- 122
I really miss them. Maybe not for daily races, but it was so fun to race in those cities.
Hopefully they will return.
Hopefully they will return.
City courses
- Thread starter Mixolydian
- 27 comments
- 2,058 views
- 5,143
- Nicest part of hell
I read some people argue that with the current engine and detail-rich environments it would take several times the effort and time to model a city track with all the buildings etc. compared to a permanent track. I think that may be the problem here and that's why there are no city tracks in the game.
But yes, I miss them a LOT as well, in fact that's my biggest problem with GT7, I miss the tight, narrow and bumpy city tracks that require a lot of skill and where overtaking is a lot harder than on other tracks. Also the sense of speed at city tracks is crazy.
Personally I found those a lot more fun to race on than the clean permanent tracks with their perfect surfaces, ideal cambers and swooping corners.
Seattle, Rome, Paris, New York SS11 - those tracks were amazing and so much fun.
I still hope PD will include one or two city tracks, that would add diversity into the game which it really needs at this point IMO.
But yes, I miss them a LOT as well, in fact that's my biggest problem with GT7, I miss the tight, narrow and bumpy city tracks that require a lot of skill and where overtaking is a lot harder than on other tracks. Also the sense of speed at city tracks is crazy.
Personally I found those a lot more fun to race on than the clean permanent tracks with their perfect surfaces, ideal cambers and swooping corners.
Seattle, Rome, Paris, New York SS11 - those tracks were amazing and so much fun.
I still hope PD will include one or two city tracks, that would add diversity into the game which it really needs at this point IMO.
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- 122
That may be the case indeed. But on the other hand, GT was also looking pretty sick for the time.
I think their direction changed to be more of a simulation game for race tracks to be taken more seriously by the FIA.
I think their direction changed to be more of a simulation game for race tracks to be taken more seriously by the FIA.
- 663
- Germany
- timekiller001
They went from being able to create several cars within a week to making one car within several months. And that will only be worse for tracks.
And if the past years taught us one thing, it's that PD is lacking resources/manpower.
- 758
- United Kingdom
- jonoholland29
Citta di Aria talk dirty to me
- 5,143
- Nicest part of hell
I agree, I think a lot of the ''Fun stuff'' was taken out of the franchise to make it appeal to the FIA since it did not meat the safety standards at all - and in my opinion that hurt the game. I mean, its a game.
- 29
- United Kingdom
A few months ago I found my sons PS2 stored in the attic, together with GT4, which we last played many years ago. I fired it up, and the joy of tearing around the street circuits like a hooligan was so great I decided to treat myself to a PS5 with GT7. The disappointment I felt when I found that there were no proper street tracks has not diminished. The Tokyo track is nothing like as fun as the GT4 version. Paris, New York, Chicago (?) the Italian and French villages (forgotten their names) were brilliant. OK, I’m getting used to GT7, but it lacks those narrow streets, the customers waving from their cafe tables as you slid towards them. That was fun!
- 1,019
- Essex, Ontario, Canada
- PapaGnr
London was a great track too, but it may have been in later GTs than 4.
- 29,916
- Cuddington, Cheshire
- JDA1982
- 48,833
- Australia
Well, most race courses were designed when cars weren’t as fast as they are today. Cars slower than Gr.4-1(meaning Econo-boxes with little to no engine modifications), race on big courses like Fuji(Yaris Cup), Mt. Panorama(Hyundai Excel Cup), Suzuka(Honda N One Make), Watkins Glen(Grassroots Motorsports), Daytona Road Course(B-Spec series), as examples.
Cars in game, like the 500F and Mini, in stock form, there are plenty short courses to race those. However, they’re still fine to race on big courses.
Cars in game, like the 500F and Mini, in stock form, there are plenty short courses to race those. However, they’re still fine to race on big courses.
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- 29,916
- Cuddington, Cheshire
- JDA1982
Whilst thats true there is a farly significant difference to those races and GT7, grid size. Larger grids typically need longer circuits for obvious reasons.
And while cars like those do race on longer courses IRL, that doesnt defeat the argument that its more fun to race them on courses designed more specifically for lesser powered cars. Especially with a grid size of 20 or fewer cars.
Ultimately, previous GT games had those courses and lesser powered cars were more fun on them. In my opinion at least.
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- 48,833
- Australia
For sure. I'm definitely not arguing against your opinion. I bet many of these GT7 short courses would still be fun in slow cars, with different environments.
Say, placing one of the short Maggiore courses with homes lining the course or walls closer to the circuit or narrowing the track widths.
Anyway, it seems to abe a big task for PD to even remodel the legacy circuits.
- 1,255
- 29,916
- Cuddington, Cheshire
- JDA1982
Certainly, if you built up the envorinments closer to the track you'd increase the sense of speed which wouldn't do any harm at all. The issue does seem to be time and effort it takes to model ubren environments at the level of detail and accuracy PD require. And I think it's a design choice, because right now they could use AI to create a detailed environment, only it wouldn't accurately represent any real place.
As we've seen with Tokyo and Grand Valley, although they aren't exact replicas of real places, they do feature several real roads and thier environments stitched together. I'm not sure AI is up to that task yet where it could reproduce an urban environment to the level of accuracy PD would require, but if you forget wanting this street to look just like this real one, and that one to look just like that real one, it could be done relatively easilly.
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Can you not imagine the bitching that would occur if a track named "Seattle" or "New York" didn't feature actual roads in those cities? The only reason we don't see the same for Tokyo in English-speaking circles is a lack of familiarity with the real roads, and if you recall when GTS launched with that course there were a decent amount of complaints about it not being an "accurate representation."
- 29,916
- Cuddington, Cheshire
- JDA1982
I think you're missing my point, which wasn't to suggest that PD should or should not design city tracks with real surroundings, but simply to point out that that it's a design choice and that those city tracks are missed by a number of players.
However, to answer your point, I don't think it would matter to a lot of people to be honest, a vocal minorty maybe, but not to most people. I don't recall the complaints about Tokyo, but that track is inspired by several real sections of highway stitched together. I think the feeling of those locations is more important that faithfully replicating the actual real locations for the purposes of a game.
The problems really arise when you want the tracks to feature famous landmarks, and then it becomes more important you not only get the landmark itself correct (or thereabouts) but the surrounding area, as that's what more people are familiar with. So that would garner far more attention than a more generic city track that doesn't go past major landmarks but you can maybe see some of them in the distance to give the feeling of where you are.
In terms of the road layouts, it should be relatively easy to create those, the actual road layouts isn't a problem, you could quite easilly create a replica of the George V Paris track layout in GT7 (people even managed it in GT6 with the track creator). It's the surrounding scenery that takes the time and because an urban environment is considerably more detail rich than a rural one (in general) when it comes to 3d modelling, the only reasonable way to create these tracks at a comparable speed it to use AI to generate the environments and then use artists to tweak them.
It's definitely a design decision that PD don't do that as it seems they want to more faithfully replicate the scenery from the real world around thier chosen locations, which is fine, it's quite cool racing past a location that's replicated from real life, but it's also very, very slow.
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- 234
- Antarctica
- 758
- United Kingdom
- jonoholland29
at 1.4 gflops and 480 lines. Slightly harder at 10Tflops and 2160 lines
- 234
- Antarctica
Oh I agree it was easier, but my point is that every track was literally from a full map of each city. If you condense that to a series of blocks rather than a full area, it should be doable. Like if they licensed the Formula E London or Jakarta layout, small radius, fewer buildings...
- 29,916
- Cuddington, Cheshire
- JDA1982
It is 100% doable, but it comes at the cost of time which could be spent making several non-urban locations instead. That's the reason they don't do it and if you recall MSR had a whole 3 locations, each with a lot of tracks sure, but all that development time on the location modelling ultimately resulted in 3 locations.
For just one of those locations you could have modelled Spa, Fuji, Monza, Laguna Seca, Brand Hatch, Tsukuba and at least two more non-urban locations. It's all about the level of detail that goes into the 3d assets and how many of them need to be individually modelled in a city circuit as opposed to a rural one.
Ai can build that for you, but it probably won't resemble the real environment. At least not yet.
- 4,385
- Connecticut
- Ridley-X4
I do wonder if we'll get potential West and North layouts for Tokyo Expressway?
I also wonder if some city courses that were in GT4 would be replaced with their Formula E courses, instead. Like how the GT4 course went through Manhattan, whereas the Formula E course goes through Brooklyn. Something similar could apply to Hong Kong and other venues that have both "hosted" a course in GT4, and have hosted a Formula E circuit in real life.
Personally, my top city course picks for returning courses would be the Circuito di Roma, Tokyo Route 246, and Monaco. Other than that, I don't see many (if any) of the others being all that worthy of returning, especially when you consider that PD would likely need to update the landscapes a lot. London? Madrid? Yeah, I think I'd rather have new layouts altogether if we're going to get circuits set in those same locations.
Another idea would be to take the relatively narrow rally courses from GT4, like Costa di Amalfi, and turn it into a point-to-point time attack stage like the Goodwood Hillclimb.
EDIT: Maybe PD could also be inspired by both real-world layouts set in certain cities, but also proposed layouts that didn't ultimately get realized, like those for the Miami GP. I'd totally be down to speed across one of those massive bridges that link Miami to Miami Beach, passing docked cruise liners along the way as I head to the art-deco architecture on Ocean Drive. Or maybe there could be a Las Vegas circuit that actually goes down the strip, even if it's just a part of it.
I also wonder if some city courses that were in GT4 would be replaced with their Formula E courses, instead. Like how the GT4 course went through Manhattan, whereas the Formula E course goes through Brooklyn. Something similar could apply to Hong Kong and other venues that have both "hosted" a course in GT4, and have hosted a Formula E circuit in real life.
Personally, my top city course picks for returning courses would be the Circuito di Roma, Tokyo Route 246, and Monaco. Other than that, I don't see many (if any) of the others being all that worthy of returning, especially when you consider that PD would likely need to update the landscapes a lot. London? Madrid? Yeah, I think I'd rather have new layouts altogether if we're going to get circuits set in those same locations.
Another idea would be to take the relatively narrow rally courses from GT4, like Costa di Amalfi, and turn it into a point-to-point time attack stage like the Goodwood Hillclimb.
EDIT: Maybe PD could also be inspired by both real-world layouts set in certain cities, but also proposed layouts that didn't ultimately get realized, like those for the Miami GP. I'd totally be down to speed across one of those massive bridges that link Miami to Miami Beach, passing docked cruise liners along the way as I head to the art-deco architecture on Ocean Drive. Or maybe there could be a Las Vegas circuit that actually goes down the strip, even if it's just a part of it.
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- 1,777
- Florida, USA
I think it comes down to optimization, there's probably a budget of the number of polygons to work with on a given track, Tokyo with it's glass boxes works fine, but a city with a lot of architectural details they probably get killed on the polygon count.
The older games running at lower resolution they probably where able to get away with a lot more detail using textures representing detail, but at 4K not likely to sell.
The older games running at lower resolution they probably where able to get away with a lot more detail using textures representing detail, but at 4K not likely to sell.
- 29,916
- Cuddington, Cheshire
- JDA1982
I dissagree with that, there's plenty of polygon pushing power avaiallbe these days. If the issue was down to a lack of computational power to create these environments in a detailed manner we wouldn't see so many games that are set in city environments. It's purely a human resource issue that makes rural locations more preferable to urban ones.
- 1,925
- United States
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