You mus have missed the previous japanese translations... we had multiple people translating, all who had no reason to lie at all and we ended up with... a whole lot of confusion.
I can translate most anything from Japanese - and if I get stuck - I can always ask my friend in Japan for help.
That is 2 different interviews now that have confirmed rain and day/night racing - who cares
what IGN says!?!
This particular interview was conducted in French and my Fiancée speaks
nearly fluent French. They translated the questions from French into Japanese and then back into French for the answers - it's no different from the way English Journalists interview Japanese people - from English into Japanese and then vice-versa.
That interview says
racing in the rain and day/night races are in Gran Turismo 5 and until they admit to lying about it,
it is the truth.
Dynamic weather isn't as likely as day/night transitions, as very few modern games have it. And how many factors do you want included in rain?
- Rain across the whole track at once, or in areas?
- Places where rain doesn't reach the ground at first, such as under trees?
- Drying affected by shade and sunlight, as well as temperature?
This is pretty complex stuff to code, about as much as basic damage. However, if anyone can pull it off, PD can.
I beg to differ.
Day/night transitions require
far more processing capabilities than simply placing rain on a given course. The lighting and shaders have to be coded to move
constantly - to represent the actual lighting conditions and shadows of the track depending on the time of day and the angle of the Sun.
This is evident in the coding required [
for example] to replace one
semi-sunset texture with a
closer to evening texture - after about one minute of game time [
with hundreds of other textures waiting to be applied to everything on the screen every 20 seconds or so, to change day into night] -
while racing -
while 10-16 cars are on the track, each one doing something completely different - while physics are being calculated for every car - while damage is being calculated as to which cars have it and where and how their current status reflects how much damage has occurred, etc.
And for rain effects?
Well for
static rain effects, all you would need to do is code the given track with a wet texture [
depending on the amount of rain, puddles could be added] and then apply a "
rain screen" [
MGS2 did this during the opening chapter on the Tanker] that is one-half the depth of field for the view screen [
what you see raining is only half of the view distance presented].
That way, you have a semi-3D view of the pouring rain and you have the wet track textures - a whole lot easier in terms of number crunching than day/night transitions.
For real-time weather transitions, that gets
a lot more processor heavy - but not
nearly as much as day/night transitions. The shadows are re-adjusted based on the given light source as the clouds move in and then the aforementioned wet track textures are
gradually loaded in - and the "
rain screen" is applied; either gradually or quickly, depending on what type of storm it is.
It would be
far easier to create rain in GT5 than it would be to create day/night transitions -
let alone both of these features.
If Polyphony Digital has found a way to include both of these features and still maintain the graphical fidelity [
that we have been drooling over] that makes GT5 so beautiful - I will be elated and stupendously impressed.
