Assetto Corsa PC Mods General DiscussionPC 

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The issue is coused by
CLUSTER_THRESHOLD = 5
in [LIGHT_SERIES_...] section, which creates too many lights
Expecially for the Stands meshes which are large
Yup! that's interesting since I too have several tracks where it's impossible to race at night: the lighting causes the fps to drop to unplayable levels...

And there's an easy solution (changing that 5 for another digit 😗), or (as I terribly fear 😢) it's too complicated to optimize these problems? I ask out of scientific curiosity, since I don't see myself capable of messing around with these codes too much...
 
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I had the same issue. Try this adjusted preset, plus drop the models.ini in the TAV_moderna showroom folder.

View attachment 1462151
@samdale12, you seem to know your way around these CSP previews. Are you able to explain what these various parameters mean?
I dropped my crystal ball onto my Rosetta stone and I can no longer astral project onto Ilja's yacht to ask him WTAF he's smoking when he labels these things.
I've done a variation of your preview above but can't seem to get the background to stay in exactly the same position every time, or to get all cars to scale correctly first time.
Occasionally the background (or car) will shift slightly in the scene, or the odd car will appear huge.
I just want all previews to look like the camera hasn't moved, and that every car is always centred the same.
Lock camera in preview window means what exactly? The preview window is a blue crystal mess with planes cutting through the car. Not useful at all.
World space? Screen space?
Rel? Rel what? Religion? Relativity? Relocation? Relationships?

1752007272130.png
 
I'm wondering if anyone can help me with a shadow issue that I've noticed recently when going through my track collection. It seems that some trees don't generate any shadows for some reason. Below is my example with pictures. The track is Palm Beach Speedway, I've no particular affection for the track, it just highlights the problem well, the link to the track is here so you can see the issue for yourself: https://www.mediafire.com/file/jil7byewx09nxij/palmbeach_speedway.rar/file

Working.png

Here are some working trees from the circuit, as you can see the shadows are fine.

Not Working.png

Next, these trees, despite using the same shader and having all other settings the same cast no shadows.

no csp.png

The same again but this time with CSP disabled, the shadows cast but have a super short draw distance.

I have tried everything I can think of, I've set shadows to cast in all manner of different ways in ext_config, messed around with cull/blend/depth modes, changed the textures from DDS to PNG and back, changed shader values and shader types. I've also been through several different CSP versions and gone methodically through every module within CSP, disabling each and retesting but have not had any luck.

Can anyone think of anything else I can try or has anyone fixed this issue on other tracks? Thanks.
 
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As a classic F1 fan I think it's pretty amazing that we have 1984 Dallas and 1982 Caesars Palace.Those tracks were done by "Anonymous". They are "semi decent" but have some issues. As they don't officially have an author I was just thinking that some track expert could polish them a little bit.

Dallas 1984 street circuit especially is pretty cool track to drive and I think it's way nicer street track than Detroit and Phoenix. And the real Dallas GP 1984 was one of the best F1 races ever. It's the one that Mansell collapsed when he was trying to push his car over the finish line.

Caesars Palace is a F1 joke as the track was built on a parking lot. Yes, really.



Sure it's not a great track... actually it's one of the worst ever... but it is important historically. The championship was decided there in 1981 (Piquet when Reutemann completely collapsed) and Keke Rosberg in 1982.It's absolutely WILD that we have those tracks. I think they deserve some attention but I don't want to start building tracks as I'm easily addicted and I'm already addicted to my season building hehe. The foundation is ok but they def. need some polishing. Dallas especially could at least use some safe AI lines for the SD 1984 cars (the only ones we have).

1982 Caesars Palace with improved AI line

1984 Dallas (pretty much at vanilla state)

Check them out.

Of course now we have some really high quality 80's tracks as Shi's Long Beach and Detrot works. But Dallas and Caesars could use some work. And of course we don't have the 1980's Zandvoort.
 
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The issue is coused by
CLUSTER_THRESHOLD = 5
in [LIGHT_SERIES_...] section, which creates too many lights
Expecially for the Stands meshes which are large
Learn something new every day! I updated Riverside that uses fewer lights by manually replacing it with more wider range lights instead of relying on light series codes and increase the CLUSTER_THRESHOLD to around 18. It should be less impacting on performance, also made few overall changes.


Screenshot_ford_mustang_gt4_riverside_8-6-125-21-31-27.jpg
 
Learn something new every day! I updated Riverside that uses fewer lights by manually replacing it with more wider range lights instead of relying on light series codes and increase the CLUSTER_THRESHOLD to around 18. It should be less impacting on performance, also made few overall changes.


View attachment 1463568
someone needs to send this info to Fenryr...
 
Learn something new every day! I updated Riverside that uses fewer lights by manually replacing it with more wider range lights instead of relying on light series codes and increase the CLUSTER_THRESHOLD to around 18. It should be less impacting on performance, also made few overall changes.


View attachment 1463568
I didn't tested your version, but, since i made a lot (very very lot) of configs, what i always noticed on my system is that

  • Cluster threeshold impact a lot on performances (a value of 12 is enough to reduce fps impact, higher i never noticed any changes but it worth a try)
  • The dimension of the area, impact almost in the same way. So if you put a light with an a range of 300 it will impact the same way as a few smaller ones with a lower cluster value

Balancing night lights (when you have real light sources is always a pain), when you don't have them, could be even more even if you don't care that much about realism since of course, if you don't have sources, you should not have light.

Hope this helps a bit
 
I love these explanations that shed light (pun intended) on optimization issues that drive my simian brain crazy, like why there are great mods that perform well at night and others that seems very similar, suck...

I'll be just as screwed because poorly optimized mods will continue to suck in certain circumstances (until some kind soul fixes them), but at least I'll know what's screwing me...
 
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I just want all previews to look like the camera hasn't moved, and that every car is always centred the same.
Lock camera in preview window means what exactly? The preview window is a blue crystal mess with planes cutting through the car. Not useful at all.
World space? Screen space?
Rel? Rel what? Religion? Relativity? Relocation? Relationships?
Using my personal preset I have found that leaving everything checked, except the "Rel." boxes leads to consistent placement... on most cars. But as you would expect with all things AC CSP, not all the time. Say 5% of cars, generally from more obscure modders, require an Offset value or values to get them re-centred.

Also hillclimb-monster size rear wings and rooftop aerials often require a vertical Offset value of say 5 or 10% to get the main body centred, if you have the 2 checkboxes ticked.

I believe "Rel." stands for 'Relative to...' So the Offset % value is not absolute but relative to the size of the car is placed depending on the "Position" and "View angle" parameters. With "Rel." checked the movement factor is far smaller if the car is zoomed in closer in the preview. When not relative to the zoomed picture adjusting the Offset % has a far greater effect.

My wish for a Previews improvement would be a checkbox that would allow the "View angle" to be automatically adjusted depending on the size of each car. Currently to keep all cars filling my Preview window as I like it, as per the attached image, is a time consuming labour of love. Or I could do the sensible thing and choose one view angle value that fits the biggest modern GT3 or Hypercars, and just accept that all the little 60's cars are going to be swimming in a big window of background image.
 
I love these explanations that shed light (pun intended) on optimization issues and drive my simian brain crazy, like why there are great mods that perform well at night and others that seems very similar, suck...

I'll be just as screwed because poorly optimized mods will continue to suck in certain circumstances (until some kind soul fixes them), but at least I'll know what's screwing me...
The lights at night are quite expensive (on not high end pc's of course), even worse if you combine them with rain. I have a quite extreme modern pc but, since i use if for work and not primary for gaming, my GPU is old (so i have a huge bottleneck), but this allow me to make my config easy even for low-end pc's.

If you have real light sources, you can (if meshes or materials are named properly) balance the performance and the quality of lights, if not is a total nightmare.
 
@samdale12, you seem to know your way around these CSP previews. Are you able to explain what these various parameters mean?
I dropped my crystal ball onto my Rosetta stone and I can no longer astral project onto Ilja's yacht to ask him WTAF he's smoking when he labels these things.
I've done a variation of your preview above but can't seem to get the background to stay in exactly the same position every time, or to get all cars to scale correctly first time.
Occasionally the background (or car) will shift slightly in the scene, or the odd car will appear huge.
I just want all previews to look like the camera hasn't moved, and that every car is always centred the same.
Lock camera in preview window means what exactly? The preview window is a blue crystal mess with planes cutting through the car. Not useful at all.
World space? Screen space?
Rel? Rel what? Religion? Relativity? Relocation? Relationships?

View attachment 1463504
I wish I knew!

  • With both 'In world-space' and 'In screen-space horizontally' ticked, the slider seems to move the car in the showroom left and right, while the camera stays fixed.
  • With just 'In world-space' ticked, the slider is greyed out.
  • With just 'In screen-space horizontally' ticked, the slider goes crazy and moves the car laterally plus the camera in some kind of weird parallax arrangement.
  • 'Rel.' appears to make the slider adjustment much finer.
'Lock camera in preview window' just seems to make it so that your mouse has no effect when clicking around in the 'Preview' window. With it deselected, holding down the left mouse button allows you to pan and tilt the camera, and holding down the centre mouse button allows you to truck and pedestal (using the definitions available here).

I'm afraid none of this helps with the problems you are experiencing - I do wonder sometimes if cars have been modelled away from the origin / 0,0,0 in the relevant 3D modelling program, and sometimes the Showroom is the first place that shows up 🤷‍♂️

Edited to add: there is another setting in CM you might like to experiment with 'Auto-adjusting camera pivot' - I usually have it on (but it could introduce variability like you are seeing).

1752052966520.png
 
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Never understood why the lighting was so damn ressource intensive in AC compared to... Well any other games lol. Running night races in PC2, AMS2, LMU, Heat 5 ? 80+ FPS No sweat. Running night races in AC ? Get lost buddy, here's 55 FPS for ya.
Everything depends on the engine. The better the engine's code, the better the results.

That's why even AAA games use engines like Unreal or Unity. Some studios develop their own engines, but that requires a lot of work. The base engine of AC wasn't designed for features like rain or advanced lighting (which is why you need CSP), so anything you add to it takes more effort to make it run properly.

If you then add the fact that some tracks and cars are poorly developed, the result is poor performance.
 
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I wish I knew!

  • With both 'In world-space' and 'In screen-space horizontally' ticked, the slider seems to move the car in the showroom left and right, while the camera stays fixed.
  • With just 'In world-space' ticked, the slider is greyed out.
  • With just 'In screen-space horizontally' ticked, the slider goes crazy and moves the car laterally plus the camera in some kind of weird parallax arrangement.
  • 'Rel.' appears to make the slider adjustment much finer.
'Lock camera in preview window' just seems to make it so that your mouse has no effect when clicking around in the 'Preview' window. With it deselected, holding down the left mouse button allows you to pan and tilt the camera, and holding down the centre mouse button allows you to truck and pedestal (using the definitions available here).

I'm afraid none of this helps with the problems you are experiencing - I do wonder sometimes if cars have been modelled away from the origin / 0,0,0 in the relevant 3D modelling program, and sometimes the Showroom is the first place that shows up 🤷‍♂️

Edited to add: there is another setting in CM you might like to experiment with 'Auto-adjusting camera pivot' - I usually have it on (but it could introduce variability like you are seeing).

View attachment 1463592
Thanks for this, very much appreciated. I'm kind of relieved to know that I'm not the only one who struggles with the enigma of CM and CSP UI labels. It's like an exercise in illogical assumption every time you try to do something.
 
Coming back to tracks, since we're probably get the Singapore from Codies, could we finally have a version of Korea that doesn't suck ? The Codies version we have from ACU has so many missing trees in the background and the other one is a kinda inaccurate port from RF.

I'd love to see the F1 2010 version with all the cranes ;)
 
I didn't tested your version, but, since i made a lot (very very lot) of configs, what i always noticed on my system is that

  • Cluster threeshold impact a lot on performances (a value of 12 is enough to reduce fps impact, higher i never noticed any changes but it worth a try)
  • The dimension of the area, impact almost in the same way. So if you put a light with an a range of 300 it will impact the same way as a few smaller ones with a lower cluster value

Balancing night lights (when you have real light sources is always a pain), when you don't have them, could be even more even if you don't care that much about realism since of course, if you don't have sources, you should not have light.

Hope this helps a bit
A simple way to debug lights:
  • go on track
  • open "CSP debug" app (under "developer apps")
  • select the "Lights" menu
  • enable "Debug lights" option

- press F7 and fly around the track and check the light yellow boxes
 
A simple way to debug lights:
  • go on track
  • open "CSP debug" app (under "developer apps")
  • select the "Lights" menu
  • enable "Debug lights" option

- press F7 and fly around the track and check the light yellow boxes
Yes but... why? I know my settings and all the 700+ config i made, works fine, i defined a system that give me less issue with a full config empty template. But then, the final result, depends on how the track is made with the light sources (i never add lights where there's no real light sources since i want a proper 1:1 version of the real track, as close as possible to the real counterpart).
 
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