Potential reasons for so few night and rain tracks?

[JTB10000]

Something that's been bugging me is why PD only chooses night and rain to be on a select few tracks, even since the GT5 days. Of course it's more work to illuminate buildings and other places, especially for city tracks, but surely that's an investment that would be worth the payoff right? And judging by the leisure pace at which PD releases their games, they don't have a mandated schedule to adhere to so they can take as much time as they want. It's an inconsistency they seem to be okay with and I don't really understand.

 

[Vspectra]

For rain they have to bake the lighting and cubemapped reflections for each time setting they make for the wet conditions. It just takes too much time.

 

[TonyJZX]

I do get the fact that the lighting is baked however that doesnt explain why they dont have any races that are SOLELY at night or rain.

There were sections of the missions with nurburgring at night.

We're not asking for dynamic weather... I mean that's just IMPOSSIBLE on current hardware obviously... you need to go back to Katuragi's PS3 for that!

 

[seadog777]

Driving a high speed car on a twisty track..... at night...... in the rain. 🤬 that for a game of soldiers!

 

[LeGeNd-1]

You can drive at night AND rain at Tokyo Central and East layouts. Granted it's not full on heavy rain like the midday one but still.

I've been wanting a FIA race at the night Nurb 24 for ages now. Anyone knows if we've ever had one? I only started doing Sport Mode since last year so I could've missed it earlier in the game's life.

 

[VBR]

Meanwhile in Assetto Corsa, fan made mods allow for dynamic weather & time of day on all tracks.

 

[MOPARbarrett5]

At this point I think the main reason is that PD is focusing mainly on GT7. Maybe it will have more tracks with rain and we already know it will include dynamic time so time switching from day to night seems like a logical step.

 

[Keith2324]

People can't drive in broad daylight and dry tracks and you want darkness and rain? Count me out!

 

[Sven Jurgens]

I do get the fact that the lighting is baked however that doesnt explain why they dont have any races that are SOLELY at night or rain.

There were sections of the missions with nurburgring at night.

We're not asking for dynamic weather... I mean that's just IMPOSSIBLE on current hardware obviously... you need to go back to Katuragi's PS3 for that!

Once in a blue moon you get a night time rain race, well just once. Tokyo at night in the rain, that was a good week!

8 months ago

You would think creating the baked in lighting and reflections would be an automatic process, but apparently PD doesn't work that way. Perhaps any people around the track need to be given umbrellas etc...

Mount Panorama shows up more often as a night race. Maybe next week, in 5 hours. There is no rain version but the dust at night is just as blinding as the spray from the rain.

 

[Scuderia Paul]

At this stage I expected to have quite a few more rainy circuits. I am amazed we didn't get Fuji Speedway and Suzuka for example.

Circuit de la Sarthe at night is surely a circuit that must have a night option but not in the opinion of PD. That was something I always wished to see added.

I can understand not getting rain as I have a strong feeling that this circuit will be thoroughly remodelled for GT7, as it is in need of being brought up to date, and that PD deemed it a waste of resources. Perhaps the omission of night is down to the same reason.

 

[Farnell42]

Maybe it has to do with balancing for Group 4 and Group 1 races? For those classes a multitude of powertrain choices are available, and under rainy conditions, the race will obviously be skewed in favor of the 4WD and FWD cars. Regarding night races, it may have to do with the FIA as well; all GT4 races run at day.

 

[zzz_pt]

Meanwhile in Assetto Corsa, fan made mods allow for dynamic weather & time of day on all tracks.

With what cost for performance? Maybe it looks decent but only on high end PCs. Even then, I doubt it reaches the levels of GT.

For instance, Pc2 had dynamic weather and tod but at least on console the performance was atrocious. I much rather have what we have in GTS. Not perfect but at least it doesn't put me off the game. In Pc2 I ended up only racing with sunny weather or no rain if there were lots of cars on track. At night it was even worse, especially the aliasing.

Hopefully GT7 (and the PS5) can bring back dynamnic weather and tod on GTSport visual standards, at the least.

 

[VBR]

With what cost for performance? Maybe it looks decent but only on high end PCs. Even then, I doubt it reaches the levels of GT.

I don't know the performance cost, not tried it myself. AC was released in 2014, so it doesn't need a high end PC to run on. That said, I don't know about the weather & ToD mod. My point was just that independent modders seem to be outperforming a 1st party studio.

Spoiler: Has seasonal changes as well, looks pretty good to me...

For instance, Pc2 had dynamic weather and tod but at least on console the performance was atrocious. I much rather have what we have in GTS. Not perfect but at least it doesn't put me off the game. In Pc2 I ended up only racing with sunny weather or no rain if there were lots of cars on track. At night it was even worse, especially the aliasing.

I tried the P CARS 2 demo & didn't like it. A friend of mine bought it recently & said it was awful, like going back to an Atari in the graphics department.

Hopefully GT7 (and the PS5) can bring back dynamnic weather and tod on GTSport visual standards, at the least.

Aye, here's hoping. 👍

 

[RACECAR]

I've been wanting a FIA race at the night Nurb 24 for ages now. Anyone knows if we've ever had one? I only started doing Sport Mode since last year so I could've missed it earlier in the game's life.

There was one last year (I want to say early june). Manufacturers race in GR.3 and it was at night. One of the worst races ever, which makes me question how sure you are to want it

 

[LeGeNd-1]

There was one last year (I want to say early june). Manufacturers race in GR.3 and it was at night. One of the worst races ever, which makes me question how sure you are to want it

I've been doing every event since May last year and can't remember it. Must be the year before or you got it mixed up with a daily race maybe? I remember a Daily C at night Bathurst which was a total carnage

 

[Stencedaddy]

I don't know the performance cost, not tried it myself. AC was released in 2014, so it doesn't need a high end PC to run on. That said, I don't know about the weather & ToD mod. My point was just that independent modders seem to be outperforming a 1st party studio.

Spoiler: Has seasonal changes as well, looks pretty good to me...

I tried the P CARS 2 demo & didn't like it. A friend of mine bought it recently & said it was awful, like going back to an Atari in the graphics department.



Aye, here's hoping. 👍

They are severely limited by the power of the ps4. Why do you think games with worse graphics have more weather options? They gotta give something up somewhere. You keep talking like PD cant do it or dont know how. They can they just dont have the power from the console and whats the point doing it now when gt7 is on the horizon.

 

[VBR]

They are severely limited by the power of the ps4. Why do you think games with worse graphics have more weather options? They gotta give something up somewhere. You keep talking like PD cant do it or dont know how. They can they just dont have the power from the console and whats the point doing it now when gt7 is on the horizon.

My post regarding AC was referring to the PC version, not the PS4 version.

 

[Stencedaddy]

My post regarding AC was referring to the PC version, not the PS4 version.

And what exactly does that have to do with gts weather on ps4? Comparing Pc custom mods to ps4 devs who are more limited in the power they have to work with. Doesnt make sense to me to compare them

 

[VBR]

And what exactly does that have to do with gts weather on ps4? Comparing Pc custom mods to ps4 devs who are more limited in the power they have to work with. Doesnt make sense to me to compare them

There is enough power to have wet tracks in the game, because...err...they already have wet tracks in the game. Saying it's because of a lack of power doesn't make sense. I was merely pointing out that individual modders in AC are outperforming PD in this regard, i.e. adding wet tracks to the game, which they are. Also, PD managed to have many more wet tracks with ToD in GT5/6 on PS3, & PS4 is ten times as powerful as PS3. They also had a few wet weather tracks with reflection mapping on PS2, which had even less power than the PS3. Why don't PD add more wet tracks? Who knows! But it has little to nothing to do with power requirements for the aforementioned reasons.

 

[milehighmadd]

First comp race I did on ACC for PS4 was Suzuka at 12am in heavy rain...

The kool-aid is fresh.

 

[DaGiBUS]

The PS3 could do dynamic time and weather so I don’t see why the PS4 cannot do that.

 

[Donnced]

The PS3 could do dynamic time and weather so I don’t see why the PS4 cannot do that.

IBM Cell power (PS3) Vs. AMD Jaguar low consumption laptop CPU (known as PS4 bottleneck)

Games as AC, ACC and the 2 Pcars with their phisycs engine takes a real hit on the CPU, and dynamic climate and day-night cycle doesn't help either.

GT Sport also had to offer as a Sony first party a PSVR compatibility, thing that needs really stable 60fps even on base PS4...and that's already a good limiter to make more rain tracks/dynamic climate etc.
And Sony policy don't give Devs permission to make a PSVR compatibility "only on" PS4 Pro.

Older GT games weren't able to give stable framerate in all situations either.

 

[Sven Jurgens]

IBM Cell power (PS3) Vs. AMD Jaguar low consumption laptop CPU (known as PS4 bottleneck)

Games as AC, ACC and the 2 Pcars with their phisycs engine takes a real hit on the CPU, and dynamic climate and day-night cycle doesn't help either.

GT Sport also had to offer as a Sony first party a PSVR compatibility, thing that needs really stable 60fps even on base PS4...and that's already a good limiter to make more rain tracks/dynamic climate etc.
And Sony policy don't give Devs permission to make a PSVR compatibility "only on" PS4 Pro.

Older GT games weren't able to give stable framerate in all situations either.

Nah it's purely a design decision to put priority on pristine graphics, to have the best (baked in) lighting. Dirt Rally could do rain in VR:

Granted there are no other cars on the track, yet GTS doesn't even try.

GTS could do everything in PSVR when using the ps3 low quality car models, yet I guess there was no budget left to expand on the simple time trial setup (with limited time of day selections)

Dynamic lighting impacts visual quality as well as dynamic weather. Hence we only got a few static weather tracks (with baked in lighting and reflections) and is the reason why GTS sits at 103 GB. Next gen the game should be a lot smaller and a bit more difficult (can't rely on shadows for braking points anymore )

 

[TBR 427]

For rain they have to bake the lighting and cubemapped reflections for each time setting they make for the wet conditions. It just takes too much time.

I do get the fact that the lighting is baked however that doesnt explain why they dont have any races that are SOLELY at night or rain.

Lightmap and Light Probe baking is more or less automated once they're mapped out and placed*. It's likely that >90% of the probe positions and lightmap UVs made for daytime conditions would be suitable for nighttime capture. They'd just leave some threadripper monster build machine on over the weekend.

*Obviously some things like the sharper road reflection systems would need to be verified / tweaked, but again that's a one-time thing that should then work for all subsequent rain conditions.


As for why you can't just blend between 2 sets of lighting? Why can't you have something halfway between those?

Think: the equation for that is (Lighting A / 2) + (Lighting B / 2).

Notice that you'd have to have both sets of lighting data in memory?

Think: remember how the 24h dynamic lighting variants of tracks in GT6 seemed to have lower-quality lighting than the fixed-time tracks....Now you know why!

Maybe it has to do with balancing for Group 4 and Group 1 races? For those classes a multitude of powertrain choices are available, and under rainy conditions, the race will obviously be skewed in favor of the 4WD and FWD cars. Regarding night races, it may have to do with the FIA as well; all GT4 races run at day.

Very good point! In Gr3 there's only a few outliers such as the Alfa and old GT1 cars, whereas with Gr4 there's the Alfa and GT86 (super-light MR/FR), all FWD cars (FWD), as well as the Megane Trophy (super-low polar moment, short wheelbase), and several larger FR muscle cars, usually with wheelbases that differ greatly.

The counter-point to the performance you mention is that MR cars should be able to get better drive out of corners; in the wet race at Red Bull Ring last time, the MR cars were flying out of the first, second, and last corners. In Gr4 though, with straights that long and average corner speeds that low, I can imagine the top speed (least affected on that track by rain in Gr4) of the FWD cars would make them even more unbeatable than normal...

IBM Cell power (PS3) Vs. AMD Jaguar low consumption laptop CPU (known as PS4 bottleneck)

The bottleneck for these conditions is GPU-side. And that'd probably the biggest differentiatior in PR4 vs PS4 Pro; while the Pro might be able to handle it fairly well, the OG ps4 might struggle a bit too much to give a confortable framerate.

 

[Donnced]

Nah it's purely a design decision to put priority on pristine graphics, to have the best (baked in) lighting. Dirt Rally could do rain in VR:

Granted there are no other cars on the track, yet GTS doesn't even try.

GTS could do everything in PSVR when using the ps3 low quality car models, yet I guess there was no budget left to expand on the simple time trial setup (with limited time of day selections)

Dynamic lighting impacts visual quality as well as dynamic weather. Hence we only got a few static weather tracks (with baked in lighting and reflections) and is the reason why GTS sits at 103 GB. Next gen the game should be a lot smaller and a bit more difficult (can't rely on shadows for braking points anymore )

Dirt Rally in vr has only half car rendered,if you look to the rear..no inside is there, also, don't forget that Dirt Rally goes on the old ps3 gen Evo 3.0 engine... Dirt 4 and Dirt Rally 2.0 didn't get vr support on console and goes on the new gen Evo 4.0 engine.

A GT6 could probably work in full vr on a base PS4,but not sure,look driveclub, they got to remake the game triming night , dynamic climate, number of cars , graphic details to get 60fps stable enough on base PS4 to offer the PSVR version.

Dirt Rally 2 is also near 100gb and isn't so powerful in graphics and car details as GTS,so I don't think that the few rainy tracks and baked illumination is the only culprit to weight 103gb

Lightmap and Light Probe baking is more or less automated once they're mapped out and placed*. It's likely that >90% of the probe positions and lightmap UVs made for daytime conditions would be suitable for nighttime capture. They'd just leave some threadripper monster build machine on over the weekend.

*Obviously some things like the sharper road reflection systems would need to be verified / tweaked, but again that's a one-time thing that should then work for all subsequent rain conditions.


As for why you can't just blend between 2 sets of lighting? Why can't you have something halfway between those?

Think: the equation for that is (Lighting A / 2) + (Lighting B / 2).

Notice that you'd have to have both sets of lighting data in memory?

Think: remember how the 24h dynamic lighting variants of tracks in GT6 seemed to have lower-quality lighting than the fixed-time tracks....Now you know why!




Very good point! In Gr3 there's only a few outliers such as the Alfa and old GT1 cars, whereas with Gr4 there's the Alfa and GT86 (super-light MR/FR), all FWD cars (FWD), as well as the Megane Trophy (super-low polar moment, short wheelbase), and several larger FR muscle cars, usually with wheelbases that differ greatly.

The counter-point to the performance you mention is that MR cars should be able to get better drive out of corners; in the wet race at Red Bull Ring last time, the MR cars were flying out of the first, second, and last corners. In Gr4 though, with straights that long and average corner speeds that low, I can imagine the top speed (least affected on that track by rain in Gr4) of the FWD cars would make them even more unbeatable than normal...



The bottleneck for these conditions is GPU-side. And that'd probably the biggest differentiatior in PR4 vs PS4 Pro; while the Pro might be able to handle it fairly well, the OG ps4 might struggle a bit too much to give a confortable framerate.

The CPU on PS4 Pro is the same as base PS4,just a bit overclocked, GPU is a bit better on PS4PRO and has a bit more of ram,but the CPU is still the bottleneck on both consoles

You can have a very good CPU to make the calculation,but if the GPU isn't good enough you can't exprime the hardware enough.

Same happens reversed...you can have a great GPU,but if CPU isn't campable enough you have the same problem as above.

That's one of the reasons Sony did pay more attention towards the CPU for the next PS5 console.

 

[Sven Jurgens]

Dirt Rally in vr has only half car rendered,if you look to the rear..no inside is there, also, don't forget that Dirt Rally goes on the old ps3 gen Evo 3.0 engine... Dirt 4 and Dirt Rally 2.0 didn't get vr support on console and goes on the new gen Evo 4.0 engine.

A GT6 could probably work in full vr on a base PS4,but not sure,look driveclub, they got to remake the game triming night , dynamic climate, number of cars , graphic details to get 60fps stable enough on base PS4 to offer the PSVR version.

Dirt Rally 2 is also near 100gb and isn't so powerful in graphics and car details as GTS,so I don't think that the few rainy tracks and baked illumination is the only culprit to weight 103gb

DriveClub had to do a lot more starting at 30fps, yet they got the whole game working with all cars on track on base ps4 just before the studio got shut down :/

GTS is already at 60 fps with baked lighting and can render 2 fully detailed cars in VR. Swallow that pride PD and use ps2 models to make the rest of the game playable in VR... I don't know why rain isn't available in VR but maybe the spray didn't look good enough in stereo 3D or the rain stood out being a 2D after effect.

Dirt Rally 2 most likely also has baked in lighting. I don't remember it being dynamic (I deleted the game since no VR coming and kinda sucks with a controller anyway)

The CPU on PS4 Pro is the same as base PS4,just a bit overclocked, GPU is a bit better on PS4PRO and has a bit more of ram,but the CPU is still the bottleneck on both consoles

You can have a very good CPU to make the calculation,but if the GPU isn't good enough you can't exprime the hardware enough.

Same happens reversed...you can have a great GPU,but if CPU isn't campable enough you have the same problem as above.

That's one of the reasons Sony did pay more attention towards the CPU for the next PS5 console.

Yep, here's hoping ps5 will offer GTS in full VR.

 

[LeGeNd-1]

Very good point! In Gr3 there's only a few outliers such as the Alfa and old GT1 cars, whereas with Gr4 there's the Alfa and GT86 (super-light MR/FR), all FWD cars (FWD), as well as the Megane Trophy (super-low polar moment, short wheelbase), and several larger FR muscle cars, usually with wheelbases that differ greatly.

The counter-point to the performance you mention is that MR cars should be able to get better drive out of corners; in the wet race at Red Bull Ring last time, the MR cars were flying out of the first, second, and last corners. In Gr4 though, with straights that long and average corner speeds that low, I can imagine the top speed (least affected on that track by rain in Gr4) of the FWD cars would make them even more unbeatable than normal...

FF Gr.4's will have just as much problem in the rain as RWD cars (FR moreso than MR). 4WD cars will be the OP ones in the rain and there is nothing BOP could do to balance that (not unless they have a 1 race specific BOP just for wet conditions).

In Gr.3 because all cars are RWD the differences are less, but MR and NA cars still have advantage over FR and turbo cars.