Task A04 : Add a preview image for each available livery of each car / driver

[pouillot]

Now #138 / D29 is nearly completed, this work can start, or at least the discussions about how to do it.

The code expects the image files to be :
- .png files for the moment, but JPEG support will be added soon, so let's say it is .jpg files (better for size reasons),
- to be named like this <car name>-<skin name>-preview.jpg, except for the "standard" skins : <car name>-preview.jpg
- to be located in the same folder as the associated skin/livery file, wherever it is now.

The recommended size for these images could be (let's discuss though) :
- 16x10 or 16x9 aspect ratio (nowadays and expected future screens dimensions),
- at least 800x500 pixels (about half our current target max screen size 1920x1080 (HT TV).

Another question to solve : what environment, distance, car position, ... do we define for these "shots" in order to get a consistent aspect and enable the users to compare the cars and liveries at a glance ?

[pouillot]

As told yesterday, pushing forward the discussion about how to achieve this task for 2.0.

Some updated hints (as discussed yesterday + other mines) :

• wait until the livery is _really_ finished before shooting (avoids doing twice or more)
• use exclusively the JPEG format (only supported in the code, + smaller files, probably no use to keep hi-quality, too many images for detailed tweaks in the future ?)
• use a 16/10 aspect ratio, 960x600 seems the right size to prevent "pixelization" up to 1920-pixel wide screens (seems ok for 1 or 2 years ;-) (you can set this manually in <user settings>/config/screen.xml, after setting the Windowed mode ; don't Full Screen mode)
• for a given car set, use the same track, position on the track, camera and zoom factor for all the cars
• different car sets may use different tracks
• use maximum graphics quality (the Graphic / Open GL Option menus - Sky Dome, LOD, ... - but also your video settings panel can help)

The main question here is to find out the good candidate tracks
for these top model shoots : the ones with the best light ...
here, I lack graphics expertise and trust you ...

Please go on :-)

[mungewell]

I added some previews for 5 wr-series cars, not brilliant but I won't be able to do anymore until (at least) the weekend so perhaps they are good enough to get into 'alpha2'.

Simon.

[pouillot]

I like them. Committed in r3083.

[pouillot]

Eckhard, I'm sorry ... but I find the previews for the Spirit RB1 LT, Vieringe 5 RB and SC Cavallo 360 a bit strange : may be they were shot from to high off the ground, because they make the cars appear oddly, just as flat fishes ... :-)

I prefer from far the point of view that Simon used for the RS cars, especially for the FMC and Kenji.

Whatever the game window size / aspect ratio I choose, always the same.

Is it something special to my screen, or have anyone else the same feeling ?
Were these shots really taken with a 16/10 game window ?
Weren't they flatten in order to fit their current 800x500 state ?

[pouillot]

Please guys, don't forget this task ... at least for the standard livery of each car.

The RS cars are done ... but we only have a few more ones for the moment.

[ocirne94]

I would happily take on this task, but I think it requires SVN write access...

[pouillot]

Ocirne, you now have this write access (just as each dev team member who needs it :-).

May I add 1 item to the above HOW TO (960x600, ...) ... the height of the point of view is important, in order to get a flattering view of our cars (see my question above about the "flat fishes" ;-).

But warning about this preview shooting work ... that the shot cars / skins are really done (for 2.0). Just to avoid double work.

May be this needs to be asked to every artist here :
Eckhard, Haruna, ..., which are really done now, which are now under rework, or planned to be before 2.0 ?

[ocirne94]

I find that the current division between "CustomCarLiveries" and "CustomCarLiveriesTextures" Wiki pages is quite confusing... I'd prefer to merge the two pages; also, it appears that they have differents points of view:

CustomCarLiveries says that "your skin file have to be named like this : "<car name>-<skin name>-preview.jpg""

CustomCarLiveriesTextures says that we should have "a preview image as a JPG image in 800 x 500px; carclass-car-style-preview.png or carclass-car-preview.png"

Which name should I use?

P.S.: thank you J-P for the access, I'll try to put it to good use ;-)

[pouillot]

Actually, the 2 descriptions are the same, if you consider that :

• carclass is among { sc, ls1, trb1, rs1, rs2, 36gp, ... },
• car stands is <car name> (often brand + model, like lynx-220 or cavallo-360),
• style is another word for <skin name>.

About merging the 2 pages ... I agree it'd be better for everyone.

PS: You're welcome, Ocirne, and we have no doubt about the good use :-)

[apr-torcs]

Hi Ocirne. Consider also the comments on the development list of speed-dreams, on this subject.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=985758.74251.qm%40web36904.mail.mud.yahoo.com&forum_name=speed-dreams-devel

cheers

[ocirne94]

Hi Manfariel,
thank you for the link; that's an interesting discussion, but after reading it a question has risen in my mind: 960x600 or 800x500?

[apr-torcs]

I think the decision was 960x600

[ocirne94]

Hey, in order to get the best reult, would it be too difficult to program a robot to always have exactly the same behaviour, in order to get the same position for different liveries of a same car?

[ocirne94]

Because rarely starting position is the best one for a shot, and from the very first turn robots start to change behaviour between two different sessions..

(sorry for the duplicate, just brain-storming)

[ocirne94]

I have a serious problem: as it seems that some cars are undergoing major reworks (the SC Boxer three days ago, and before that the TRB1 Silber), I don't know which ones I can work on;

I have got to know which car sets are 'stable' for 2.0...

'cause I am using the robots to shoot the previews, and I have to keep the same setups when shooting previews of cars of one set; and of course the preview should be the one of the final model.
Also physics seem to be undergoing some changes, but I can workaround that using SimuV2.

[pouillot]

Please, guys ... can we help Ocirne, and tell him our plans for 2.0 ?

• SuperCars? : Eckhard, Haruna, ... ?
• LS1 : Haruna ?
• TRB1 : Eckhard, Haruna ?
• 36GP : Andrew, Eckhard ?

[ocirne94]

Thank you J-P... I'm now adding information from private mailing with Eckhard:

Ready:
GP36 Silber (only one player skin)
TRB1 Silber (3 skins - driver skins will come too)
TRB1 Spirit (3 skins + 4 driver skins)
TRB1 Vieringe (3 skins + 2 driver skins)
SC Cavallo 360 (3 skins + 4 driver skins)
SC Boxer (2 Player skins - 3rd one + driver skins will come too)

SC Boxer and TRB Silber: reworked driver skins are coming
SC Lynx: WIP rework
SC-Murasama, SC-Ciclon and SC FMC: some upcoming livery edits

[andrewsumner]

The 36GP cars are undergoing the much needed review of their setups, and hopefully nearing completion, after which the robots will be reviewed to ensure they drive the cars quickly & keep them on the track.

There's no planned visible changes to any of the cars, other than perhaps improvements to skins to include baked shadows (Eckhard?).

In my "spare time" I'm polishing up an improved model of the LS1 Zaxxon (Saleen S7), should be finished in a week or two & will submit for people to review & decide if it should be adopted or not.

[pouillot]

Ocirne, what are your plans about Jaime's awesome showroom track ? Wouldn't it be cool to use it at least for the preview shots that are not already done ?

But may be there's need for deciding first about the textures and objects to put in the garage ... can we go ahead on this ?

[mungewell]

I added a script to check the previews for the robot drives (src/tools/scripts/check_robot_skins.py). Listing of status attached.

Things to note:
1). Not all robots have skins (which is fine as they will pick up the car default one), but would be nicer if they did.
2). Some ACC models are newer than the skins, which mostly indicates incorrect 1024x1024 skins
3). Some drivers don't have a default skin, but do have an alternative - which would only be selected if the user goes into the 'garage'.... do we want to move these to become the default.

Do we yet have an automated method to capture screen shots? (trigger on 'ready' message?)
Simon

[ocirne94]

Unfortunately taking previews at the moment is completely manual - that is, you have to wait for "Go" to have disappeared, hide the mouse cursor and the whole interface, and then take the screenshot; also the editing in GIMP is completely manual, which I find rather boring (but I have no skill in GIMP scripting).

[mungewell]

Taking preview shots of the robot skins will be very difficult (they won't stay in place like the humans). I'll see if I can hack the code to automatically call (GfuiScreenShot?() or whatever) just before the race starts.

Rather than using Gimp I would suggest ImageMagick?, which is a batch/command line tool.

Did we ever get the code in place to start a race directly from the command line, ie. without going through the menu. This would help if we could pre-configure the selected car, start the race (with screen shot), quit and process screenshot to jpg.

I was also thinking that we probably don't want to use the same 'location' for the previews. The 36GP probably look nice against the 'wall', but the would look out of place in the garage (with CF strip lighting).

Do we want to keep the 'action' shots of the RS cars, or move them into the garage?

[area42]

Yes we have an nearly automated method:
- At first optimize your graphic card settings for a great quality:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/speed-dreams/wiki/GraphicCardSettings

- Setup display size to 1680*1050
- Choose race mode "Practise"
- Select "Garage" track at category "Developer"
- Select your car
- Setup weather to "Noon" and "No clouds"
- Start race
- Choose camera on key F9
- Now just Zoom in 5 times and press F12 to save your screenshot
- Open the screenshot in GIMP
- Resize it to 800x500
- Change the mid brightness via menu Colors > Levels to 1.20
- Save the images as JPG with high quality settings (95% quality, Subsampling 1x1 1x 1x best quality)

[mungewell]

The problem with this method is that it's highly user intensive, and I'm _very_ lazy ;-)

We appear to have 131 robot drivers, although a large number don't have their own skins.

It looks like the list of drivers is stored within the '~/.speed-dreams/config/raceman/practice.xml' file as
--

<section name="Drivers Start List">

<section name="1">

<attstr name="module" val="usr_ls1"/>
<attnum name="idx" val="14"/>
<attnum name="extended" val="0"/>
<attnum name="skin targets" val="1"/>
<attstr name="skin name" val="ffr55"/>

</section>

--

It would be fairly easy to script something to auto-magically change this, start the race, snap a shot, copy/convert the screenshot and move onto the next car/robot/skin. I have all of these parameters within the python script I just wrote.

All that's missing is a fast way to get to the start of the race....

[mungewell]

Looks like within a game, the zoom factor is remembered - you can zoom, switch to different camera and then back to 'F9'.

But it is reset when the games is aborted/restarted.

Suggestions anyone?

[mungewell]

in 'graph.xml' the zoom is being reset each time the race starts
--

<attnum name="fovy-7-0" val="1"/>

--
changes to
--

<attnum name="fovy-7-0" val="9"/>

--

Maybe here:
--
00:00:23.342 Info OpenAL : Creating static source from data/sound/bottom_cras
h.wav
00:00:23.343 Info OpenAL : Creating static source from data/sound/backfire.wa
v
00:00:23.343 Info OpenAL : Creating static source from data/sound/gear_change
1.wav
00:00:23.344 Info Dynamic Sources: requested: 235, created: 235
00:00:23.345 Info Static sources : 21
00:00:23.345 Info Dynamic sources: 235

00:00:23.352 Trace Wrote C:/Users/swood/Documents/speed-dreams-2.settings/conf
ig/graph.xml (0AD82AE0)

00:00:23.352 Trace Ready.
00:00:23.354 Info Sound restored
00:00:23.354 Info Starting race engine.
00:00:23.355 Info Practice now in NETWORK_WAIT state
00:00:23.355 Info Practice now in RACE_START state
00:00:23.355 Info Ready.
--

[pouillot]

Replying to mungewell:

Did we ever get the code in place to start a race directly from the command line, ie. without going through the menu. This would help if we could pre-configure the selected car, start the race (with screen shot), quit and process screenshot to jpg.

See #413 for this request. Should not imply big changes, IIUC.

[mungewell]

Modified the 'check_robot_skins' script to reconfigure 'practice.xml' and automatically start SpeedDreams?.

This at least take out the manual configuration stage, just need to push 'enter, enter, enter' to start a practice session, grab the screen shot and then quit the game.

Next is to get SpeedDreams? to automatically take the shot and get the script to copy it to the appropriate place in the filesystem. And maybe look at preventing it using the speedo/rpm/etc graphics as skins....

[ocirne94]

Replying to mungewell:

Rather than using Gimp I would suggest ImageMagick?, which is a batch/command line tool.

Does ImageMagick support a function similar to GIMP color levels, and advanced JPEG saving options such as the onesEckhard describes in comment 24?

[ocirne94]

Ok, I've seen that ImageMagick? can handle advanced JPEG saving, but I wasn't able to find anything similar to GIMP color levels function.

A quick idea: if the final script will be written in Python, it may be a smart idea to use the Python Imaging Library to deal with the image; I've already dug into its code and it needs about 10 lines to have resizing and saving to JPG (to handle subsampling, quality setting and optimization function, which reduces the output's size by ~10%). Dunno how much work would it need to implement color levels, maybe having a look at how GIMP's code deals with them.

[mungewell]

Do we need the colour levels stuff for screenshots/previews... I think we only did that for the menu back grounds.

Obviously 10 lines of python could easily be integrated, if we set up the initial view OK we shouldn't need to do any sizing/cropping. Please upload a code snippet if you have it.
Simon.

[ocirne94]

IIRC using levels is needed since I made Garage track working with sky dome; I guess, would disabling sky dome make levels unnecessary? (Don't have time to verify yet, but it could be verified by looking at the asphalt pixels color without sky dome versus sky dome AND levels editing). Please find attached the code snippet. I think resizing is present in the procedure to reduce aliasing even more - Eckhard?

[ocirne94]

Code to make preview screenshots ready for using in SD.

[area42]

Hi all,

why so complicated? Take you bunch screenshots and use teh batch convert for GIMP:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html

It ships with may Linux distros and is available for Windows too. It handle open, save, resize and levels :)

[ocirne94]

Wow, looks very interesting; the only thing I don't understand is how it handles levels - it doesn't seem to have all the parametres which are available in the "official" levels window (e.g. for brightness it has only one adjustable value, while GIMP itself shows 3). If this can be succesfully used, the external script would have to do only the shooting procedure and possibly the final renaming.

[area42]

Ok, here it comes: use DBP for GIMP with:
- Input: use your screenshot PNGs sized 1680x105 or higher
- Colour: Enable, Bright: 0,4, Contrast: 0,25
- Resize: Enable, Absolute, Width: 800, Height: 500
- Output: JPEG, Quality 0.95, Sampling 1x1

Hit Test for a preview and Start to batching your screenies to previews.

[mungewell]

I think the scripts are ready to go... but we need to find a way to automate the taking of the screen shot - otherwise the robots will start driving off (and there's also lot of key presses to be sequenced)

I found out how to disable the reset of the zoom, so this remains as previous set. The in-game selection between skins now looks really slick...
--
--- a/src/modules/graphic/ssggraph/grscreen.cpp
+++ b/src/modules/graphic/ssggraph/grscreen.cpp
@@ -139,7 +139,7 @@ void cGrScreen::activate(int x, int y, int w, int h)

}
if (curCam) {

curCam->limitFov ();

- curCam->setZoom (GR_ZOOM_DFLT);
+ //curCam->setZoom (GR_ZOOM_DFLT);

}
active = true;

}

--

I'll upload a teaser image.
Simon.

[pouillot]

Replying to Simon:

I did try inserting a call to 'GfuScreenShot?(NULL)' in raceman where it was triggering the 'Ready, Set, Go' GUI messages.
This produced a blank screen shot, so maybe I need to pass a pointer/context so the function knows where to get the pixels from....
Anyone got any ideas?

No, no need for an pointer.
But did you try running this in non-multi-treaded mode ? ('cause if multi-treading is on, your call to GfuiScreenShot? is done from the simu./robots thread, not the GUI one, which might explain).

A better/safer place for this call (and test for right situation time) is probably at the beginning of the rmUpdateRaceEngine function in src/modules/legacymenu/racescreens/racerunningmenus.cpp (in order to access to the situation time, use LmRaceEngine?().inData()->s).

[pouillot]

Note r4114 update for BaseAmbiant?, BaseDiffuse? and BaseSpecular? sky dome light settings (see #383).

[mungewell]

I think we're there... I've uploaded a small patch here which makes the screen shot happen automagically. This should NOT be uploaded to main code.

There's a couple of glitches with my machine being slow to load models, but overall we're good. Also my GFX card is also a bit crappy so we might get better images from a decent one.

I've uploaded a 'sample pack' here (16MByte):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34518077/preview_pack.tar.gz

It took a little under 1 hour to produce 247 screen shots, with just sitting pressing 'enter' when required.

[area42]

Took a look on the screenies, here is my short feedback:

- first great stuff at all :)
- may screenies are a little bit to dark
- on some SC cars in Data/cars/models the skin texture is missing
- all have the same rims per car instead of using the ones that fit to the skin
- rims are very unshaded and self illuminated, compare:
http://dev.speed-dreams.org/Eckhard/sc-boxer-96-preview.jpg
http://dev.speed-dreams.org/Eckhard/sc-boxer-96-preview-self-made.png

If we fix these small bugs we have a great solution for this boring job :)

[mungewell]

As the shots are taken with the game engine, any issues like 'wrong rims' is another bug... :-)

Which SC cars have the wrong skin texture? Another bug I suspect.

For the script I put a flag in which can be used to spec an alternate processing script. Call with additional '-p my_script' param and instead of processing the screen shot the script will call 'my_script location_of_preview.jpg'.

Your script should 'find' the current screenshot in '~/.speed-dreams-2/screenshot', process it and save it to the correct name.

This will enable the 'fancy' gimp processing talked about earlier in this bug.

[area42]

When i remember rights the LYNX and the Boxer have missing textures.

[mungewell]

OK here's what I see from the pack

Bad Texture:
car/sc-boxer-96-yellow-stripe-preview
car/sc-lynx-220-all-tune-preview
car/sc-lynx-220-red-lord-preview
drivers/mp5-fmc-preview (wireframe showing)
drivers/mp5-fmc-preview (wireframe showing)
driver/ls1-cavallo-570s1-preview (painted windscreen)
driver/ls1-cavallo-570s1-preview (painted windscreen)

Late (too slow to render on my crappy system):
car/trb1-silber-rblk-arrow-preview
car/mpa1-murasama-preview
car/36gp-milano-12c36-preview
car/mp1-diamond-d25-preview
car/sc-spirit-300-GTR-preview
car/mp1-vicente-preview
driver/ls1-archer-r9-preview
driver/ls1-archer-r9-preview

Also '36gp-motorunion-typec-preview' seems to be the longest car, and is almost clipped on the right side of the image.

[mungewell]

- all have the same rims per car instead of using the ones that fit to the skin

Can you give an example? I spent 1/2 hour looking at this and don't see where something does not match up to what it should be....

Simon

[area42]

Take a look the data/cars/models/ls1-archer-r9 any preview using the same rims or data/cars/models/sc-boxer-96. But every car skin of a car have its own rims.

[mungewell]

Never mind, I see the problem (on Human cars). It looks like I need to ensure that the 'skin targets' parameter is set to '1' for standard and '3' for alternate wheels.

--
$ diff practice\ -standard.xml practice\ -bee.xml
63c63,64
< <attnum name="skin targets" val="1"/>
---

<attnum name="skin targets" val="3"/>
<attstr name="skin name" val="bee"/>

$ diff practice\ -standard.xml practice\ -tsubashi.xml
63c63,64
< <attnum name="skin targets" val="1"/>
---

<attnum name="skin targets" val="3"/>
<attstr name="skin name" val="tsubashi"/>

--

I'll code this tonight, I assume that this is bit field.... where's it defined?

[mungewell]

The Princess is now wearing the right shoes :-)

The rim may have been over-illuminated as I had 'morning' selected for sky dome. Does it look better now?

I'll give a little time to fix the other issues and then run another set next week. If there are no objections I can upload these, or should I wait....

Simon

[mungewell]

I just noticed that my script didn't render previews for 'MP5-Drift' as it flags that there is no ACC model in that directory - although in this case this is not a problem.

736 checking mp5-fmc-drift
737 ---
738 ACC model is missing

I'll adjust the script to allow it to try to render even if the ACC is missing.
Simon

[kakukri]

That is because the car model is shared between the various MP5 incarnations, so acc files are only present in the mp5-fmc folder, the others contain only setup and texture files.

[mungewell]

Uploaded a new pack of previews here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34518077/preview_pack.tar.gz

Notable problems:
car - 36gp-ettore-t59-preview.jpg = broken shadow map
car - sc-boxer-96-yellow-stripe-preview.jpg = bad texture
car - sc-lynx-220-all-tune-preview.jpg = bad texture
car - sc-lynx-220-red-lord-preview.jpg = bad texture
car - trb1-silber-rblk-blue-sky-preview.jpg = bad texture

usr - ls1-cavallo-570s1-preview.jpg = painted windshield
kilo2008 - ls1-cavallo-570s1-preview.jpg = painted windshield

[mungewell]

Did a run of the new style previews, 266 of them are now added to SVN.

As noted above a few a visually wrong, these can either be fixed by hand (once the source material is fixed) or by deleting them from your working copy and re-running the script. The script should also pick up on the source materials changing too.

Let me know if there are any obmissions.
Simon

[torcs-ng]

simplix mpa1, alls skins are good.

[mungewell]

added simplex_mpa1 in r4231. Any others needed?

[torcs-ng]

No, I think that it's good.

Thank's

[mungewell]

closing this out as done.... any missing previews can be done manually or by the script.

[ocirne94]

Great, but I still find some glitches (below is only a partial list):

Supercars Lynx 220 (headlamps on, and blank texture with other liveries)
Team Lynx (missing)
Many robot liveries (headlamps on)

[pouillot]

Reopening, as some glitches left.

Q: Is the "lamps on" one a real issue ? I'd consider it only a minor = non-blocker one, now we we have nice previews of the cars and their liveries.

[pouillot]

Closing this, after creating #618 for this remaining minor issue.

[pouillot]

Re-opening (r4540), as some previews are actually lacking for the ls1-archer-r9 : dearly, imas, yuyuko.

Other official cars all checked OK.

[mungewell]

Looks like these 'new' skins were added 6 weeks ago, I'll attempt to get them done tonight.

[mungewell]

ls1-archer-r9 previews fixed in r4548