Pretty sure this is just Motion-Blur, because the vehicles are excluded from that system and don't get the 'ghosting'. I just looked at one of the VVV videos and you can see the 'ghost' (as you call it) offset is proportional to the vehicle speed when pausing the video at various points. In motion this translates to variable "length" blur depending on how fast you are travelling, which is pretty standard for a post style MB system like the one used on Project Cars. In the case of that GIF - looking sideways the blur system would be producing very large offsets for each frame and the result looks like one I'd expect from this sort of MB shader.
You did big improvements in motion blur in last few months. Still, the effect never applies to cars can produce bizarre images like this (very extreme example, I know)
Is there something planed in the future to add object based motion blur in cars? Is motion blur different in PC? The trail image seems to be blended using actual blur with the original one.
Furthermore, motion blur was applied to windshield in cockpit cam and on water drops too when turning, braking and accelerating creating an uncomfortable tunnel effect but I glad to see those were fixed recently. Congrats.
It's need a more soft filter on tree shadows because when projected on the windshield are very unrealistic. I will search a representative shot later.
It is also confusing in the graphics options that the level of detail of cars affects the shadows of these (distances, specifically). It would be nice to have an option for shadows resolution and another one for distances (separating cars shadows options and track shadows would be great) as there are people more sensitive to blocky shadows but others prefer less resolution but avoid shadows pop in.
After the great improvement in the visual quality during night races a couple of months ago where you applied bloom effects to simulate the atmosphere density, would be great more control in options for cars shadows from car lights. They are only perfectly fine in ultra shadow preset but this preset is very demanding on the hardware for the other parameters that rise in the preset. Every track shadow produced by our car lights disappear in other preset but ultra. Using our car lights produced shadows with lower resolution could be a better compromise, so again allowing the user to check track shadows on/off indepently of the shadows quality will be perfect.
External camera has judder problems in some too long turns. There are similar problems about keyframes interpolation in replay cameras, but they are more visible in some zooms + travelling movements.
Anisotropic. You have perfectly described the level of AF applied on tarmac and ground decals (tire marks, dirty decals..), but what aniso level consoles apply in vertical surfaces? I refer especially to advertising textures on the track sides. They are usually the most critic part because our eyes tend to read them.
LODs. Are there plans to do a less rigid LOD calculation? Taking account the number of cars on screen and weather conditions (fog or rain) that can affect visibility. I remember doing a similar comment about detailed grass in wmd forums. Moving every car to lower polycount LOD in a few meters in storm weather could save resources that could be devoted to drawing minimal car reflections.
Faked reflections for rear lights produce inconsistent results, some occluded by another car lights has reflections, sometimes they are visible through the tarmac, cars with 3 rear lights only have 2 light reflections .... are there fixes for that in post launch patches? It's fantastic you have achieved to fit that effect in consoles so recently that we've not seen in any console footage yet. Was it possible at the expense of a few miliseconds in consoles frametime or putting more optimizations in the code. In the last case, are those optimizations usable for PC version or are they using specific console workarounds? I always though that performance hit for those faked reflections was too massive.
About car reflections, until a few months ago, reflections presets MEDIUM and HIGH showed reflections of the opponents cars on the wet asphalt. Different presets involved different quality of those reflections (basically reflection resolution without filtering). A few weeks ago this approach was changed, and now there are only car reflections using the ULTRA preset. Leaving the rest of presets without opponent cars reflections as it is the console version. Ultra preset is very demanding in CPU requirements so now is available to very few people to enjoy races where your opponents have reflections under the rain. This change is related to the recent move to some SSR layers? Is there intention for bring car reflections back in any way or is already something for PCARS2?
There have been some last minute changes in the ambient occlusion? It has always been an absent effect in pCARS but it could give a boost to the graphics. HBAO + for the future?
Congratulations for finally fix problems with detailed grass in multigpu systems in v998, I already thought I could not test that improvement in any build before the final version. My 3way sli thanks you.
Thank you.