Give us better sounds - PLEASE !!

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Samus
..and therein lies the problem. GT is the biggest selling PS exclusive franchise, it earns them hundreds of millions of dollars
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I contend that there's no way you can know how much PD gets. They are a first party studio, which puts them in a different position than second or third party studios, and I forget what the definition of "second party" even is. Heavily funded by the parent company or something. But anyhow, even independent third party studios pay a stout fee to SONY for the right to make Playstation games, since SONY CE is the publisher and produces the actual product we buy. I would quote PS3Blog.net:

Gran Turismo 5 is Already Profitable

This could be an absolute first in history (minus other Gran Turismo’s) that a game has already made a profit before it even launches. Even with a $60 million dollar (so far) development cost of this game.

Most games could not recover from such a steep development cost no matter what, much less before it launches.

Its quite simple and interesting that a lot of us tend to overlook it…but the reason why is Gran Turismo Prologue. The partial game was a splice of Gran Turismo in the making, launching at $39.99 USD and selling over 3.5 million units gaining over $100 million dollars in revenue.

So Sony is looking at a starting profit before the game launches which is expected to be the PS3′s highest selling title to date.
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This isn't a slip.

PS Neither are perfect but I'll take the slightly OTT but fairly realistic sounds of Forza 4 over the lifeless, synthetic drone of GT5 any day.
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I'll agree with you that Forza cars do have a lot of satisfying grunt to them.

With a caveat. Not to everyone, like me. Some, I liked a lot, but many cars drove me up the wall - ba-dum-bum. In fact, with my first playthrough which unfortunately lasted all of two months or so, I bought not one single exhaust upgrade, because I dreaded to think how much more obnoxious the cars could be. For example, the RX-7 MROARS like a rabid cow, and I much prefer the RX-7 bot cars I'm racing against which sound much less exaggerated. What's more, their driving model is very dodgy for me, and the bots finally stomped on my last nerve, so I'm racing in GT5 for a while. These are yet more areas in which not everyone agrees with how awesome some things are. And since we'll never see eye to eye on this, have a nice one.

Imari
The Microsoft video with the lead sound guy for Forza 4 which is linked somewhere in this thread has a quote from him that sounds for one car in FM4 took about three days to turn around once they'd got their process down.


PD's choice to have a small team is just that, their choice. They have the budget and the resources to have many, many more people if they wanted. They choose not to
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1. I refer my friend to remarks I made above.

2. How big is the sound team?

3. I prefer SONY's and Polyphony's ability to keep a secret. Microsoft does it their own way... you know. SONY is tight lipped. Polyphony does it by Kaz hand picking quality, trustworthy people. Turn 10 may be a swell bunch of guys, now that Dan Greenawalt has toned down his mouth and Che Chou is gone. But I've never heard of them being referred to as a family, the way teams like Insomniac Games and Polyphony Digital are.

Anyhow, gonna finish some awesome Chinese and hit the track some more.
 
Tenacious D
Yes, and you have fallen into something of a trap. ;) Which I will explain.

Let's say the typical racing sim has 30 unique cars in the stable. And that the sound team has 18 months to get the audio package together for a game's release. This means they have almost three weeks they can devote to each car and get it right.

Let's say that GT5 has 600 unique cars, probably way low, but let's use that. And they worked on the audio for the game for four years, which is probably way long, but let's go with that. This means they have about three days to spend getting the sound right for every car.

Sound like a job you'd want? :D I mean, even given the fact that they use common soundsets for roughly similar cars which get people complaining they aren't right, it's really ludicrous to think you can get the same quality in one-seventh the time. Want to try and get a week's worth of work done in a day? Not me!
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It is you that has fallen into a trap my friend and that is the old apples to apples analogy. Your typical racing sim has a budget that is a sliver of PD's development budget. To compare the two teams as if they are the same or funded the same nullifies your statement above. Multiply what iRacing does by a factor of 15 or 20. 20 x 30 = 600 does it not? A good analogy would be expecting the same results from Marussia or Caterham as you would from Ferrari and Red Bull in F1. It's not apples to apples budget and resource wise.
 
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Tenacious D
Polyphony does it by Kaz hand picking quality, trustworthy people. Turn 10 may be a swell bunch of guys, now that Dan Greenawalt has toned down his mouth and Che Chou is gone. But I've never heard of them being referred to as a family, the way teams like Insomniac Games and Polyphony Digital are.
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Ok, but

Tenacious D
How big is the sound team?
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Wouldn't this question, after taking your above comment into consideration, be irrelevant? Polyphony have a family of hand picked, quality & trustworthy people, while Turn 10 are limited to a bunch of swell guys, albeit it more of them.

(I contend) Quality > Quantity

Tenacious D
I contend that there's no way you can know how much PD gets
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Once again, this isn't consistent with your past comments.

I contend it doesn't matter how much money they made, Polyphony have a family of hand picked, quality & trustworthy people. I contend we should hold them to higher standards then everyone else (except apparently Insomniac).

On a semi-related note, do you think an inter-office baby at Polyphony would help get better AI in the series? Maybe once the child reaches maturity he could be thrust into the sound department. Maybe then we will witness the true power that is family based game development.
 
Tenacious D
I contend that there's no way you can know how much PD gets.
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I don't need to know that, PD are Sony and Sony are PD. They are one in the same. All I need to know is that their games sells more than any other and Sony give them a huge budget to make games.

Just think for one moment how much $60 million dollars actually is. For one company making essentially one product it's a huge amount of money, a figure only dwarfed by few other studios and they're all much larger than PD.

They are a first party studio, which puts them in a different position than second or third party studios, and I forget what the definition of "second party" even is. Heavily funded by the parent company or something. But anyhow, even independent third party studios pay a stout fee to SONY for the right to make Playstation games, since SONY CE is the publisher and produces the actual product we buy. I would quote PS3Blog.net:
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That's all very nice, how is it in any way relevant to PD?

Gran Turismo 5 is Already Profitable


This isn't a slip.
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What isn't a slip? Again, what point are you trying to make here?


2. How big is the sound team?
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Um, this is exactly the point I was making. They don't have enough employees, you're supposed to be rebutting that point, not agreeing.

3. I prefer SONY's and Polyphony's ability to keep a secret. Microsoft does it their own way... you know. SONY is tight lipped. Polyphony does it by Kaz hand picking quality, trustworthy people.
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You start your post out by stating I don't know something then come out with a gem like this. Pray tell, how on earth do you know how PD hire staff and what on earth has "keeping a secret" got to do with.....anything?

Turn 10 may be a swell bunch of guys, now that Dan Greenawalt has toned down his mouth and Che Chou is gone. But I've never heard of them being referred to as a family, the way teams like Insomniac Games and Polyphony Digital are.
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Right, so the reason PD aren't bigger than other first part Sony studios is because they're a "family", and that somehow makes them better at making games? Give me a break.

My point is still the same, Gran Turismo is the best selling PS franchise, it should have one of if not the biggest number of staff. "PD don't have many staff" is not a valid excuse for things lacking in the games, it's an issue they have chosen not to solve and one they will continue to be critiqued on. They need more staff.

I noticed you ignored this part of my post:

no matter what the actual number is the employees they do have should be the highest of any Sony studio. It's not. They have approx. 110 according to their website. Naughty Dog have 250+ and have been able to split into two teams thanks to that number. Guerrilla Games have 270+. PD should have 200 at the minimum, probably 300.
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Care to answer it this time? Why do those first party studios making games that sell much less copies have significantly more employees? Because they're not a "family"?
 
Samus
I'm not for one second saying sound recording and manipulation for games is easy or fast. All I'm saying is, to rebut your valid point that PC sims have a lot less cars, PD have had 80% of the GT5/GT6 car list in their minds for a decade or more. In that time, with the budgets they've had it large chunk of it should have gone on sound. I take Griffith's word for it that they are working on something new and completely different to simulate the sounds but my point is still the same, if they knew there was a chance that wasn't going to be ready/viable on PS3 they should have had in place another team working on the sample based sounds.
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This is all true, but it's also all drawn through hindsight. In hindsight, the decision to model cars to the level of detail they chose for the Premiums might not have been the "best" choice. They could have played it all very safe and iterated gently on GT4, but if you can afford to take a risk, surely it's on a game that was paid for before it was even released? Did Prologue's success change things early on?

I think GT5 wasn't too badly hindered by the (apparent, through hindsight) overreaching behind its development, although it was perhaps close. To think PD won't have learned from it is to do them an injustice, I think. No matter which way it pans out for PS3, we'll know what these new sounds are about soon enough, and we'll have another piece of the jigsaw for the conundrum that is GT5.
Samus
I don't expect them to properly record 700 cars, or however truly unique cars there are in GT5 because they don't need to. I do/did expect them to do the same as Forza, record as many as they could and hire a large number of sound/recording experts to do it. Sure some cars would have reused samples but they already do now, they're just bad samples.
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They won't have not recorded the cars, regardless of how they're going to do the sounds. How else are you supposed to know how the cars are supposed to sound (in a controllable, repeateable, cross-comparable manner)?

Samus
..and therein lies the problem. GT is the biggest selling PS exclusive franchise, it earns them hundreds of millions of dollars, no matter what the actual number is the employees they do have should be the highest of any Sony studio. It's not. They have approx. 110 according to their website. Naughty Dog have 250+ and have been able to split into two teams thanks to that number. Guerrilla Games have 270+. PD should have 200 at the minimum, probably 300.

PS Neither are perfect but I'll take the slightly OTT but fairly realistic sounds of Forza 4 over the lifeless, synthetic drone of GT5 any day.
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There are issues with team size and efficiency, especially when you look at issues of communication and inter-departmental cooperation. It might not be so simple, in PD's case, to just add more people and expect a boost in throughput perfectly proportional to the extra cost involved. There may be a step-change required in the team size in order to maintain the efficiency, perhaps along with a structure (and hence working practice) change, and that step change itself is something that will be difficult to manage.

Either, way PD is still growing, and I think I remember correctly that most of the staff they took on last year were artists of some form or other. That's probably because with the next gen systems, the sheer quantity of data required will mean they really do need far more people just making stuff.
Maybe they were hoping to get some of the technical hurdles (physics, AI, sound) out of the way this gen, and focus on content for next gen (GT3 and GT5, both first on a new platform, both low on content).

You could of course just throw even more money at everything and outsource it all, but why when GT does OK (profit) with the budget it has? Why does it have to compete with those other games that do outsource? If it really did need to compete in that respect, surely it actually would, given how heavily integrated into Sony the franchise is?

PS. As a headphone user, I cannot stand the distortion in Forza3/4 - 2 was nice, though. I think the best of both worlds would be the ideal case (FM2 samples, GT5 engine, oh and iRacing physics inputs), but that's just fantasy for obvious reasons. Sound will eventually converge in this manner, but there's a lot of work to do first.
 
They don't need to outsource it all but for certain things, why not? We've seen pictures and video of PD recording car sounds and it's usually two/three guys with a handful of less than impressive mics.

Why not hire a large (10-20) professional team of audio engineers or whatever to do the live sound recording? It will cost them more but as we've already mentioned, they're not short on budget and it's not like they could do it 'wrong', or not how PD wanted it. You can either do a good job recording sounds and come back with gigabytes of good samples for every area of each car or you can not. It's not like outsourcing car modelling where someone could come back to PD with work not meeting their high requirements or just not being appropriate for their needs.

I'm not saying it needs to compete with other games, we can completely ignore any other competitor and there is still the fact that PD have far less employees than many other first party Sony studios and you have to ask yourself, why? Looking at it that simply it doesn't seem to make sense.

I get that you can't just hire 100 people in a week and they did hire people last year but it should be a constant process, they should have an open door for applications every day of the year, slowly building the team over the last five years.
 
Samus
They don't need to outsource it all but for certain things, why not? We've seen pictures and video of PD recording car sounds and it's usually two/three guys with a handful of less than impressive mics.
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Says who? Anybody whose opinion actually holds any weight on the matter? Not that I recall; most people couldn't even see the mic, if we're thinking of the same picture. The startup sounds sound OK to me, I wonder if they only used "impressive" mics for that part, and "half-assed" everything else?

But you're right about outsourcing; however, I maintain that Sony would surely pressure PD to do it if they actually needed to (but how would we even know if they were? How do we know they're not, in some small capacity at least?)
Samus
Why not hire a large (10-20) professional team of audio engineers or whatever to do the live sound recording? It will cost them more but as we've already mentioned, they're not short on budget and it's not like they could do it 'wrong', or not how PD wanted it. You can either do a good job recording sounds and come back with gigabytes of good samples for every area of each car or you can not. It's not like outsourcing car modelling where someone could come back to PD with work not meeting their high requirements or just not being appropriate for their needs.
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Pretty sure they'll be doing this, distributed in different teams sent across the world. Like I said, there's no way they're not recording the cars. It is essential, no matter how you're going to generate sounds, if you want those sounds to be accurate.
Samus
I'm not saying it needs to compete with other games, we can completely ignore any other competitor and there is still the fact that PD have far less employees than many other first party Sony studios and you have to ask yourself, why? Looking at it that simply it doesn't seem to make sense.

I get that you can't just hire 100 people in a week and they did hire people last year but it should be a constant process, they should have an open door for applications every day of the year, slowly building the team over the last five years.
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You won't compare, but PD have fewer employees... ?
Anyway, PD appear to have been growing continuously (not just last year) - I doubt contractors and collaborators would be fully credited on their website, either. Their new offices (who knows what effect the tsunami and office moves had) are also next to a university, which is surely an endless stream of cheap labour... :P

I guess PD were just comfortable at their relatively small size, and that can count for a lot on the efficiency side of things. I don't know that that has had an impact on the sounds, largely because we've not heard any of the new work on that front.

The number of cars and the range of sounds required for one car (tuning) mean that PD might well be justified in pushing hard for their new method and ignoring the old one, if it streamlines the content production (they won't need so many more staff for that) and adds great features for us (customisation!). Again, Sony cannot be unaware of GT's "sound issue".
 
When replay with spectator view, is weird you can hear tire run on the curb sounds very loudly. Another weird thing is you can see back fire but no sound.
 
townnet
When replay with spectator view, is weird you can hear tire run on the curb sounds very loudly. Another weird thing is you can see back fire but no sound.
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Those curbs are loud in real life. The pops are there, but they're far too quiet most of the time. Then again, there is often little correlation between the audio and visual aspects of it in real life anyway (you can't actually see most of the exhaust, and the combustion isn't necessarily visible to the naked eye).
 
Samus
They don't need to outsource it all but for certain things, why not? We've seen pictures and video of PD recording car sounds and it's usually two/three guys with a handful of less than impressive mics.

Why not hire a large (10-20) professional team of audio engineers or whatever to do the live sound recording? It will cost them more but as we've already mentioned, they're not short on budget and it's not like they could do it 'wrong', or not how PD wanted it. You can either do a good job recording sounds and come back with gigabytes of good samples for every area of each car or you can not. It's not like outsourcing car modelling where someone could come back to PD with work not meeting their high requirements or just not being appropriate for their needs.

I'm not saying it needs to compete with other games, we can completely ignore any other competitor and there is still the fact that PD have far less employees than many other first party Sony studios and you have to ask yourself, why? Looking at it that simply it doesn't seem to make sense.

I get that you can't just hire 100 people in a week and they did hire people last year but it should be a constant process, they should have an open door for applications every day of the year, slowly building the team over the last five years.
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100% agree this is an easily resolvable problem, one can't deny the resources are there and that others have done a far better job at sound with relatively miniscule budgets. I came to the conclusion long ago that they just don't think sounds are a priority aka they are "good enough" and they'll get around to fixing them either when sales begin to droop and sounds are part of the reason or there is severe criticism in the gaming media and a huge backlash from fans.

Perhaps GT5 was the turning point, I certainly hope so, but I won't hold my breath waiting for it:sly:
 
Griffith500
Pretty sure the fact that they're working on a complete overhaul implies they don't think the sounds are "good enough" at all.
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Then maybe their mouth piece shouldn't say things that says the opposite just to save face. You either come out and be honorable and forthcoming or you treat your fans like some trite gullible group.
 
Griffith500
Pretty sure the fact that they're working on a complete overhaul implies they don't think the sounds are "good enough" at all.
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As you can tell, I'm not a big believer in "promises". I believe what I see when I see it. PD/Kaz have hinted at, promised or shown glimpses of many things that didn't come true or were retracted in spite of being popular and successful. Kaz has also said he's not certain their revolutionary new sound ideas will be ready for GT6, in which case it's just more and more waiting while every other sim/game on the planet has better sounds, even the free ones. For someone who is such a "perfectionist" and supposedly lives and breathes the GT series, the sounds in GT5 should be an utter embarassment to him.
 
Exactly. The new sound simulation could be the greatest sound ever in racing games, the point still stands that if it's not ready for GT6 we've gone a whole generation with sub-par sounds because they just left the interns working on the 'old' sounds in the meantime.
 
Really, guys, if anyone's talk is cheap, it's yours. There were no promises in what Kaz told Jordan, and whilst there's no way to tell precisely what is meant until we get our ears around it, waiting is all we have.

I'd rather wait for GT7 than some undetermined point in the future for truly improved sounds for the genre as a whole - if that means GT6 is the same as GT5, it'll be worth it in the long run. I hope it's not the case, but I was already resigned to it anyway. I agree that there are things that can be done to improve the sounds in their current format, and have gone into great detail in the past - hopefully they'll abandon the new sounds for GT6 in time to achieve some of that, if it looks like they won't be ready.

Anyway, if you like those other games' sounds, there's little to stop you from playing them - it's what I do; it's better to mix things up, anyway. The genre needs someone to move things on, and that's worth waiting for - even if I have to do it myself (after an eternity...)! :P
 
But is it 'acceptable' (not the right word but I can't think of a better one) for them to release two games with sub-par sound because of a lack of time/resources/whatever building a new sound engine? I mean we wouldn't accept that in other areas, would we? Would we be happy with two games of "something to tide you over" physics?

Again it goes back to the numbers issue. If I were in charge and I knew my sound guys were possibly going to take several years to finish their new system I'd have hired 20-30 guys to make sure in the meantime the sample based system was up to scratch. Yes it would technically be a waste of time once the new system was ready but we're not talking a short space of time, we're potentially talking 8 years and two major games if GT6 is mostly the same.
 
Samus
But is it 'acceptable' (not the right word but I can't think of a better one) for them to release two games with sub-par sound because of a lack of time/resources/whatever building a new sound engine? I mean we wouldn't accept that in other areas, would we? Would we be happy with two games of "something to tide you over" physics?

Again it goes back to the numbers issue. If I were in charge and I knew my sound guys were possibly going to take several years to finish their new system I'd have hired 20-30 guys to make sure in the meantime the sample based system was up to scratch. Yes it would technically be a waste of time once the new system was ready but we're not talking a short space of time, we're potentially talking 8 years and two major games if GT6 is mostly the same.
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I think all we've ever really had is "tide-me-over" physics, so I guess yes and no (it varies from person to person). But I agree that they shouldn't have neglected the current sounds as much as they seem to have done (so far).

At the very least, they should make sure the samples allocated to cars actually make sense (I'll do it!). The current sampling regime cannot really change on PS3, given the focus of the overall package in terms of allocated resources. But I would really like it if they could spare some artists to mix in some intake, or do something special with variable bit-depths (like mip-maps, but for sounds) to get the right character out of the car in every tuning state etc. by loading in the right samples (or pre-mixing them at load-time) to fit the memory available.

But, first and foremost, the cars need to sound vaguely "right". They've shown they can do it, and in most cases they have the samples that are just about passable. Something that would really help would be to catalogue all of their sample sets according to state of tune, engine configuration, exhaust layout etc. and then allowing us to choose from them according to the car and what's done to it. Just that simple option of choosing the sound we want from all the relevant / appropriate ones would make half the complaints disappear. Adding intake (or equivalent) in some way would halve that again.

Either PD do have some minor contingency plan in place (as above), or they're very confident they'll get what they want out of the PS3. I think they would be very foolish to just copy over GT5's sounds, given it was less accurate than GT4 was overall. You have to wonder how that happened - they actively made things worse, primarily in terms of sample choice.

Would it be acceptable? It'll vary from person to person; for me, I can only judge in the context of what they were focusing on instead. Obviously, if GT6 is exactly like GT5, it will diminish the experience somewhat for me; the rest of the game had better deliver (and it sounds like it might, for my needs). But, none of this has happened yet; only time will tell.
 
Johnnypenso
As you can tell, I'm not a big believer in "promises". I believe what I see when I see it. PD/Kaz have hinted at, promised or shown glimpses of many things that didn't come true or were retracted in spite of being popular and successful. Kaz has also said he's not certain their revolutionary new sound ideas will be ready for GT6, in which case it's just more and more waiting while every other sim/game on the planet has better sounds, even the free ones. For someone who is such a "perfectionist" and supposedly lives and breathes the GT series, the sounds in GT5 should be an utter embarassment to him.
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Kaz has a bit of a history of saying things that later change radically. Whether they were true at the time and something major happened to cause the course change or whether he just tends to talk a bit too much, his statements are not that reliable.

There's that old standby of the online features presentation from TGS 2006. The statement that they can release GT5 any time they want, only to delay it. The statement that the sounds are too perfect. And so on.

I'm sure he and PD are working hard on whatever they're working on. But I'd take anything the man says with a massive grain of salt.
 
Best thing I ever did was build my PC, now I don't really care for GT6 as much as I did.

So Kaz if you read this know that I don't mind if you give us sound's like GT5. I have at least 5 other options for PC so go ahead.
 
Imari
Kaz has a bit of a history of saying things that later change radically. Whether they were true at the time and something major happened to cause the course change or whether he just tends to talk a bit too much, his statements are not that reliable.

There's that old standby of the online features presentation from TGS 2006. The statement that they can release GT5 any time they want, only to delay it. The statement that the sounds are too perfect. And so on.

I'm sure he and PD are working hard on whatever they're working on. But I'd take anything the man says with a massive grain of salt.
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This is all only sensible, and the fact that the recent "talk" is full of caveats means that perhaps he's learning. Obviously, he has a lot of enthusiasm, and he knows what his team is working on and will be possible "in the end". But maybe that enthusiasm has got the better of him in the past, sure, but he's no Peter Molyneux. :P

GT5 maybe could have been released "any time", but I guess they wanted more (Premium) cars in it, and that meant they delayed things as other systems came off the prototyping bench (a good example might be weather and time change). I'd kill for a proper GT5 "post-mortem", with actual developer input (I still think GT6 will make sense of a lot of it).

As for the sounds being too perfect, I still take that in the context of his "the graphics are too perfect" comments before GT5 was released. He was saying that their representations of circuits were too clean, that they captured it at a "perfect" time of day, where the sun is always shining, the shadows never move and there are no skidmarks etc. (or something to that effect). Of course, now we have weather and time change (not universal, yet) and a slight working over of the pristine circuits (remember Fuji from GT5:P) and skidmarks (praise be!).

In the context of sound, you could say that they capture the cars in one condition, and that condition never changes in the game. Maybe they want to be able to add the equivalent of weather, time change, roughed up textures and skidmarks to the sounds, too.

EDIT: Gran Turismo 5 Looks "Better than Reality"
So only some minor embellishments on my part... :dopey:
 
It may help to understand how the minds of some obsessives work. Deep down each release of game, painting, music, thesis, anything, may be effectively an admission of failure, to self. In the context of my world: I have music releases that could sound much better if re-mastered today. Most would think that it would be an elementary decision to re-master then, but not for me. There is a certain amount of allowing it to remain completely of it's time, but also there is a self loathing ("I should have done better, and I don't want people to have that pointed out to them") factor involved. It really does not help with sticking to release schedules either.

"Too perfect" statements and the like to me smack of diversion, be it conscious or otherwise. There is a constant fear of being outed as the phony (no pun intended) you "know" you are. I would not be surprised to eventually find out that Kazunori is manic depressive. I see the manic and the depressive in him.

American History X director Tony Kaye fought, but failed to have his name erased from the film's credits because he was so intensely unhappy with the result. Many would say that the film was very good, few would say that it was poor, yet still....

All this, of course has no bearing on the disappointment that was GT5. The wait was disappointing, the result was disappointing. I just wondered if some more pragmatic thoughts may help to understand where some of the frustrating elements could have found their origins.

Feel free to berate me for "finding a whole new level of delusion in order to defend GT", but I am talking about human stuff here.
 
Absolutely. Stuff like that wouldn't have crossed my mind. Makes you wonder, what would become of GT if someone else, alongside Kazunori, had some control over the development?
 
Luminis
Makes you wonder, what would become of GT if someone else, alongside Kazunori, had some control over the development?
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I am confident that it would be the last thing he would want to happen, but the first thing that should happen. Being locked up inside one's own little world is part of why perfectionists rarely create perfection.

Some people would sooner try to "make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" than instigate getting help. It is extremely difficult to go against that vice.
 
LeMansAid
I am confident that it would be the last thing he would want to happen, but the first thing that should happen.
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Sounds pretty logical to me.

Now, I don't remember exactly where I picked that up, but wasn't there something about Japanese working culture that made employees accept their superios' decision without questioning it too much? I don't want to go around spreading prejudices or anything, but I remember that being mentioned around here somewhere. Wouldn't seem like the best thing to happen if you're right about Kazunori's state of mind.
 
"State of mind" would be more like software, whereas I think we'd be talking hardware, or at least firmware here. If that makes sense.

Anyway, I have seen people suggest that laziness plays a role in, for example, sound deficiencies (I do know what thread this is), but I would be very surprised if that were true. Very! I equally don't think it's priorities.

People are rightly left wondering why PD don't at least put up stop gap sounds while working on the totally new approach. As has been pointed out, the financial side should not be an issue. It doesn't really make sense. Does it actually come down to the psychological issues of a single man, maybe indeed in combination with a specific culture of hierarchy.
 
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The thing is, these neuroses exist on a continuous scale - a scale on which every one of us falls somewhere. To say that Kaz is a manic-depressive (or bi-polar in the modern parlance) doesn't necessarily mean that it is debilitating to him or his work, I mean he has achieved quite a lot with it (assuming it is true).

I can totally empathise, though, given I am never satifisfied with any of my work. That does mean I can struggle to motivate myself to do things (I don't think Kaz has that problem), but moreover it does tend to mean that I keep my work to myself. Which may actually be a blessing all around. :lol:

I have heard the same thing said about Russia, though, regarding seniority issues; and you could probably have said the same thing about Enzo Ferrari - I'm sure we've all come across such an environment at one point or other. Ultimately, it's about the individuals (which is partly why Valve Software is so unique, as they really are supposed to be all about individuals).

Is Kaz really the Iron Fist type? It seems as though he's employed specialists in certain areas from the start, which would mean he'd have had to defer to them immediately on their respective areas, to some extent. I doubt, for instance, he'd pull a Soichiro Honda and say that tessellation is some new fangled rubbish that doesn't need to go anywhere near his games and can't they just use the normal methods like everyone else, it's always worked just fine etc. Or is it that he's a total technocrat, and everything has to be done the most technically interesting way? The game says otherwise, I think, as there's plenty of legacy techniques in there still.


I think the sound direction is the result of the sound designer they've had since GT4 - coincidentally, that's when they realised their recording method was flawed. Surely, if Kaz was not to be questioned, they'd have continued to do it the way he was overseeing it being done for GT2? No, I think Kaz trusts his team - maybe he should keep them on a shorter lead from time to time to stop things overrunning, but they've done well enough overall so far.

Kaz strikes me as more of an engineer; taking a holistic / broadband / multi-disciplinary approach (through his team), based on sound fundamental principles and relying on copious amounts of data, to produce a new solution of practical utility to an interesting problem.
 
Luminis
Now, I don't remember exactly where I picked that up, but wasn't there something about Japanese working culture that made employees accept their superios' decision without questioning it too much? I don't want to go around spreading prejudices or anything, but I remember that being mentioned around here somewhere. Wouldn't seem like the best thing to happen if you're right about Kazunori's state of mind.
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With the usual caveats of generalisations not necessarily being able to be applied to any specific company, major Japanese companies to seem to hew to seniority and age specifically more than I would expect to see from similar companies in Australia or NZ. (I'm sort of assuming that AU/NZ companies are roughly similar to US, UK and probably Euro companies.)

PD may not necessarily be one of those, but stuff like Panasonic or Toyota have a bit of a tendency to promote those who have been there the longest, not necessarily those who are the best. It's just the way the salary ladder works. There is some evidence that in more practical professions ignore this to a greater degree, but it's still there.

This could also explain why certain aspects of the game don't appear to be getting the leadership they might need. The most senior person was promoted to control that, even if they might not necessarily have the skills to do the best job. And the hierarchy tends to enforce the bosses will. Some Japanese will try and point out a better way if the boss isn't doing it right, but most will let it slide for the sake of not causing waves.

Ultimately, it's mostly that Japanese people put a far greater value on not directly opposing your workmates than Europeans, Americans or Australians do. I think every workplace in Australia would have at least one person who wouldn't hesitate to stand up to the boss and tell him he was being a dick, if that was the case.

This is just my experience from living in Japan for 3 and a half years. I don't really profess to have any deep understanding of what's really going on behind all this. There's too many little things that are just very different to what Euro/US culture would consider normal, and too many things that I still don't know about.
 
I'm sure this is a news flash, but I agree with Griff once again. ;)

I personally won't mind if the sounds are just ported over from GT5, but I don't expect it. And those who think PD's sound team hasn't done squat for the game really need to listen to a replay of a NASCAR car. Particularly from roof cam. For those of you who don't like roof cam in-race, watch a replay from roof view, and in particular at race end as the car idles down. The sounds it makes as it slows to a coast are amazing. Or the Honda HSV, try that.

But those expecting a quantum jump in exhaust quality along with the DLC, I doubt you're going to see that on PS3. Bring up PC sims, that's fine, but it's apples and Volvos. I sincerely doubt many PC gaming rigs have 256 megs of ram, and the car list is paltry compared to GT5. I think the only real comparison you can make is that dreaded F-word game on XB360.

And in Forza 4 in particular, Turn 10 made some stark choices to economize on assets and focus on certain things. The shadows are wonderful, but being textures, they probably take up a good hunk of that unified ram. And since this is the sound thread, I'd point out once again that the car the camera focuses on, normally yours, gets all the "real" sound samples. The other cars get some vague generic package which is sometimes close/right, sometimes not. And I say "the focus of the camera" because in replays, you can switch cars. Which causes a lengthy pause, and part of that pause is the loading in of new samples for that particular car over the top of the ones for yours/the previous car. Another thing I noticed are the tire sounds in replays, which seem cut back considerably in spots, such as around turns where fixed cameras will have a fleet of cars making staccato "morse code" tire barks as they brake.

It's not all that realistic, but is it bad? For the most part, I like Forzxa 4's sounds, though I will have to say the cars seem to only have two exhaust samples: obnoxiously loud, and louder than hell. ;) But they do make even Beetles sound like mean racing machines. However, I'm fine with Forza and Gran Turismo keeping their respective sound methodologies, though with Forza 5 getting a monstrous 8GB of ram, I don't expect the audio to be as skimped on as in F4.

GT6 most likely will be to one degree or another, and there's no getting around the limitations when the PS3 has 1/32 the ram space of PS4 and The ONE. And that's empty ram, with no OS and game running, so you try the math on that.
 
Nobody has said they're done "nothing", if they did we'd hear silence for every car. Obviously they've done something and yes, as usual if you pick out a specific car you'll find some that sound good. They're few and far between though and in your second example the person you like agreeing with has already said the samples are still wrong and recycled on that car.

What they've done is not put enough focus on the sample based system for a large number of the cars, instead just pretty much forgetting about them or leaving it to the interns as Griffith puts it.

As for your comments about RAM you realise that isn't a new theory? It's one that has been debunked several times in this thread by the fact that it doesn't matter if you have 32Mb of RAM or 16GB, if the samples are completely wrong they're going to sound completely wrong. Your point about some cars sounding good proves this, you can't have both sides of the coin in your argument.

Also I see you've gone back into another of your "bring up Forza 4 at any given opportunity" phases.
 

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