RE: SimonK
"At this point every new track they add should have these capabilities and frankly I don't know why they haven't added it to more tracks. "
You don't just flip a switch (enable a flag, toggle a bool etc.) to activate something as intricate and complex as a day and night cycle. It would take graphics engine personel an indefinite amount of time to retrofit art assets that are years old and that weren't intended to be used with that feature. Whether it's modifying some of the shaders (per track), or reworking the textures, changing the rendering modes who knows what. If the lead graphics programmer were to explain it to us, it would take so much less time for him to come up with a proper explanation than it would take to have the dev team actually begin implementing just a portion of those changes.
"Of course it takes longer, but they have as much time as they need when it comes to DLC."
DLC sales rapidly decrease the further they are put out after the release date of the game. So it's not fiscally viable to dedicate to much more time and resources to the DLC on top of how much effort they're already putting behind it.
SavageEvil
"If you are adding day/night transitions and weather, make it a global system that works on every course in the game..."
It's much more likely they would be implementing this in GT6 and that when they added it to some of the select tracks in GT5 that it was more of a sort of test run of the technology.
