Damage

Collisions are about to become even more terrifying in iRacing.

Wrecking is an unfortunate part of racing. It also represents one of the hardest hurdles for sim racing developers to overcome. To help players understand just what a detailed system entails, iRacing has released a new behind the scenes video of its upcoming dynamic damage model.

This week’s GT Sport demo has confirmed that visual damage exists within the game. Players have spotted the cosmetic deformities that can happen to cars during collisions in gameplay. It’s existence hasn’t been outright shown by Polyphony Digital in promotional footage but many images and videos prove it does indeed exist.

This is a special guest post by GTPlanet member Alex (haitch40) who participated in the game’s closed beta period earlier this year.

Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi was in Paris last week for the formal unveiling of the new Peugeot Vision GT concept, offering the first chance in quite some time for members of the media to ask him questions. As would be expected, most of them were eager to get him talking about GT7.

If you were expecting the damage model in GT6 to have undergone some drastic changes you might want to curb those expectations, as a recent interview conducted by Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo suggests otherwise. When Stephen posed the question to a U.S. PlayStation producer it was met with the following response:

Thanks to RDK, Szmissz, iCyCo, and hsoomal!

A stream of interesting tidbits have been trickling into our Gran Turismo 5 forum today via several new magazine articles. First up is the December 2010 issue of PSM3 magazine, which provides a few details as highlighted by our own Dessy182:

Sony hosted a small group of media at their Benelux headquarters in Amsterdam, yesterday, and our own Blitz187 was on hand to catch any and all new tidbits of information that might emerge (this event took place before the delay was officially confirmed). As usual, Sony was extremely tight-lipped about the game’s details and did not use the event to reveal any major new features.

The first batch of Kazunori Yamauchi interviews are finally getting published from last week’s Tokyo Game Show 2010! Here’s a translated transcript of GameBlog’s video interview above, kindly provided by our own RoadRunner99:

Here’s an interesting new video from some type of GT5 demonstration session in Russia, which appears to show off a unique build of the game we haven’t seen before. While it does not have the skidmarks revealed at Gamescom 2010, it does have an updated damage model similar – though not necessarily identical to – the one found in the GT5 Kiosk Demo that’s been popping up at retail stores around the United States.

GTPlanet user Rated-M3 came home from his local Best Buy store after playing the Gran Turismo 5 kiosk demo and was kind enough to share his detailed impressions for those of you who may not be able to check it out for yourself. From his forum post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyBL1gqmPvk&feature=player_embedded

The new Gran Turismo 5 damage system first spotted by GTPlanet users in the Best Buy demo continues to make waves throughout our community, as more pictures (and now videos) keep coming in. Here’s the latest batch of higher-quality photos from Asane and tyv2448, along with a YouTube clip courtesy of StedySniper (thanks to Volcao for the tip!). Asane also provided me with a few more details on his observations so far:

At first glance, it appeared the GT5 demo popping up in Best Buy stores around the United States – while certainly exciting – did not reveal any new features or content. Now that more users in our forums are getting their hands on it, however, it seems that is definitely not the case. Collisions reveal dramatic and impressive new car damage modeling – I’ll let these screenshots by GTPlanet user Asane and gamer28 speak for themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92mDRnjgwmc

The PlayStation BETA event I told you about was finally held this past weekend. GTPlanet reader Adam Lang was first on the scene, and has been kind enough to provide us with lots of videos and screenshots from the GT5 demo on display. Most notably, you’ll see a much-abused Enzo Ferrari show heavy damage to its front bumper, along with an Audi R8 and the MOTUL R35 Skyline JGTC car. He’s also provided a lot of (literal) screenshots of the demo, so you can get a higher-resolution look at gameplay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=746uWpjd85w&feature=player_embedded

One of the new features in Gran Turismo 5 I’ve personally been looking forward to is head-tracking. Unless you’ve got the luxury of playing racing games on three screens, the ability to look into and through the turns – just as you should do in real life – provides a considerably more immersive experience. GT5’s head-tracking was first shown in limited action at E3 2010, but it was reportedly difficult to use because of surrounding conditions the PlayStation Eye had to deal with. According to a recent article from the Official PlayStation Magazine, however, the functionality isn’t perfect. Quoting the magazine from this article at CVG.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=746uWpjd85w