Forza 5's woeful lighting and how it backfired

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TonyJZX

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I get that to make 1,080p@60fps they needed to cut corners. One of them was the static lighting.

This would not be bad if the lighting wasnt always the same.

eg. certain tracks seem to always be at exactly 4,30pm on an afternoon where the light always shines into your eyes.

Thing is if you always drive this track and its always in your eyes at that corner, then the effect is lost.

I would rather they go back to the Forza 4 model which doesnt pretend to have fancy lighting.

I dont ask for wet or night racing because this is obviously beyond Turn 10's understanding much like PD's sound and damage model and Evolution's drive model but I hope Turn 10 either fix this in Forza 6 or dont do it at all.
 
I get the feeling you don't know what static means this is from Google's built in dictionary:
"lacking in movement, action, or change, especially in a way viewed as undesirable or uninteresting."

That means the light will always be the same in every corner. Now it's personal opinion but I like that some corners there is a glare in your face I feel that is missing from GT6. Do I wish they had different time ala FM4? Yeah of course I can use that to check my paint colors are right and it makes photos more interesting. Do they have to do it? In my opinion no, I'd rather then focus on the, uh, driving... I also hope they do not do it at all like you suggest since I'd rather be able to see where I am going and if they don't do it at all you will be looking out a windscreen at pure black.
 
You're talking about:

* A launch title. (This directly affected the lighting team at Turn 10.)

* Built in less than two years. (This directly affected the development time of the lighting team.)

* Brand new hardware and built on a SDK that pre-dates the consoles launch. (this directly affected the development time and available performance of the lighting team.)

* Not built on the API the hardware was designed to utilize(DX12). (This directly affected the available features, development time and available performance for the lighting team.)

* Built with completely revamped and rebuilt sound, graphical, lighting and physics engine. (This directly affected the development time and performance available for the lighting team.)

* Most cars(by a huge margin) ever in a launch racing game. (The lighting team had to work in sub-surfacing scattering for every car and built the lighting engine for the vehicles.)

* Most tracks ever in a launch racing game. (The lighting team had to integrate the new lighting engine into every track.)

* Most tracks are laser-scanned, the first time in the franchises history.

* Featuring Nurburgring, the first laser-scanned version of the track in a game... ever.

* Not to mention sub-surface scattering on all cars at all times.

You make it sound as if this game was a end of a console generation title with a five year development time. For the time given to them and the challenges they had to face Forza 5 was a amazing effort.
 
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I love all of the things in your list that have nothing to do with the game's lighting engine being what it is.

It's called game development and if you knew how it worked you'd know that everything I listed has everything to do with the lighting engine.

Let's do a breakdown:

1) Brand new hardware, this takes away development time as they have to build the game from scratch for the new hardware. This restricts both time of development and overall performance of the title.

2) Pre-launch SDK, this makes development incredibly hard as the SDK is rapidly changing but is still incredibly crude. This restricts both time of development and overall performance of the title.

3) API not able to directly utilize hardware, not only does this make it harder for the SDK to utilize the hardware it takes away potential performance. This restricts both time of development and overall performance of the title.

4) Engines all have to be rebuilt or revamped, this takes a ton of time and effort but also restricts innovation and creativity. This restricts both time of development and overall performance of the title.

I could go on but hopefully by now you get the idea.

Game development is simple, it's a combination of development time and sacrificing features that you wanted to be in the game. If you want A, B and C in a title but only have development time for A and B.... well C isn't going to happen. It doesn't make the developers lazy it is just being realistic and staying within reachable goals for the projects.

If Turn 10 had the development time and performance needed to have dynamic day/night cycle than it would have it.

But hey, what the hell do I know. I've only been following Turn 10 and Forza since a year before the first Forza Motorsport and following game development for nearly two decades.
 
It's called game development and if you knew how it worked you'd know that everything I listed has everything to do with the lighting engine.
If you knew how it worked you wouldn't have doubled down with how much you're talking out of your ass.





How many of the car modelers worked on programming the lighting engine? How about the track modelers? The guys who used the laser scanners on the Nurburgring. Were they the ones who were working on the lighting engine? The sound producers. They do the lighting engine? You listed all of those things as applying in this context, so you clearly seem to think "game development", as you've termed it, is omni-disciplinary. You want to put a bunch of qualifiers on why Forza 5 doesn't need to be as good as people expected it to be, put reasoning that actually applies to the discussion rather than just a fanboy checklist of why Forza 5 is so great.
 
If you knew how it worked you wouldn't have doubled down with how much you're talking out of your ass.

Hah... okay. I've only echoed what developers such as Cliff Bleszinski have echoed about game development.

Game development is a fight between what you want to do and what you have time to do.

How many of the car modelers worked on programming the lighting engine?

They were busy working on the largest amount of cars ever in a launch title.

How about the track modelers? The guys who used the laser scanners on the Nurburgring.

They were busy creating the most tracks ever in a launch title with the first ever laser-scanned Nurburgring.

Were they the ones who were working on the lighting engine? The sound producers. They do the lighting engine?

They were busy rebuilding the sound engine for a launch title on new hardware with a brand new dedicated audio chip called SHAPE.

You want to put a bunch of qualifiers on why Forza 5 doesn't need to be as good as people expected it to be, put reasoning that actually applies to the discussion rather than just a fanboy checklist of why Forza 5 is so great.

Thanks for proving my point.

The team at Turn 10 that worked on the lighting engine at Forza were only so big with so much time to build what they did for Forza 5.

They built a brand new lighting engine on a brand new piece of hardware, with a crude SDK that constantly changed, a API that is basically a mutant of DX11 and DX12 and did sub-surface scattering(part of the lighting engine) for the first time in any racing game and this limited their available performance development time for Forza 5.

This isn't a fanboy check list, it's a list of known facts that affected the overall result of the product.
 
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Hah... okay. I've only echoed what developers such as Cliff Bleszinski have echoed about game development.
I'm even less impressed with your alleged secondhand knowledge on the intricacies of overall game development than I am with your alleged secondhand knowledge of the inner workings of Turn 10 from 2011 to 2013.

Game development is a fight between what you want to do and what you have time to do.
Good thing I never said otherwise, and bad thing that you brought up things that barely (and rarely) factor in to feature inclusion and development; which is what the thread is about.


Hence:
I love all of the things in your list that have nothing to do with the game's lighting engine being what it is.




They were busy working on the largest amount of cars ever in a launch title.
The hint is that they, meaning the car modelers, had nothing to do with the creation of the lighting engine; so you bringing up how many cars Turn 10 made in a thread criticizing the lighting engine for FM5 is irrelevant.

They were busy creating the most tracks ever in a launch title with the first ever laser-scanned Nurburgring.
The hint is that they, meaning the track modelers, had nothing to do with the creation of the lighting engine; so you bringing up how many tracks Turn 10 made in a thread criticizing the lighting engine for FM5 is irrelevant.


And even ignoring the meaningless buzzword that "laser scanning" has become in the past few years, it would be the first ever promoted laser-scanned Nurburgring; assuming the oft-rumored factoid that PD uses proprietary (and potentially outdated) laser scanning equipment ever since the BMW Virtual Drive demo of 2004 is true.

They were busy rebuilding the sound engine for a launch title on new hardware with a brand new dedicated audio chip called SHAPE.
The hint is that they, meaning the people mixing/producing the sound recordings and/or the sound engine (since there is probably a lot of overlap in that particular field since sound engineering can be such a broad net), had nothing to do with the creation of the lighting engine; so you bringing it up in a thread criticizing the lighting engine for FM5 is irrelevant.

Thanks for proving my point.
Your point was/is evidently that the Forza 5 lighting engine is the way it is because of development challenges making the title and getting it out to the launch of the Xbone. That point has no problem on its surface, and the way you've described it is perfectly believable without deep scrutiny that no one here has the ability to really provide. The problem is that you bolstered it with things that are completely irrelevant to the topic of the quality of the Forza 5 lighting engine, then doubled down on those things that were completely irrelevant to the Forza 5 lighting engine by claiming it all fell under the nebulous concept of "game development", and have now posted a third time (with a followup edit of your first post) with the implication that those things that are completely irrelevant to the quality of the Forza 5 lighting engine are still relevant to the quality of the Forza 5 lighting engine because.


Hence:
I love all of the things in your list that have nothing to do with the game's lighting engine being what it is.


Now, if you're going to go off the handle and take that to mean that I just don't know anything about "game development," that's really your problem. I mean, we can look at your edits:
(The lighting team had to work in sub-surfacing scattering for every car and built the lighting engine for the vehicles.)
That's not how game engines work. They don't create new lighting engines for each individual car, and any visible errors would be attempted to be corrected by the modeling team before the programmers got involved.

(The lighting team had to integrate the new lighting engine into every track.)
That's not how game engines work. They don't create new lighting engines for each individual track (even the tracks in GT5 ported from earlier titles that had static lighting still used the same process for displaying shadows and light sources as the tracks with active time change built specifically for GT5; just with the light being at a fixed location), and any visible errors would be attempted to be corrected by the modeling team before the programmers got involved.



But I'd say it's pretty self-evident:
This isn't a fanboy check list
That it became one when you started throwing out things that Forza 5 did that had nothing to do with the thing being discussed.
 
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While you're jumping my crap; my original post, with the "fanboy checklist, was just to represent how large of a project this game was and how much it accomplished in such a small amount of time. The list itself was never meant to purely only explain why the game had the lighting engine it ended up with.

Calling a list of facts for the ultimate outcome of a game a "fanboy checklist" is incredibly immature and only shows you're own underlying agenda.



It's hilarious how you manage to interpret all my comments in the wrong way.

I never said each car has its own lighting engine, only that sub-surface scattering was featured across every car with multiple materials.

I never said each track has its own lighting engine but each track is running on unique settings and I'm pretty sure the guys that worked on the lighting had a part in properly setting this up.
 
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i realise this is a game rushed to market for that Xmas 2013 launch with less content less cars less everything

i understand the pressures

do me the favor of calling it 'Forza 5 Prologue' and dont charge full price if you're delivering half a game

thing is you can ask the customer 'please understand' and the customer will understand however its a big disingenous to then ask the customer to pay the same price as Forza 4 which few people would call 'incomplete'

i suppose i can now await people's justifications for this...
 
I've got a few hundred hours into FM5 and I still play it almost every day. I have no qualms justifying the $60.
I would have to agree with this. While the quantity of things are down this iteration, the quality is sky-high this time around. Even after FH2 came out, I got rid of that fairly quick and went back to FM5. I more then got my money worth from this game, and its definitely worth its price tag.
 
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I would have to agree with this. While the quantity of things are down this iteration, the quality is sky-high this time around. Even after FH2 came out, I got rid of that fairly quick and went back to FM5. I more then got my money worth from this game, and its definitely worth its price tag.
I did the same thing with FH2. I tried picking it back up a couple of weeks ago to drive the new MX-5, but I put it back down after about 30 mins. I'll probably be doing the same with the F&F expansion pack that was released today.
 
Variable time of day would've been great but the lighting through the trees when blasting down the long straight in Road Atlanta is nice.
 
So we have members throwing the 'fanboy' insult around and another member who didn't bother to read the AUP they agreed to follow when they joined (otherwise they would be using capital letters correctly when posting).

One more chance will be given to this thread and those posting in it, post following the AUP or this thread will get locked and warnings will be handed out.
 
I've got a few hundred hours into FM5 and I still play it almost every day. I have no qualms justifying the $60.
Just like me, except for GT6.

But on-topic, I don't find the lighting all that bad. I'll admit that the lighting is off, just like GT's sounds, but to try to boast that it's "the best-looking racing game" is wrong. Just my 2 cents.
 
Just like me, except for GT6.

But on-topic, I don't find the lighting all that bad. I'll admit that the lighting is off, just like GT's sounds, but to try to boast that it's "the best-looking racing game" is wrong. Just my 2 cents.
What's wrong with people having that opinion?
 
What's wrong with people having that opinion?

its out of step with people who have eyes

i cant stand Driveclub and I play F5 just about every day but you'd be hard pressed to tell me DC isnt the best looking driving "game" out there right now

hell have you seen Forza Horizon 2?
 
its out of step with people who have eyes

i cant stand Driveclub and I play F5 just about every day but you'd be hard pressed to tell me DC isnt the best looking driving "game" out there right now

hell have you seen Forza Horizon 2?
Considering it came out about a year before those, would it be out of thought to consider it, at the time it was available?
 
ehh look i agree that the GFX is better than I expect and I actually will race with a lot less GFX happily if the game actually makes up for it

but put it this way, i fired up Horizon ONE Fast and Furious free edition just now and some of the clever way Playground utilises graphics on the 360 impresses me more than Forza 5's effort...

Forza 5s gfx is there, its ok but i wouldnt say it wows me in any particular way except to say that its sharp and you can drive it but there's nothing great about it nor is it a standard bearer for 'next gen'
 
ehh look i agree that the GFX is better than I expect and I actually will race with a lot less GFX happily if the game actually makes up for it

but put it this way, i fired up Horizon ONE Fast and Furious free edition just now and some of the clever way Playground utilises graphics on the 360 impresses me more than Forza 5's effort...

Forza 5s gfx is there, its ok but i wouldnt say it wows me in any particular way except to say that its sharp and you can drive it but there's nothing great about it nor is it a standard bearer for 'next gen'
I agree, Horizon 2 is a beautiful game. That goes to show what you can accomplish when you sacrifice frame rate. Photomode shots in the rain are just ridiculous.
 
With regards to the lighting, T10 focused on keeping a constant 60fps; which they do for every Forza Motorsport game. This is the only reason they havent given us dynamic time or weather in the FM series, but they have given us night before in FM1.



As you can see from that video, it isn't because T10 cant give us those things. It is because they wont, as they always want to hit that 60 FPS mark. If you check out some of my posting history regarding this stuff, you will see some very long posts detailing why doing night racing and weather can impact on performance. A lot of it has to deal with particle effects and volumetric lighting, which are both massive resource hogs.

For FM6 they could do what they did in FM4 if they decide to stick with static lighting, and give us two versions of the same track at a different time of day. but none of us have no idea what they are planning at the moment for FM6. It is possible they could have put night and weather in FM6, it is possible that they haven't. A 50/50 chance of it happening either way. We will find out though when E3 rolls around, because if they have night or weather racing in FM6; they will use it as a main selling point of the game.
 
Am I the only one who doesn't care about dynamic time of day? I'd rather have 3 beautiful baked in times, that allow for better graphical enhancements and more headroom for physics.

Morning, Afternoon, and Night all with beautiful effects would be better (imo) then dynamic tune of day that only looks nice at sunrise and sunset?

Just out of curiosity, I wonder how many people use the dynamic time of day and run at Noon? Very few I suppose as its bland as hell... So the hours of between 11-2 and probably the least ones used (as they are the least beautiful) and therefore most will run morning, late afternoon and night...

Would god interesting to look into...
 
two or three fixed times would be fine

however i question how come a 8Gb quad core Xbox cant do it while a 256mb ps3 can...
 
however i question how come a 8Gb quad core Xbox cant do it while a 256mb ps3 can...

It is not a question of the Xbox ones ability to render those effects, just the fact that T10 do not want to implement anything that could potentially remove that 60FPS. We all know the Xbox one can do night and weather, just like the 360 could before it, and the original Xbox before that. T10 have always had the ability to give us weather and time of day.

Also the CPU in the xbox one is a mobile based octa-core, so 8 CPU cores. It is an 8 core tablet CPU, with a core clock speed to match. It also has the GPU housed on the same die, which makes it an APU (accelerated processing unit). In my opinion, one of the worse CPU's to use in a games console. The PS4 has the same CPU, but its GPU is slightly stronger.
 
For the money they charged, the One should've had a solid pc processor in place of Kinect, as that's now an afterthought for developers.
 
It is not a question of the Xbox ones ability to render those effects, just the fact that T10 do not want to implement anything that could potentially remove that 60FPS. We all know the Xbox one can do night and weather, just like the 360 could before it, and the original Xbox before that. T10 have always had the ability to give us weather and time of day.
And the fact that T10 had major time constraints and PG needed to help out to get Forza 5 ready for launch of the xbox.
 
i like it how this whole generation is summed up as "lowered expectations"

we dont expect rain or snow or night or dynamic lighting, just different fixed times of the day, and its not the fault of the underpowered hardware but rather the time constraints of the developer...

i'm wondering what excuses we will be hearing when forza 6 comes around
 
HCK
Am I the only one who doesn't care about dynamic time of day? I'd rather have 3 beautiful baked in times, that allow for better graphical enhancements and more headroom for physics.

Morning, Afternoon, and Night all with beautiful effects would be better (imo) then dynamic tune of day that only looks nice at sunrise and sunset?

Just out of curiosity, I wonder how many people use the dynamic time of day and run at Noon? Very few I suppose as its bland as hell... So the hours of between 11-2 and probably the least ones used (as they are the least beautiful) and therefore most will run morning, late afternoon and night...

Would god interesting to look into...
Personally I do care about both dynamic time of day and weather, both can and are key factors in racing (particularity endurance) and titles without it do lack something, no matter how good the rest of the title is.
 
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