No more scenery appearing at once on the horizon: the stage dissolves into the sky and backdrop toward the view distance, and the sectors and objects at the edges of the view no longer pop in or change.
- The scenery dissolves into the sky and backdrop over the last 15% of the view distance instead of being cut at the far plane. It blends toward the backdrop drawn behind it, by the distance from the eye, so it fades the same however the view turns. It works on SDL GPU and OpenGL and costs about 0.3 ms a frame at 2560x1600 on a Radeon 780M.
- The view distance a stage sets as the car passes its route nodes is reached gradually rather than in one frame, so strips of the stage no longer appear or vanish on the horizon at those points.
- Every sector the view reaches is drawn. The original drew a sector only when a corner of its ground was inside the view, so sectors at the far corners of the view were left out (on France stage 4, in about three frames out of four) and appeared at once as the view turned or moved.
- Trees, signs and the other objects that turn to face the camera are sorted and blended by their own distance. The original read one distance shared by every copy of an object, so all the trees of a kind could switch between soft and cut-out edges at once.
- The car reflections draw only the sectors they can reach, which is cheaper and gives the same reflections.
The view distance stays the stage's own: the stages are not built to be seen further, with hill tops and tree lines that have nothing under them past that distance.
Tested locally on Linux x86-64 and i686: all 36 tests pass, including a culling test that checks every sector the view reaches against a reference. France stage 4 was compared with the previous version along the whole stage, and at its start in clear weather and in rain, and SDL GPU with OpenGL. The Windows build was compiled locally. Release packages are built and tested by GitHub Actions for each supported platform.
You need your own original PC Colin McRae Rally 2.0 game data. The downloads contain only the port, its dependencies and licences.