Would the REAL Ian Bell please stand up?

[spapadillion]

I can't believe how quick everyone is to assume that the person posting in the forums recently as IanBell is really THE Ian Bell. After all, there has been no official mention, at least that I'm aware of, of him joining our forum, nor has he posted regarding these topics on EA's own forums.

Already, other sites have begun quoting from the words written here as if they were official EA release notes and not just some random "troll" w/ too much time on his hands. In reality, I doubt the real Mr. Bell would have the time to sit around browsing the forums all day, as our IanBell has been doing, giving vague answers and glad-handing.

I'd absolutely love it if I was wrong, but until then, I'll be consuming salt by the grain at every opportunity.

 

[JediRage]

Isn't it Iain Bell? I just raced this guy in the McNamara Retro challenge.

 

[NombreyApellido]

Ian Bell was very, very active in the forums going back to when GTR was just a mod for EA's F1 titles... Judging by the posts made so far, I say it's the man himself 👍

 

[HKS racer]

Already, other sites have begun quoting from the words written here as if they were official

Really? So quote this people:

GT5 need a custom event feature

Shift 2 need at least a fix with all those freezes

Jessica Lopez is da Girl!

 

[tribolik]

Damn he got me fooled, and I was going to buy the game because the fixes where made... I stupid can I be?

 

[Bigbazz]

Brb making a Michael Schumacher account, I think we should hear Michaels view on Shift 2.

 

[tribolik]

Robert Kubica would be more credible - being in the hospital and all that free time.....

 

[Mulan]

moderators should know or they would delete it!

 

[tribolik]

How would they know? they can only see the IP... not the face of whos posting... I could be Pamela Anderson... wow thats creepy...

 

[Bigbazz]

moderators should know or they would delete it!

They didn't delete Mark Webbers account, am I also to assume then that he is the real Mark Webber?

 

[crooky369]

Must have the time not playing in the IPL.

 

[///M-Spec]

It's always possible someone is not who they say they are on the interwebs. His IP seems to be in the correct general range, but that's certainly no guarantee.

If he is a troll, then we'll go from there. But based on the context of his posts, he's a fairly convincing troll if that's what he turns out to be.

Anyway, if you were going to pretend to be someone like Ian Bell, wouldn't you start telling huge whoopers of a lie instead saying more or less what people expect him to say?


M

 

[Imari]

I can't believe how quick everyone is to assume that the person posting in the forums recently as IanBell is really THE Ian Bell. After all, there has been no official mention, at least that I'm aware of, of him joining our forum, nor has he posted regarding these topics on EA's own forums.

Already, other sites have begun quoting from the words written here as if they were official EA release notes and not just some random "troll" w/ too much time on his hands. In reality, I doubt the real Mr. Bell would have the time to sit around browsing the forums all day, as our IanBell has been doing, giving vague answers and glad-handing.

I'd absolutely love it if I was wrong, but until then, I'll be consuming salt by the grain at every opportunity.

Either way is possible. Until further proof arrives, a dose of healthy skepticism is advised.

Of course, it's possible to be skeptical and not be an ass by describing what he's doing as "giving vague answers and gladhanding". If it is indeed the real Ian Bell, he's doing a service to those of us wanting more information about how the game is being supported. If he's not the real Ian Bell, then the mods will dish out whatever punishment they deem fit regardless.

 

[spapadillion]

How would they know? they can only see the IP... not the face of whos posting... I could be Pamela Anderson... wow thats creepy...

What, I believe, they can do is compare his IP to those of the rest of us to see if it's a current member posting under an assumed alias; a fairly common practice on most forums.

Anyway, if you were going to pretend to be someone like Ian Bell, wouldn't you start telling huge whoopers of a lie instead saying more or less what people expect him to say?


M

Unless, of course, it's a psychopath we're talking about, and not just someone out to have a little fun at others' expense.

 

[spapadillion]

Either way is possible. Until further proof arrives, a dose of healthy skepticism is advised.

Of course, it's possible to be skeptical and not be an ass by describing what he's doing as "giving vague answers and gladhanding".

Please enlighten me as to how I've inaccurately described his actions, preferably without insulting me again.

 

[///M-Spec]

What, I believe, they can do is compare his IP to those of the rest of us to see if it's a current member posting under an assumed alias; a fairly common practice on most forums.

Not posting from a known IP from existing member, so far as I can tell.


M

 

[tribolik]

What, I believe, they can do is compare his IP to those of the rest of us to see if it's a current member posting under an assumed alias; a fairly common practice on most forums.

I dont think «clones» or second accounts are allowed in this forum acording to the AUP.

 

[oshaylinux]

If that's not the person, then I think he need to know someone is impersonating him. Once he knows, I think it would be best to officially speak out about it.

 

[Imari]

Please enlighten me as to how I've inaccurately described his actions, preferably without insulting me again.

Well, let me see now. I'm going to assume for the moment that the guy is legit, because otherwise what he's saying is neither vague nor gladhanding. It's lying.

Quick post to say that we've removed the lag internally (well, down to hardware limits) and we're have a blast in testing with the wheels here. Some 'late in the day' asynchronous changes with a view to optimization put things out of kilter a touch. The changes mean that the input is now processed very early on in the frame and filtered through to the physics as quickly as possible.

Details are limited, but one doesn't get into insane technical details on a quick post. In fact, one probably avoids getting into insane technical details on GTP at all. A quick overview is what is called for, and he gives it to us.

Bit of a heads up on the choices we had to make regarding anti aliasing in Shift 2.

The new render engine for Shift 2 as well as having a full HDR range is also completely deferred. I think this is the first of its type in a racer and came with some benefits as well as trade-offs. We were able to go nuts on the night lighting and multiple cast real time shadows because of being deferred but the trade-off is that AA becomes a bit of a bitch to do. You can't run standard MSAA in the normal way. We used morphological antialiasing on the PC and consoles. The PC settings for medium is edge detect and for high also reads depth information. On PS3 we run post processed MLAA totally on SPU.

If we didn't have the night racing we could have gotten away with an enhanced Shift 1 render setup with the increased range and contrast and used simple MSAA (4x on 360 and quincunx on PS3).

Edit, should mention that the PC AA will eat CPU time as it's the only place we can run it on a fully deferred engine.

Seems pretty unvague to me.

Yup, we have engineers at both Nvidia and AMD late on in the project who give us direct feedback.

That is a monster resolution to be fair We do an awful lot of work with cute shaders per pixel that obviously multiplies at higher res.

What CPU are you running? The AA will hit that directly.

I run a 580 here and I do know we worked hard on SLI compatibility late on. I'm not sure we had a 590 though. I'll check with our PC lead and bug list and get back

Again, not vague at all. Direct answers, direct questions in an attempt to help the poster he replied to.

Correct yes. We're working with Intel to create a more efficient MLAA option that should see almost zero hit on quad core systems. All being well we'll push it out to a patch very soon.

Solid information there. Not vague, unless you're expecting technical detail on how they're doing it which really isn't appropriate for a GTP post.

Interesting one this guys. I think a lot of it is down to field of view. We used the CADs that are supplied by the officials at the Nords' as does everyone else when you license the track (bloody expensive BTW!).

In a previous life, we made that rfactor version also IIRC

Again, solid confirmation (if you believe he's the real Ian Bell) that they used the CAD data for Nordschleife.

Gladhanding is a term that carries a certain negative connotation, used to describe when someone is being overly friendly to gain some sort of advantage. I've seen IanBell being polite. It's good customer service. I don't see where there's any advantage for him to be gained by doing so. Hence, it's not gladhanding, he's just a nice guy and operating within the boundaries of expected social behaviour for a company employee interacting with his customers.

Did you expect him to come in here and be all "What up dawgs, he hear you been having some mishaps with your controllings, yo. We've been repairing that shizzle, we knocked it out of the PARK. Dry your eyes mates, you'll be shredding those bots with precision before you know what hitcha!". Being a professional =/= gladhanding.

 

[buziii]

Did you expect him to come in here and be all "What up dawgs, he hear you been having some mishaps with your controllings, yo. We've been repairing that shizzle, we knocked it out of the PARK. Dry your eyes mates, you'll be shredding those bots with precision before you know what hitcha!". Being a professional =/= gladhanding.

Well...many here would have understood him better if he had. I, for one, don't know much about morphological antialiasing, so I hopes dey jus be repairin dat shizzle.

 

[freedomweasel]

I just think it's amusing that over in the GT5 forums people complain about lake of PR, and our only connection to PD is through google-translated twitter remarks. Now a dev actually joins the forum and talks to us and you assume he's a troll? I'd bet he's "doing his job" more than trying to fool everyone that the "real" Ian Bell is a nice guy who wants to fix his customers problems.

We regularly follow, and post on various online forums at my office, helping customers, getting feedback, etc. If your business doesn't have "enough time", as you say, for customer service it won't last long.

Lets apply Occam's Razor here. Which is more likely, a dev for the game this forum if for read complaints/comments, and logged in to give some insight and updates. Or scenario two, someone was bored and decided to pretend to be a very nice, friendly version of someone and give professional sounding answers. A quick look at the general quality of posts from most people should give you a hint. Most people here can't spell, or use punctuation, much less string more than 4 words together to form a coherent sentence.

edit: I'm sure there are ironic spelling mistakes in this post, feel free to enjoy those.

 

[HeadsoupBob]

I think the doubters expect Ian Bell to say "right, here's my home address, salary, favourite colour, date of birth and car rego. That should prove it's me." Only Jordan can confirm it's Ian by checking his email address, but by the content of the posts, they seem too informed and relative to be made up. Also he said he liked the 'little things' thread, which is actually over on the nogripracing forums

 

[Syntax error]

It's always possible someone is not who they say they are on the interwebs. His IP seems to be in the correct general range, but that's certainly no guarantee.

Just to add to this, the email address attached to his account is convincing enough for me. I don't doubt that it is indeed Ian. I'm not entirely sure why everyone is so sceptical. It's not like we haven't had hardware devs on this site before.

I'd like to thank Ian for taking the time to visit our board and respond to some of the concerns people have with his product.

 

[JJ72]

yeah why is everyone so surprised? Ian Bell does post on forums, it's not anything special back in the RSC days.

 

[tyl0r_r]

I share OP's skepticism if for no other reason than he was basically on the forum for 5 hours yesterday. I just hope we're getting reliable info .

 

[spapadillion]

Yup, vague answers and glad-handing. I appreciate the detail in which you answered my question, inari, but I still continue to see it as such. Nothing was said that suggests the poster has more than an enthusiast level understanding of computers, there was plenty of glad-handing going on (regardless of whether or not you take offense to the term), and the fact that I personally watched the user IanBell browse the forums for a good six hours straight after his last post leads me to believe that it's a troll we're dealing with and not just a helpful dev w/ a soft spot for GTPlanet. Again, I hope I'm wrong on all counts.

 

[Spagetti69]

I personally watched the user IanBell browse the forums for a good six hours

Your scary.

 

[Syntax error]

I think this thread has now run it's course. Falling short of Ian holding up a sign with GTPlanet written on, not much will satisy some (and with good reason, skepticism is a healthy trate to have when browsing the net), however I think there is little value to be had from this discussion and therefore I'm closing it. If anyone has anything truly important to contribute to this thread, they can PM me and I'll make a judgement call on whether we should reopen the thread.

 

[///M-Spec]

Just to add to this, the email address attached to his account is convincing enough for me. I don't doubt that it is indeed Ian.

Ah, that's a very good point. I'd forgotten a user's email addy needs to be confirmed during activation. It's only been, oh 8 years since I've activated mine here.

I agree. Either someone hacked the real Ian Bell's email account at SMS or he is who he says he is. Discussion over.


M