If all these unreleased tracks are really there in the code, and some have even been seen in trailers and demos several years ago, it makes me curious as to how much of the delays come down to the lack of power in the PS3... It certainly can't all come from the PS3 issues, but there
are a few things I've noticed with both GT5's and GT6's tracks...
- In GT5's course creator tracks, the draw distance was very short, and even then frame drops occurred with lots of cars or smoke on the track - this didn't always happen on some regular, pre-baked tracks (at least those without weather).
- By default, that means a lot of optimization goes into regular tracks - pre-determined chunk load-ins, optimized lighting, etc. This can usually be tested when you run the tracks backwards.
- Massive liberties were taken with Sierra, I'd imagine because of the sheer amount of space that needs to be rendered:
Look at the lake - ridiculously simplified, it's a very small texture tiled across a huge area, and the edges are incredibly rough. A lot of other areas have similarly low-res textures, likely to allow the track to run efficiently.
This would lead me to believe that outside just the texture and wireframe work, a lot more than we realize also goes into optimization for track development - load in points, optimizing shadows and textures, etc...
PD have access to more powerful hardware, so they can use more powerful, uncompressed builds for the trailers. However, we saw Seattle in the NSX trailer way back in GT5 days, and the textures still looked very GT4-ish, especially on the buildings:
...So at that point it was likely just a direct rip from the old game, and used for the sake of a trailer, where it was easier to hide the quality faults. Putting it in the new game, they'd likely update the textures, and place it in the new lighting engine. But when that happens, it becomes more taxing on the processor, and would take more work to keep it from breaching the hardware restrictions. Perhaps the processor room for displayed track data has been whittled down so much from other new data in the GT6 engine (new lighting, adaptive tessellation, etc.) that any new track has to be hyper-optimized and compressed (if it is to be an HD remake) just to keep the game from jittering or crashing. If that's the case, it could (somewhat) explain the massive delay for Sierra, and perhaps other courses... However, I don't understand how Seattle could be delayed for almost two years at this point, that is, if PD really started work around the time that the NSX trailer was released.
Most of the thumbnails that Whistle Snap revealed appear to be quite a bit low-res, and it seems odd that PD would add PS2 ports in an update - I thought they'd claimed that any new content would be "premium" level. It makes sense to have a flood of new content for the Spec II update, as it would pull in all sorts of new (and old) users. It'd likely be more effective than if they'd slowly released the content over time with a smaller spec II patch (which potentially could've caused and extended other content delays). If they're really planning on adding all of these tracks, I don't see any reason why they'd bother to use the ancient thumbnail data... So that would lead me to believe that it's just legacy data left over, similar to the other content leaks.
That said, the new Route X variant seems to be legit new content, considering that comparatively, it's a relatively new asset, the thumbnails look modern, and as far as we know, they've never been used. I'm really curious where these were found,
@Whistle Snap, are all of them new as of a recent update, or were they found in an area that already existed, but was just too difficult to decrypt until recently? If its the former, this could be a
huge batch of content coming in the next few weeks or month.