.
Still able to enjoy the mod... even more so now! :cheers:
And I don't blame the modder / creator for sharing all the skins btw, just saying that's another way to save you some space

Running this in the skins folder will go through each skin folder and do dtx5 compression and remove mipmaps.
EDIT:
This saves diskspace , not gpu ram though... so actually all this is not really relevant to your posts. :lol:
Click to expand...
In that particular example you probably find its different skins for each series, so Le Mans, WEC and then IMSA, all that changes is the number plate banner.

Doesn't removing the mipmaps cause the skins to go white or black when seen in the distance?
 
Ale2Passos
No one can help with this? I have already tried everything without positive results.
Click to expand...
Hi,

Not that I know all and I have no magic wand or something, but did you upgrade to latest CSP (might be cause?) and have you tried a different PPfilter? Other than this I don't really know to be honest (Am on Pure 2.57 myself too) not using CM though and have no problems.
 
For those interested (to improve racing performance) and who don't want a program that's tedious to use, I use "XnConvert". This program will modify most textures in the format or resolution of your choice.

I'm not an expert on texture skins in car mod folders, and I'm sure there are plenty of other programs to do this kind of texture work.

A simple drag and drop of textures from a skin, anything from (for example) 2016_Gloves_DIFF, 2016_Suit_DIFF, 2016_Suit_NM, ac_crew, and many others...

Once you've chosen the conversion parameters, just press "convert," and this program does the job well.

P.S.: I'm not promoting them, just what I use regularly and find very useful.

A fairly simple program that requires little knowledge to use.

Ps. 2: This message is for people who aren't familiar with this type of program (I know that most people here are much more experienced in modding than I am and use other methods).
 
andrevr
The reason hasn't been clearly articulated by RSS, but here's the TL;DR I was able to piece together, cos I was also interested. The trend is spreading btw, the HSS Matra launched in early access with PNG skins.

Pro: PNG's can be much smaller, simpler to work with, and in some cases avoid artifacting (like striation). Also, as textures get ever bigger, Photoshop (the fat Adobe crumbling tower) and whichever 3rd-party extension is chosen to make it work with DDS, on the vast majority of painter PCs, is being pushed to the edge, esp in large DDS saves.

Con: PNG doesn't support alpha channel (which is apparently responsible/capable of effects like chrome, matte and the second coming, and while I do understand the mask, I have yet to find someone who can explain that clearly, without marketing-speak), so transparency needs to be incorporated directly into the image.

Sidebar.Here's a interesting trick. Create a PNG, and then just edit the extension to DDS.
AC will convert that to an uncompressed DDS, on the fly, and use it (ymmv) :dunce:
Click to expand...
it was clearly articulated on their discord. There are no compression artifacts so you get better quality.
 
Ale2Passos
Hi everyone! Can anyone help me with this problem? After updating to the latest version of PURE (2.57), the game looks like this and Pure Config doesn't work. I've already tried reinstalling everything, but that didn't fix anything. I've also tried deleting the weather_fx.ini files, but that didn't work either. Also, when I select Pure Gamma in Weather FX and enter a race, when I exit, the Pure Gamma option automatically changes to Pure LCS. Finally, the FPS drops drastically, never going above 13 or 15.

Click to expand...

Please watch the install video and install it exactly like it is shown there. You must use 7zip app and its Extract button!!!
Don't use any other methods to install Pure!!!
 
racinjoe013
Don't usually do things like this, but I just spent the better part of the last two days wasting my time re-sizing and re-saving car skins and i'm a bit frustrated.

Do car skin makers understand the concept of files sizes and GPU memory?

I noticed in MSI Afterburner that I was pushing past my 8gb of GPU memory and thought it was something I did when modding a track. Turns out it was the car skins and I wasn't even using that big of a field. Only about 25-30 cars. I started to look through the skins folders and noticed some really huge file sizes for the textures used in most of the skins. Some of it was due to larger than needed texture resolutions for silly things like chasis AO's, tyre blur textures, NM files, etc. Most of it was due to choosing the wrong dds format when saving. There were files saved in a dds format that made the file size 4 times bigger than it should be. Thankfully after a massive amount of time spent, i'm back down to 5-6gb of GPU memory for a field of 30-32 cars.

OK, rant over..... :)
Click to expand...

Amen, vive la révolution!

(And apologies for doing 20mb BC7 files for vintage cars if that's too big)
 
racealot
Greetings all, thought to share some news about a neat car-mod I've come across... On the physics-side, it handles quite realistic on just about any street/race circuit...

However, the downside is that it's encrypted, but it's a keeper.
View attachment 1440398

To that end, I've began to do some random liveries for it - without the proper AO mapping - cause it's encrypted dah!
View attachment 1440399

The issue (for me & others) is that liveries will not have AO applied.

def: In 3D computer graphics, ambient occlusion (AO) is a shading and rendering technique that simulates how light falls on an object, particularly in areas where surfaces are close together, creating a more realistic look by darkening creases, holes, and intersections.

Questions are the following:
1. Anyone have the unencrypted version (paidmod) so that the AO mapping can be shared?
2. Can the AO be applied via ext_config instead?

mod-source:
igna15workshop.gumroad.com

BMW M3 E46 N-Spec

This mod is a tuned and improved version of my friend Yuki M3 E46, who is happy to allow me to share this mod to the world.The goal was to make a track inspired E46 M3. Therefore it’s got functional aero, CSL steering rack, coilovers and semi-slicks. Two different engine setups are available...
igna15workshop.gumroad.com igna15workshop.gumroad.com
Thanks a bunch for any feedback provided.
Happy racing!
Click to expand...
UPDATES:
A generous thank-you to @ninezeroniner, @andrevr, @24H, @Masscot and @Fanapryde - for their collective assistance & contribution towards getting this AO MAP fixed, and the additional shift.ksanim file...

body_ao__fixed.png

NOTE-1: This mapping may look OK to the naked-eye but there are some areas which are stretched and skewed -which ruins the decal-look.

The liveries workflow continues, here's an update thus far.

bati_e46_nspec54__wip-liveries-2.png


NOTE-2: further ingame testing and nip-tucks are still required to ensure that decals used are in proportion to the size of the car.

EDIT:
Forgot to include an image of the numberplate that will be included with the liveries. Based on the ext_config that's in each skin-folder, this numberplate will show in the rear.
Plate.png

Happy racing!
 
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