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- IceManPJN
- IceMan PJN
i think the headlights are bright enough they just aim down
This seems to be the problem, at least sort of. I think it's actually more of a problem with how Polyphony programmed the lighting to work. There seems to be nothing wrong with how far the lights actually illuminate, but they illuminate farther on more level ground and much, much less so on hills. In real life, if I drive up a hill at night my headlights still illuminate the same distance ahead of me just as they would on level ground, but not so in GT5. Let me illustrate with some pictures.
These are brights:

These are dims:

Both look to illuminate a reasonable area in front of you. However, these are on nearly level ground.
Now, here we are on an incline:

Observe how it now illuminates only like four or five feet in front of the car, as though the lights were now suddenly aiming sharply downward? On level ground they shine much farther ahead. The problem looks to be that Polyphony are incompetent and had the headlights shine level relative to the Earth at all times no matter what angle my car is at (up or down).
Imagine the beam shining horizontally no matter what angle your car was at and this seems to be what Polyphony has done. You can't see with headlights that are beaming horizontally if you're going up or down hills such that your headlights shine either straight down at the ground (when going uphill) or straight up into the sky (going downhill).

It's actually sort of hard to tell in the picture but it was easier to see on my television when I took the shot, but my tail lights actually illuminated a much larger area than my headlights were illuminating on this incline. The red glow of my tail lights covered the whole road all the way down to the bottom edge of the photo, while the head lights only covered an area barely large enough to fit two sofas.
On a side note, the time was set as late as I could set it so it was fully dark, but the photo mode insists on making it revert back to dusk. That's why the sky is more blue and the landscape easier to see. I couldn't find a way to make it stop reversing time in photo mode. I compensated a bit by adjusting the camera settings to take in a little less light (I forget what the setting is called).
EDIT:
I wanted to elaborate on something mentioned early into the thread. Admittedly, I haven't read most of the 300+ replies here, so if it's been covered then I apologize, but....
Have you ever tried driving 150 mph at night?
I've driven 60 on dark country roads with my high beams on, with nice headlights, and it's pretty hard to see. At 150 you outdrive your lights pretty darn easily.
At 150mph you are going faster than the lightbeams coming out from the front of your car at roughly 3 x 10^8 m/s?
Some darn twisted logic there.
Okay, here's the thing about outrunning/overdriving your headlights. Yes, light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Overdriving your headlights doesn't mean that you're driving faster than the light can travel or almost as fast as the light can travel, or anything along those lines at all. What it means is that you're headlights only illuminate a limited area ahead of you, and if you're traveling fast enough that you don't have enough time to react once something comes into view, you're outdriving your headlights.
For example, let's say that your headlights are enabling you to see 200 feet (61 meters) ahead of you, but you're traveling at 150 MPH. At 150 MPH you cover 220 feet per second. If something comes into view only 200 feet ahead of you but you're covering 220 feet per second, you have less than one second to respond accordingly. This gives you very, very little time to observe something, make a decision, and physically act on it, and at 150 MPH it probably wouldn't matter what you did because it's not as though you can dramatically alter your velocity in a fraction of a second.
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