Features you hope are added in Course Creator

What added features do YOU hope to see in the upcoming CM?


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Any track maker like them would have to generate a lot of terrain features, which means hundreds of millions of polygons stitched together in the software before even a tree, guard rail or spectator stand is placed. And then they would have to be placed, and the track adjust itself to accommodate them. And appropriate textures generated over them.
Which would mean you would have to resort to the system like V-Rally 2 had instead, where you map out the course design beforehand and then the game uses that outline to determine how to best render that track according to how you designed it and you simply have to wait while it does so. That may very well be how the GPS portion that PD talked about will actually work; and that's how the GT5 Course Maker seemed to work as well (with the conceit that you didn't actually have control over what it did) since it took notably longer to load a course maker track than it did any regular track, the wait time was unaffected by hard drive speed, and the space as saved to your PS3 was very small.

And do all this efficiently so it runs online with at least 12 cars on track at once with a reasonable framerate. Keep in mind that something much simpler, the Movie Maker, the team couldn't get to work in GT6, or work well enough be worth the effort to make it. Even on the supposedly better XBox360, Turn 10 couldn't get theirs to spit out more than half a minute of decent resolution video for Forza 4.
Much simpler, but in no way as computationally intensive. You're conflating the same separate things that Nixxon was doing above when he was flailing around to argue why the Far Cry 4 editor wasn't comparable because it wasn't a driving sim. All you have to do for a movie upload (ignoring sound) is dump whatever happened to be in the VRAM at any given frame into a video container, then upload the resulting file to YouTube after the race is done. If you aren't worried about compression in the pursuit of max performance, it's incredibly straightforward to do, but that's the rub: The YouTube video upload feature had to run while the race was going on. That's tacking a ton of overhead directly on the CPU for a couple of games that already really struggle to achieve decent performance in certain situations; and that's even if you don't bother doing any optimization or compression (which also means you will max out the hard drive writes to try and lower CPU usage). Add to that that PD probably rendered graphics with the CELL as much as possible, and it gets even worse; not to mention the upload times and the humongous hard drive hit as a result of a raw video dump. The reason that the Forza 4 upload feature only allowed such a short clip was likely because that was as long as they could spare before game performance tumbled because of using up some resource (probably RAM); and the reason that the PS4 and XBone allow the same thing with no problem is because the GPU in both shares the architecture with a chipset that has a video encoder built into the hardware itself. The track maker doesn't run when the races are happening.



That isn't to say that the amount of freedom provided by ColouredBadger's example above would be possible, since that is a fully realtime terraformer and track creator and means you do have to render the track while you are editing it; but allowing you to lay out a track area and then generating/rendering the track from that would be taxing insofar as the more complex of a track you designed, the longer the game would take to generate it for you to play on. The only relationship it has to the game itself when you play it is if the game allowed you to do too much with scenery or automatically placed itself in a way that wasn't efficient; but it isn't like GT6 doesn't already have problems with that when playing on the tracks PD made.

and a lot of free space to produce HD quality content
Even assuming PD didn't just have it generate the track in realtime like they seemed to in GT5 (which would mean the amount of space it would take up would be practically meaningless, just like race replays are; but PD truthfully might save the track as an actual file to increase performance so the track could be better broken down into chunks when driving on it), why would a user created track take up much more space than a PD-created track? It would be less efficiently designed than a PD track in terms of texture and scenery usage, but it would also almost certainly be of lower quality on an asset level as well simply because the amount of control wouldn't be the same.
 
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“We might start off by providing tracks that we’ve made to the users first – and then the editing user interface might come a little bit after that.”

I'd forgotten all about that part of the quote.

We've seen one track that may or may not have been a result of the course creator: Sierra. I'd imagine that if CC was near a releasable state they'd be banking the goodwill by releasing the best of their in-house created tracks for a few weeks while they polish up the last bits and pieces. People would go wild having a new track every week.

PD releasing a CC-made track is probably the first sign we're going to get that it's actually on it's way.

Of course they might just chuck it out with no announcement at all. But that would seem exceptionally silly. If you've got an easy way of making tracks, you might as well abuse it a bit first before handing over the keys.

P.S. One wonders if this is where their "track every month" guff went. They thought the CC was ready damn near release (as shown by other things Kaz has said), and so they thought they'd be able to push an in-house CC-made track every month.

Would have been a good trick, and would have worked too. If they hadn't put the cart before the horse and assumed that CC was going to be functional when it obviously wasn't.
 
P.S. One wonders if this is where their "track every month" guff went. They thought the CC was ready damn near release (as shown by other things Kaz has said), and so they thought they'd be able to push an in-house CC-made track every month

Good deduction, perhaps similarly why there was the 'delay' with getting Sierra out.
 
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