Discord Spitball Session Follow Up - Photo Mode, Livery Editor, Route Blueprint & Tuning

(Closing Thread: Thursday 10th October, 2:30pm BST)

On Monday & Tuesday of this week, within the Discord myself and some of the dev team took part in a spitball session with those active in channels.
These sessions lasted for 30minutes each and we’re a discussion regarding the specific topic at hand.

The reason why we kept this to Discord was due to the nature of being a spontaneous live discussion rather than a pre-planned thread.
Although, following some of the feedback here, many of you asked for information to be related back onto the forum or an opportunity for those who couldn’t make the spitball session to have a location for feedback - Hence the creation of this post.

Please be aware that feedback has now be gathered from the Discord session and passed onto the relevant teams.

REMINDER: No matter what is discussed or mentioned in these sessions, it does not mean it will or won’t make it into the game. This is solely for the teams to get an understanding of your thoughts

~~

Information gathered so far (So we don’t get duplication’s below)

Photo Mode
Features:

  • Ability to change weather, time of day and seasons - Including able to pre-set these.
  • Ability to take photos from the perspective/inside the cars
  • Able to preview previous photos without have to quit the photo moment
  • Able to remove the FH4 logo
  • Be able to remove external items such as PR Stunts, danger signs, etc
  • Option for different lens types - Normal, fisheye etc
  • Pre-set angles for the camera
  • Additional camera options - Cast, Brilliant, Highlights, Shadows, White Balance, ISO Sensitivity, Focal Length, Noise, Grain
  • “Live photo” to rewind within photo mode during a set frame(s) to get that “perfect shot”
  • Being able to control car headlight intensity
  • Toggle roofs for convertible cars
  • Activate car mirrors in photos mode
  • Ability to “spawn” or place additional cars for group shots
  • Photo competitions being in-game - Players vote in-game anonymously.
  • Ability to save photos locally - Windows/PC > Folder
  • An increased quality mode for PC users who can generate the “higher detail” within photos. E.g rendering at a higher res than the player is running at
  • Ability to open or close “pop-up” headlights
  • Issues:*
  • Quality of photos in Forza hub
  • Camera settings “resetting” due to being the same button as focus
  • Players cars disappearing from photo mode when they DC/leave
  • When you move too far from the car, e.g use 20x zoom in photo mode, the shadows disappear

Livery Editor

  • Features:*
  • Button for changing tone, saturation and brightness function to be available for each paint (including special paints)
  • “Favourite” section for paint and livery
  • Creating folders or a location for vinyls
  • Enable liveries to be any type of material from the paint selector
  • Mirror functions that doesn’t invert the decals
  • Edit another person livery - Option to have locked, friends only or public (Creator decides this)
  • Vinyl applications on all surfaces
  • Increased camera zoom. Closer and wider angles.
  • Fading or the ability to fade colours
  • Ability to sort liveries via manufacturer or similar to players garage
  • Manufacturer vinyls or Community vinyls on windows
  • Tag system within Liveries, e.g “Comic Book Movies”
  • Issues:*
  • Mapping on cars not being centered
  • Featured section for layers - Change Daily/Weekly
  • Pixilation of liveries - Decals are low resolution in editor, and lower once on the car

Route Blueprint

  • Features:*
  • Remove destructible objects
  • Rotating & Moving checkpoints (Adjust the position and not just the width)
  • Finish line to be treated like any other checkpoint
  • Ability to add walls on corners similar to the races in-game
  • Ability to publish blueprints as time trials with a leaderboard
  • Option to ‘reverse track’
  • Disable start line structures
  • Custom starting points and/or checkpoints, e.g customised colours/flags
  • Ability to place walls/barriers on custom routes
  • Select weather & season on route creator loadup
  • Automatically generated optimum driving line
  • Insert checkpoint number rather than going through them sequentially
  • Ability to add props. E.g destructible walls, fences, flags
  • Option to edit or ‘re-open’ an already saved route.
  • Enable different types of blueprints such as Drift Adventure routes
  • Increased search options. E.g the number of miles/distant
  • Publish a blueprint similar to design/tunes so it’s visible to all
  • Option to delete (failed) blueprints
  • Custom races in Custom Adventure
  • Visual aid noting how far the player is from a checkpoint
  • Visual aid telling the player they should turn left or right at the next crossroads
  • “Random Weather” option
  • Drivetrain Selection. RWD, AWD or FWD
  • Custom races in online adventure and ranked adventure
  • Issues:*
  • Drivatars not following the route and cutting the track
  • Players awareness that Share Codes now exist
  • Default length should be unlimited on searching

Tuning

  • Features:*
  • Whilst browsing, ability to see which aspects a tune has. E.g Tyres, Suspension, Engine (Swap), Body Upgrades
  • Be able to view a description where the tuner can describe what they are trying to achieve with the tune
  • Search for cars via filters. E.g with/without swapped engines, bodykits
  • Showing the type of tyres a car has each season (Ee.g Winter/Rally etc) - Via an Icon
  • Ability for tuners to lock/unlock their tunes once shared.
  • Slow/fast damper settings (sliders) similar to those in Dirt Rally 2.0
  • Giving players a diagnostics tolls - Similar to that in MotoGP
  • Ability to unlock the adjustable aerodynamic parts
  • Giving an option to choose between a grip & drift slider and indepth tuning
  • Anti-Lag System after the race ignition upgrade in turbo engines that so you can see in the telemetry and hear from the exhaust
  • A tutorial or “How too” - Create visual aids with the descriptors
  • Show/give credit on the Rival leaderboard who created the tune for the car
  • Ability to sort tunes by downloads, uses, clubs and tunes. Also performance in online adventure (“most winning tunes”)
  • Unlock aero on cars that have adjustable OEM wings
  • Sharecodes for Tunes
  • Issues:*
  • Brake balance slider appears to be reversed

~~

We’d like to thank again everyone who took part in the spitball sessions to gather the above feedback. We appreciate all the help and participation given from you all with these.
Thank you!

3 Likes

Maybe a bit off-topic but I think being able to see that description in car selection menu would be nice. While browsing cars, we would know what tunes they have installed and what’s their purpose. It would be useful for example when selecting a car for an Online Adventure.

1 Like

For tuning: add weight to car so it lowers the PI.
Route creator: show a map of the route with the blueprint poster.

2 Likes

Livery Editor:

  • Mask Scoping: Mask layers in the current implementation cut through all layers beneath them, all the way down to the car finish. I would like a method to scope them, to stop the masking operation within the vinyl stack with a scoping layer. This would enable the masks to expose gradients or frame complex images on lower layers and would make them considerably more flexible. What I envision is basically the ability to create an anti-mask layer in a similar manner as “create mask from group”. The anti-mask would simply abort all masking operations on higher layers at its level, so the mask would expose the vinyls beneath the scoping layer. It would also allow the scoping layer to have an arbitrary geometry for increased flexibility.

  • Set Transparency on Group or Selection: You can currently set the color on a group or selection or vinyl layers. You can also move or rotate them as a unit. I would like the ability to set the transparency value of a vinyl group or selection of vinyl layers to a common value, in the same manner as you can set the color. This would save a lot of time on some of the projects I have done.

  • Independent X-Y Axis Scaling on Vinyl Groups: When vinyls are collected into a group, they can currently only be scaled at 1:1. Changing the proportions of the group with independent axis scaling is not possible. I would like the ability to do this, since it would allow adjustment of vinyl groups to fix the available space more accurately, or to compensate for surface distortions.

  • Apply Skew Transform to Vinyl Groups: Skew can currently only be applied to individual vinyl primitives. I would like the ability to apply a skew to a vinyl group. This would make it easier to create oblique text, and provide another mechanism to compensate for distortions on irregular surfaces.

  • Apply Skew Transform to Y Axis: Some of the primitives are not symmetrical on the X and Y axis, and the ability to apply skew on only the X axis can be limiting in some cases.

2 Likes

All sounds good. I would add the main missing thing to liveries is that you don’t know what car to put them on… That’s the No1 problem. The Car has to be mentioned automatically somehow.

Photo Mode
Issues:

  • storage limit way too low for xbox one x users: only ~30 photos since there seems to be a total filesize limit
    there is no way to set a resolution for photos. so players running a lower resolution can store way more photos (also an issue with gaining rank for Photographer Star Card)
    so maybe use maximum amount of pictures, regardless of the resolution. and maybe increase the maximum number with the rank…

Route Blueprint
Features:

  • Fast foreward checkpoints when pressing d-pad left/right twice or more 3/5/10 checkpoints (it takes way to long to edit the 50th checkpoint of 100+)
    Issues:
  • Drivatars not following the route and cutting the track ← there seems to be a bug with intersections, where a drivatar continues as if he passed the 2nd time already…
  • Pressing d-pad right/left while a checkpoint is loading in editor changes the radio station…
  • In “Create Custom Event” right after creating a custom route, the option to limit car class is missing (only available via getting to the location and use create blueprint there)

More Livery Editor:

Micro-Adjust Mode: Currently move operations in the vinyl editor are a minimum of 0.5 unit granularity. A method to move vinyls and groups at a granularity of 0.1 or finer is needed. There are frequent issues getting vinyls to line up between surfaces, such as running a continuous racing stripe from the front surface, over the top of the car, and onto the back surface (and sometimes over the wing, too). The coordinates between the surfaces rarely line up properly, and sometimes even the scale is off. This can result in annoying discontinuities at the surface transitions that cannot be adjusted out due to the low granularity of the move operation. I’m not sure why move operates at such a poor granularity, the rotate and scale operations offer pretty good granularity.

Undo Stack: The ability to undo the several prior operations done in the vinyl editor would be useful.

OpenType/TrueType Font Support: The fonts available in the vinyl editor leave a lot to be desired. There are numerous styles missing, and a significant number of characters that are not present. There are no bold or italic options. Why not leverage the scalable outline fonts that come with Windows (and I assume Xbox)?

  • Ability to create custom Street Race events
  • Blueprint swap existing Road Races to Street Race events

In general suggestions look very good.

Tuning

  • Creative hub : Fix/remove proposing to report my own tune
  • Creative hub : Fix/remove downloading my own tunes
  • Creative hub : Display the number of downloads by tune ( isn’t it the purpose )
  • Creative hub : Allow Deletion of tunes ( Mandatory to cope with number of tunes limitation
  • Help player to identify difference between 2 tunes when difference is only fine tune.

Designs

  • Fix/remove downloading my own tunes + creating duplicates

Not in list but so damned important

Playlist

  • Display community races IDs

Club

  • Allow to create club events : CS of the week, Stunt of the week, just like a kind of playlist but at club level.

Rivals

  • Allow to play winter
  • Allow to change car without leaving a rivals race ( just restart, change car , go )
  • Specific boards for track-tor
  • moderate Rivals : remove any obviously cheated/unexpected/bugged scores.

Online

  • Make Free Roam a type of CS and get back B class road CS. we will have only 3 races CS which improves pace and allows everyone to get something interesting if you are able to do that the class/type changes every CS.
  • Ranked : Forbid track-tor
  • Ranked : continue improving the system to lower leaving strategy benefits
  • Ranked : constrain max point loss to the last number of point gained.
  • Remove wheel spin launch from online. It is totally useless to online and leads to even longer load times. ( just display you won a wheel spin period)
  • Do something to promote fair play like a bonus point displayed on the finish board for each player to distinguish clean players from … others
  • Custom CS : Allow to start solo so that other can directly find a CS to enter in.
  • Custom CS : Allow to indicate ‘I don’t care’ for freeroam and collision → increase chances to join a CS.
  • Fix display on tyres type in garage. At worse, always activate the tyre type filter or replace it by one based on tyre types defined at car tuning level ( stock, sport, race, dirt/rally, cross country)

There’s lots of stuff id love to see added or tweaked with livery editor, but the thing I want most is pretty simple; snapping.

Remember in FM7 you could hold LB (I think it was LB) while resizing, rotating, moving, etc an element and it would “snap” by set amounts? For example when rotating you could do that to quickly rotate something to exactly 45, 90, etc degrees. Without that snapping you have to rotate it to near 45, then use the D pad to get it perfectly at 45.00.

@RetroKrystal Thanks for including the forum community (and those who weren’t on Discord at the right time) in this discussion.

To add to what was mentioned without duplicating suggestions, here’s what I would like to see:

Photo Mode:
Ability to place avatar in the shot (and do an emote), similar to what’s done automatically at beauty spots

Blueprints:
Ability to put a recommended blueprint on a custom route

Tuning:
Basic automatic tuning options (at least an option to automatically balance the suspension), maybe with high-level options to tweak overall suspension stiffness and acceleration vs speed

Tuning:

  • Allow to turn TC on/off separately for each vehicle in the tuning menu.
  • Add different TC levels: on; on at start (or at low speed); off. Similar to GT Sport.
  • Allow to use the tuning menu while waiting for a race in multiplayer lobby. Sometimes when driving around (waiting for race to start) I have a feeling I should do some corrections to my tune, but I don’t want to leave the lobby.

Blueprints (and multiplayer):

  • Create Community Custom Adventure, which will feature verified blueprints. Or add blueprints to multiplayer in some other form. The choice of PvP and Coop is not enough, because almost no one joins it.

Photo Mode

  • Share codes for photos

Livery Editor

  • Share codes for liveries

Route Blueprint

  • Viewing the map when browsing Blueprints
  • Joining Blueprints together as a series of events, or otherwise Custom Championships
  • Being able to view a description where the creator can describe what they are trying to achieve with the route
  • Being able to start Route Creation from Drag Strip, Street Scene, and if possible even Showcase events
  • Custom Drag Strip and Street Scene events (that would give you influence in those areas of Horizon Life if you complete them)
  • Blueprints as Time Trials or otherwise without Drivatars, where the player races alone (against the clock)
  • Recurring “Route Competitions”
  • “Random Season” option
  • Engine Position Selection: Front engine, Mid engine, Rear engine
  • Ability to combine restrictions similar to Playlist Championships such as Porsche + Rear engine, Ford + RWD
  • Ability to force bone stock car events (or at least to set the PI limit to be identical to one stock car’s, for instance the Ascari has 866 and only a KZ1R with S1866 as PI would be allowed)
  • Option to “lock” routes and to edit other players’ “unlocked” routes
2 Likes

Tuning:

  • Create a new type of tires: a very low PI rally/rain/winter tires. Intended to use in B-/C-class.
  • Allow to delete tunes and check number of downloads in Creative Hub.

Route Blueprint:

  • When placing a checkpoint in route creation, allow to change the camera to aerial view.
1 Like

Woah did no one mention telemetry in replays?! Or did I just miss it.

Anyways, telemetry in replays. Not having this is probably the worst thing about tuning in FH4.

1 Like

Liveries: Also fix the colours in the Auction House on Liveries they have been broken since the game was first launched.

Thanks everyone for your input and feedback!