Gaming Gran Turismo 5

This game is the Owen Hargreaves of the gaming world, I bet some how they're both linked a bit like Elliot and ET were and when we finally see one we'll see the other, most likely in 2015.
 
Cars

29cuou0.jpg
 
The more I read about what we can expect, how many cars there are, how you can modify each one virtually individually, the graphics, the physics, the courses ect ect

The more you realise that this is going to be a truely mammoth game. An overused word now in internet speak, but a truely Epic game.

You think about how much coding goes into this, millions upon millions of lines of code, masses of photographics, individual car engines sounds that modify depending on if you have a turbo or a new gear box or if you are driving on tarmac, clay, dirt or dust. It's unbelieveable.

Comparable in my opinion to some of the wonders of the world.

That may sound like a ridiculous statement but just think about how many intelligent minds, geniuses, it took to put a game like this together and it fits on tiny discs.
 
Pexbo said:
The more I read about what we can expect, how many cars there are, how you can modify each one virtually individually, the graphics, the physics, the courses ect ect

The more you realise that this is going to be a truely mammoth game. An overused word now in internet speak, but a truely Epic game.

You think about how much coding goes into this, millions upon millions of lines of code, masses of photographics, individual car engines sounds that modify depending on if you have a turbo or a new gear box or if you are driving on tarmac, clay, dirt or dust. It's unbelieveable.

Comparable in my opinion to some of the wonders of the world.

That may sound like a ridiculous statement but just think about how many intelligent minds, geniuses, it took to put a game like this together and it fits on tiny discs.
Click to expand...

Content wise, I don't think that any game in any genre touches this, by quite some measure. I also think that it's commendable that they have waited and waited to give it as a whole package, none of this DLC nonsense. Forget it, and get on with GT6 (which will probably be the PS3s swansong).
 
WeasteDevil said:
Content wise, I don't think that any game in any genre touches this, by quite some measure. I also think that it's commendable that they have waited and waited to give it as a whole package, none of this DLC nonsense. Forget it, and get on with GT6 (which will probably be the PS3s swansong).
Click to expand...

Content comparison, perhaps a strange comparison, but the World of Warcraft Universe is huge.

Not the same graphics or physics but 4 continents that would take you probably the best part of a month to fully explore on foot.

1,400 Richly decorated areas, each the scaled equivalent of probably a small town.

30,000 Unique Items, Weapons, Armor, Food, Drink Ect.

6000+ Non Player Characters. Each with their own "Personality".

8000+ Quests.


Size wise, I would say wow takes it by quite a way. Attention to detail, GT5 would take it by even futher.
 
Pexbo said:
The more I read about what we can expect, how many cars there are, how you can modify each one virtually individually, the graphics, the physics, the courses ect ect

The more you realise that this is going to be a truely mammoth game. An overused word now in internet speak, but a truely Epic game.

You think about how much coding goes into this, millions upon millions of lines of code, masses of photographics, individual car engines sounds that modify depending on if you have a turbo or a new gear box or if you are driving on tarmac, clay, dirt or dust. It's unbelieveable.

Comparable in my opinion to some of the wonders of the world.

That may sound like a ridiculous statement but just think about how many intelligent minds, geniuses, it took to put a game like this together and it fits on tiny discs.
Click to expand...

I couldn't imagine how much work it took to put this together. We do simulations all the time in my ME courses, and a drastically simplified one with massive assumptions takes a long time to prepare when juggling other classes. Just the thought of how much code and engineering work had to go into the physics engine for this game just blows my mind. We ignore so much stuff when we study this in class to simplify things to help learn the basic principles, but the stuff that gets ignored is what makes up the subtle differences that make up the fractions of a second difference in lap times. Stuff that takes advanced degrees or years of experience to get a full grasp on. Stuff that still overwhelms me even after studying some of this stuff for five years. I can't even wrap my head around that level of detail.

I think it's going to be a truly mammoth game just like you say. One that I think Sony envisioned when they spec'ed out the PS3. One that will hopefully exhaust the limits of the console.

And one that will probably be entirely wasted on my 19-inch Zenith CRT from 1994. I really need a new TV.
 
Pexbo said:
Content comparison, perhaps a strange comparison, but the World of Warcraft Universe is huge.

Not the same graphics or physics but 4 continents that would take you probably the best part of a month to fully explore on foot.

1,400 Richly decorated areas, each the scaled equivalent of probably a small town.

30,000 Unique Items, Weapons, Armor, Food, Drink Ect.

6000+ Non Player Characters. Each with their own "Personality".

8000+ Quests.


Size wise, I would say wow takes it by quite a way. Attention to detail, GT5 would take it by even futher.
Click to expand...

Right but much of that is in the cloud, right? User-generated content and whatnot. I'd imagine that we'd see the GT5 universe explode as well once people start going nuts with the course creator.
 
jveezy said:
Right but much of that is in the cloud, right? User-generated content and whatnot. I'd imagine that we'd see the GT5 universe explode as well once people start going nuts with the course creator.
Click to expand...

There's no user generated content in Wow, you play in the universe you are given.
 
Go talk about wow some place else, you have the wow thread for it. I can't be exposed to it, it's like showing heroin to a former addict :D Let's just keep it about cars in here, games that I can play one or two hours per day during a lot of months and be happy with it.
 
Pexbo said:
The more I read about what we can expect, how many cars there are, how you can modify each one virtually individually, the graphics, the physics, the courses ect ect

The more you realise that this is going to be a truely mammoth game. An overused word now in internet speak, but a truely Epic game.

You think about how much coding goes into this, millions upon millions of lines of code, masses of photographics, individual car engines sounds that modify depending on if you have a turbo or a new gear box or if you are driving on tarmac, clay, dirt or dust. It's unbelieveable.

Comparable in my opinion to some of the wonders of the world.

That may sound like a ridiculous statement but just think about how many intelligent minds, geniuses, it took to put a game like this together and it fits on tiny discs.
Click to expand...

I was arguing with a friend that video games nowadays are works of art on their own right. And like other forms of art, some are masterpieces. It's amazing how some people who don't like to games frantically deny their right to have this tag.
 
Gaming is an art where you as a person can directly interact with the visuals and and audio. However, it also has presentation where you can not interact. And at time it can be very awesome. All of the following, visuals, music, other audio, is created for a video game. And the sad thing is, the musical track is better composed than most of the trash in the top 10.



This is a 1080p game at 60fps, people seem to forget this.
 
WeasteDevil said:
Gaming is an art where you as a person can directly interact with the visuals and and audio. However, it also has presentation where you can not interact. And at time it can be very awesome. All of the following, visuals, music, other audio, is created for a video game. And the sad thing is, the musical track is better composed than most of the trash in the top 10.



This is a 1080p game at 60fps, people seem to forget this.
Click to expand...


I'm lost for words. WOW! Even Petter Solberg looks like Petter Soberg when you catch a glimpse of him (I may be imagening that).

fecking hell.
 
Watched that Video Weaste posted and think I just wet my pants. Did you see that f40 at the end, looked real, although I said that when GT1 came out lol. The ring looks fantastic and Top gear track too.
 
Can't wait to throw mysel round the top gear track in a KIA ceed!
 
jveezy said:
I couldn't imagine how much work it took to put this together. We do simulations all the time in my ME courses, and a drastically simplified one with massive assumptions takes a long time to prepare when juggling other classes. Just the thought of how much code and engineering work had to go into the physics engine for this game just blows my mind. We ignore so much stuff when we study this in class to simplify things to help learn the basic principles, but the stuff that gets ignored is what makes up the subtle differences that make up the fractions of a second difference in lap times. Stuff that takes advanced degrees or years of experience to get a full grasp on. Stuff that still overwhelms me even after studying some of this stuff for five years. I can't even wrap my head around that level of detail.

I think it's going to be a truly mammoth game just like you say. One that I think Sony envisioned when they spec'ed out the PS3. One that will hopefully exhaust the limits of the console.

And one that will probably be entirely wasted on my 19-inch Zenith CRT from 1994. I really need a new TV.
Click to expand...

You're turning the engineering side of me on jveezy
 
You lot probably don't have a clue, but since someone asked me to put that question on here - will there be A1 in the game? I mean Audi A1.
 
Gran Turismo 5 developer interview - Telegraph

Gran Turismo 5 developer interview

Kazunori Yamauchi talks to Esquire magazine's Henry Farrar-Hockley about creating Gran Turismo 5, the ultimate driving game.

Gran Turismo began as a simple ambition to create the perfect driving simulator; now, it’s evolved into one of the most successful video game series ever, and a social movement in its own right. Esquire caught up with Kazunori Yamauchi as he put the finishing touches to the latest chapter.

In a quiet backstreet of Tokyo’s Koto district stands a nondescript office building, its plain façade and modest signage giving little away as to the type of business conducted above its white-tiled lobby. Up on the second floor hides the headquarters of Polyphony Digital, a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc (SCEI). It is the developing studio responsible for Gran Turismo, the most accurate driving series ever to grace a games console, and — with more than 56m copies sold - one of the primary contributors to the success of Sony’s PlayStation.

The series’ latest iteration, Gran Turismo 5, has taken five years to complete (some 27 months longer than initially anticipated) and cost around £38m to develop. It has been mooted that it will sell as many copies as Lady Gaga’s debut album (12m, give or take), only it will retail for four times as much - with a limited-edition version costing twice as much again.

Right now - which is to say, just after lunch on a Tuesday in late September - the floor is eerily quiet. It is the calm before the proverbial gale. Most of the employees are power-napping, either at home or in one of the four “hotel” rooms adjoining the far wall, or simply lying under their desks before their next shift begins in earnest. The only discernible sound is the gentle buzz emanating from the neon-lit servers occupying the centre-point of the office. Housing one of the most powerful computer clusters in Tokyo (no mean feat, that), the sealed area has its own preset cooling system. Hence, the blinking mainframe shares its secure storage bay with several crates of Veuve Clicquot.

Towards the back of the main office - past the piles of suitcases, reams of manufacturers’ paint samples and auto manuals and, inexplicably, a boxed George W Bush doll - is the recreation room, a double-height library crammed with car magazines, DVDs, massage chairs, keyboards, guitars, a kitchen and a treadmill. It is uninhabited save for a lone figure who sits reading, a fresh coffee at his. This is Kazunori Yamauchi, president of Polyphony Digital and creator of Gran Turismo. He smiles and rises to greet me.

Gran Turismo is a rare beast: a video game that’s popular with non-gamers. Its re-creation of a realistic driving environment with real-life car marques and models has endeared it to a worldwide audience of automobile buffs, young and old, male and female. The PlayStation-only game has spawned 13 official titles and spin-offs, and a host of lesser imitators engineered by rival software houses. At its heart, it is a driving game in which you compete to win money to collect more powerful, race-tuned cars.

“It is a game and it is a simulator,” Yamauchi explains, “but it’s definitely also something else. I sort of consider Gran Turismo to be a movement.”

This credo - of an unofficial club of like-minded individuals, fuelled by a passion for driving - is reflected in the series’ other unusual offering: its ability to improve your real-world road-handling skills. Its complex and realistic physics mean that gamers have to adhere to the laws of driving to succeed. Pinpoint braking times, clutch control and driving lines are the route to glory in this game - there are no cheat codes or predetermined button combinations: no shortcuts to the chequered flag.

In 2005, Jeremy Clarkson - a self-professed fan of the series - attempted, on an episode of Top Gear, to beat a lap time he’d set in the game at the Laguna Seca raceway in California. (His genuine attempt, at the wheel of a Honda NSX, proved to be 16 seconds short.) Yamauchi has since expressed his regard for the BBC show by including Top Gear’s Dunsfield Aerodrome circuit as a drivable track in Gran Turismo 5.

As we relocate to a bank of sofas= in Polyphony’s reception, I ask Yamauchi where this passion for all things four-wheeled originated. “Our family dealt in fine china, ceramics, that kind of thing,” he reflects. “In Japan, a fine china merchant would usually go from house to house. When I was three, I would often be the passenger in my father’s car, going with him on his deliveries to our customers. It was just natural for me to see the other cars on the road through the window. Children pick things up very quickly, and I soon learned the names of all the cars.”

He once wanted to be the next Jean-Henri Fabre - the French entomologist who inspired Charles Darwin. “I would read his books from cover to cover every day,” he says. Could Fabre’s fastidious attention to detail in recording nature have motivated the way he catalogues cars? “I never thought about it, but yes, that’s probably where this drive for detail began.”

Yamauchi was at school when he first established a rough concept for Gran Turismo. “I wanted to drive something real,” he remembers.“ That meant using existing cars, and the driving feeling and being real.” The initial problem when he graduated was convincing others of his huge vision. Sony recognised potential in him, but he wasn’t about to be granted the backing for such a grand project. So he focused on developing a game that would get him one step closer to his goal. The result was 1994’s Motor Toon Grand Prix, a cartoon-like outing in the vein of Nintendo’s Mario Kart, which was one of PlayStation’s launch titles. Although visually appealing to children (its Wacky Races-like characters include a spoiled princess and a bunch of Mafiosi penguins), its underlying driving physics appealed to adults.

The game was a success, and Yamauchi was given the green light to proceed with his bigger ambition. The first Gran Turismo took five years to realise, comprised 180 cars and 11 race tracks and sold 10.85m copies. “That was a major challenge,” he admits. “In that five years - it still hasn’t changed all that much - I hardly ever went home, and we had a very small team working very hard to finish it. It was a time period in which spring, summer, autumn, winter would simply roll by.”

In 1998, he founded Polyphony Digital with a team of just 10 employees. Now he has around 110, although this hasn’t eased his work/ life balance. Yamauchi’s routine typically involves 24 hours at his desk, followed by nine hours’ down time. “I operate on a 33-hour day,” he laughs. Relaxation, he adds, is fulfilled by reading voraciously. “It’s been like that since I was 10.”

The latest GT outing, released this month, will be the biggest yet. “I think people will feel like they’re taking on the unknown,” Yamauchi says. “It won’t be just about the graphics or the physics - I think they’re going to have an experience in which they see the true potential of this thing they’re playing with.” The game offers over 1,000 cars, some 70 tracks, the ability to take on 15 other players simultaneously online and - in keeping with the times - full 3D gameplay.

“I’ve seen Gran Turismo 5 running in 3D and it is stunning,” enthused Andrew Oliver, chief technical officer of British developer Blitz Games Studios, earlier this year. “It is a major step forward. It is gaming’s Avatar.”

Another addition is car damage. In the past, manufacturers balked at the idea of players being able to rough up their prized designs. But in GT5, you can T-bone a Ferrari if you please. This has, of course, added to his team’s workload. The 3D-modelling of each car takes six months and now has to include the underside of each chassis - should you roll your Nissan GT-R while cornering hard on Piccadilly Circus.

If his games are unorthodox, so too is his company. Although Polyphony is a subsidiary of SCEI, it has been awarded complete autonomy from its parent, and yet it is still relied upon to deliver to a deadline. Does this daunt him? “I never really worry about that kind of pressure,” he says. “The first GT took five years to create, at which time there were no promises, no deadlines, and I was able to achieve something that I was finally satisfied with, that was received very well by users all over. Because I had that experience at the beginning of my career, my confidence is unwavering.” This is why he has taken as long as he’s needed to nurture GT5 to completion: realism and attention to detail being the watchwords of the series’ unquestionable popularity.

As for his management style, Yamauchi describes himself as both a game player and a manager. “The core members in the company haven’t changed in the last 10 years. I guess it’s sort of an experiment, as I didn’t take into account any examples of other companies or other systems of management. We really just take every issue as it comes.” He is also one of the more down-to-Earth CEOs I have encountered. Asked what his proudest moment is, he suggests a karaoke triumph when he was six.

It is uplifting too, that - unlike certain rivals - he is not blindly sycophantic about the platform for which he develops. “Software has to be created under the restriction of the hardware,” he says. “With each new PlayStation, the vessel has become bigger, but it’s still not enough. With GT5, we’ve made it as clean and beautiful as possible within the confines of the space we’re given, but of course there’s a lot more that we want to put in.”

Our interview is drawing to a close. There’s a project to finish after all, final checks to be carried out, tiny imperfections to be remedied. I ask Yamauchi what he would like his legacy to be. He considers the question at length. “Even if the product itself is forgotten, if the movement that involves GT leaves a mark in history, I think I’d be very happy.”

Outside the GT project, he has been involved with the design of dashboard displays, body kits, even a whole concept car (the stunning “GT by Citroën”). He has also sat down with the Red Bull racing team to design “the fastest car on Earth”. Oh, and he’s now a bona fide racing driver, too, picking up trophies at the famous Nürburgring 24 Hours race in Germany. Does he have any driving tips for Esquire readers, either in the game or on the road (the two appear increasingly interchangeable)? “Spend more money improving your driving technique than on the car itself. I think this will help you lead a much more fulfilling life.” He grins. “I guess that’s not very good for your magazine’s car advertising. Maybe your editor should cut that part out.”

A succession of audible blips betrays that someone, somewhere in the building, has just started a race. I ask Yamauchi what he plans to do at the week’s close, when the final “code” (the term attributed to a game prior to its release) is handed over to be burned onto discs and then retailed the world over. “There are a lot of things that we couldn’t put in this time,” he sighs, “so we’ll probably just continue making the game. Completing one piece of work - in this case, GT5 - really connects to the motivation to make the next one.”

What Yamauchi has achieved through Gran Turismo is probably best summed up, aptly enough, by certain famous car advertising slogans. “The relentless pursuit of perfection”, for one, or “The ultimate driving machine”. Or better still, “Once driven, forever smitten”.

* This article appears in the December issue of Esquire Magazine.

* Gran Turismo 5 (Sony/Polyphony Digital) is out in December on PS3.
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