Spa Astronomy effects!

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Something I like about the night sky at Spa is that in Belgium the sky is never completly black, there is always a orange tint because of the ridiculous amount of street lights we have here.

Just look at BionicDerp's screenshot, you can clearly see the orange tint just above the trees. I like that sort of detail !

BionicDerp

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I hadn't really noticed the astronomy effects up to this point really, but I just recently did the 24 Minutes of Spa race, and it really, really gets dark round that track. I ran out of fuel coming into sector 3 so I had a long time of coasting round to admire the skies :p it really is the little things like this that make GT for me. Not just the headlines like cars and tracks, etc.
 
Jedi2016
Like what, pointing a camera at the sky? There's no reason to try to "simulate" any of that, it's just a skybox. Sure, you can set rotation and such based on location and time of day, but that's not exactly difficult, anyone can go to Google and download a hundred programs that can do that for free. And I suppose you could waste a few cycles locking down the position of the visible planets (single points in any event), but I doubt anyone would notice. And nothing would change going to the moon... the perspective is the same (if you think the distance from the Earth to the moon is even remotely significant to anything, you know nothing about astronomy).
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This attention to detail is lost on you. I am willing.to.put money on thw fact the sky scape will change to the time of year. All you xbox fanboys can.put that in your pipe and smoke it for all i care.
 
I still don't understand why it's in the game. With all the light pollution that is around raceways at night you can hardly see the moon and you can simply forget seeing any star.
 
Somehow I got the impression that the game would have real time weather and constellations like MS Flight Simulator for instance. So if it was raining at Spa in RL, it would rain in the game too. If it was cloudy at night in RL, no stars in the game. Crazy how I got that.
 
dj-smurph
This attention to detail is lost on you. I am willing.to.put money on thw fact the sky scape will change to the time of year. All you xbox fanboys can.put that in your pipe and smoke it for all i care.
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It's a very easy piece of "attention to detail"... and we haven't actually checked it yet.

I can see trees in the distance in the daytime, is that superb attention to detail or just what you'd expect? To see a realistic sky at night is also what I'd expect. I really feel that a lot of people got into the hype of "astronomic simulation" when in fact nothing of the sort has been undertaken.
 
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To be honest, though I do like the stars and what not, do Mt. Panorama and the Nurb really get that dark enough to see stars that clearly? Le Mans I'm doubtful because it's pretty lit up at least around the pit areas and spectator seats.
 
sumbrownkid
To be honest, though I do like the stars and what not, do Mt. Panorama and the Nurb really get that dark enough to see stars that clearly? Le Mans I'm doubtful because it's pretty lit up at least around the pit areas and spectator seats.
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I haven't been to Mount Panorama at night time (I have stayed overnight in Bathurst, never took notice of the sky though) but the township of Bathurst itself is a rural town, a few hours out of Sydney. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could see the stars that clearly.
 
xSNAKEx
The stars in the moon missions are also accurate.
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I thought I'd mention that I did a moon buggy jump today that had me looking straight up, and I saw the Earth. With all the goodies that PD has put into GT6, giving us the ability to virtually be on the Moon and be able to see Earth, if briefly, that was the one that really seized my emotions.
 
I think it looks good but I can't get past the fact that it looks like another thing to add onto the features list on the website. And for the ones saying that most of the locals don't get dark enough to have the ability to see stars, you are wrong. Most of the tracks in GT6 are build around rural areas. I hope you notice those giant trees around the tracks.
 
Hey guys. I also think it looks good at Night and it looks incredible watching time go by on the track but i noticed that there are no stars in Goodwood and Special Stage Route X which is shown in the "Start Your Engine" trailer and the GT6 intro movie... Does anyone know why or will it come later..??
 
dj-smurph
I am willing.to.put money on thw fact the sky scape will change to the time of year. All you xbox fanboys can.put that in your pipe and smoke it for all i care.
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Change to the time of year? You really think so? That's some serious computing power required to, you know... rotate the skybox a few degrees. That would be the forté of the programs I mentioned earlier. People have been doing that kind of calculation since before we had paper. I don't think it's in any way feasible that PD would sink ANY kind of money into that sort of thing. You give one artist a week or so to make the skybox, and you give one programmer a day or two to figure out how to fit the adjustments into the software, that's all it takes. You could probably fit the next thirty years worth of changes into a couple kilobytes of text data. Hell, there's not even any need to calculate anything, it's already done. It's been done for millennia.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid, man. PD isn't reinventing the wheel on making skyboxes, they just happened to do something that most devs don't bother with: They actually made their skybox accurate. That's all. There's nothing huge about that, and certainly nothing to go sounding trumpets about.

And who are these "fanboys" you're talking about? I don't own any Microsoft products except Windows 7. I've been here since before GTP was even on the map. So you can **** right off with your assumptions and get your **** straight before you start slinging mud.
 
A lot of people are sucked in by the "astronomical calculation" element, even now. They won't accept that we've been tracking the stars for thousands of years. There are probably hundreds of free-to-access APIs from institutes across the world from which you could download accurate starmaps for any terrestrial coordinates on any date. As @Jedi2016 says, then you just render it into the right place in the skybox.

Most programmers could figure this out in a very short period of time. For that reason it seems unlikely that GT6 is doing any calculation at all ;)
 
The stars really do look good, when I first heard about PD making the effort to model the night time skies to this degree, I really thought 'what a waste of time'. Especially when that time could have been spent on sounds, more premiums, etc, etc.

I stand by my opinion that PD should have looked at other things, but seriously, you can't deny how good those night skies look now! :) Another great place to view them is the start of Mountain Straight at Mt Panorama, it looks really good.
 
Bathurst looks good too at night. Anyone having troubles seeing stars at night , be sure to check weather report - cloudy sky :D
 
jlmcmillan1978
The stars really do look good, when I first heard about PD making the effort to model the night time skies to this degree, I really thought 'what a waste of time'. Especially when that time could have been spent on sounds, more premiums, etc, etc.

I stand by my opinion that PD should have looked at other things, but seriously, you can't deny how good those night skies look now! :) Another great place to view them is the start of Mountain Straight at Mt Panorama, it looks really good.
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I understand what you are saying but i really dont think that the mapping off the stars really took that much time. Like i said previously, its not like they pushed things like sound and physics aside just because they added a skybox. :)
 
Suggested trying this out with my friend @superstreet556 last night, was rather nice at night (irl) with all lights off, not as 'over-bearing' as it felt to me as Panorama did before, will probably try Mt.P again and see if it's changed any.
 
Jedi2016
Change to the time of year? You really think so? That's some serious computing power required to, you know... rotate the skybox a few degrees. That would be the forté of the programs I mentioned earlier. People have been doing that kind of calculation since before we had paper. I don't think it's in any way feasible that PD would sink ANY kind of money into that sort of thing. You give one artist a week or so to make the skybox, and you give one programmer a day or two to figure out how to fit the adjustments into the software, that's all it takes. You could probably fit the next thirty years worth of changes into a couple kilobytes of text data. Hell, there's not even any need to calculate anything, it's already done. It's been done for millennia.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid, man. PD isn't reinventing the wheel on making skyboxes, they just happened to do something that most devs don't bother with: They actually made their skybox accurate. That's all. There's nothing huge about that, and certainly nothing to go sounding trumpets about.

And who are these "fanboys" you're talking about? I don't own any Microsoft products except Windows 7. I've been here since before GTP was even on the map. So you can **** right off with your assumptions and get your **** straight before you start slinging mud.
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Whilst I agree that it's not "that hard" to use the existing data for this modeling, what is impressive is the way the lighting is dependent on latitude and longitude. The accuracy of the colours, especially during dawn and dusk, is very impressive. It's no doubt implemented as a look-up in-game, and there have been numerous "equations" based on say, a particular scattering model, that have been able to get close for decades, but it's still one of those things that's difficult to tune and get assets (e.g. textures) working in properly.

One thing about "APIs" and other pre-made solutions: they cost money. If you want to re-use it in another game, you have to pay again. It's likely that PD would code / work out as much of it as they can themselves and then only pay for the minimal they have to, i.e. the star map images themselves.

I still think the sky is too bright at night in GT6, though.
 
I've been searching for an "observatory place" and I found Mount Panorama at 0:00 pretty good.

You can see the Orion Constellation, the Great Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the two Magellanic Clouds (galaxies)

In this place you'll be able to see also Omega Centauri but in another hour. Didnt try.
 
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NixxxoN
I've been searching for an "observatory place" and I found Mount Panorama at 0:00 pretty good.

You can see the Orion Constellation, the Great Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, and the Andromeda Galaxy.

In this place you'll be able to see also Omega Centauri but in another hour. Didnt try.
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Thats incredible!
 
I don't know if it's only me, but although the stars look indeed beautiful, I've noticed that the sky is kind of like a dome very close to the ground. It's more noticeable in tracks like Bathurst and Daytona. In the intro, you can even see light from the track reflecting in the "sky."
 
I read somewhere that they had modeled the moon for the astronomical simulation so well, that they decided to add the moonrover thingy, and I'm like WHAT!? Is there even a moon in the sky? I haven't seen one. And why the hell do you need the moon in 3d for that? And since when a 2d map on a rotating sphere is called a simulation? I bet they lost an unhealthy amount of time on that instead of let's say finishing the game.
 
NixxxoN
I've been searching for an "observatory place" and I found Mount Panorama at 0:00 pretty good.

You can see the Orion Constellation, the Great Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, and the Andromeda Galaxy.

In this place you'll be able to see also Omega Centauri but in another hour. Didnt try.
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Ah, yes; the Southern Hemisphere, a whole new sky (well, partly to largely new)! There is something other than an aesthetic interest for me after all. :)
 
Griffith500
Ah, yes; the Southern Hemisphere, a whole new sky (well, partly to largely new)! There is something other than an aesthetic interest for me after all. :)
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I forgot the magellanic clouds in the post.
The southern hemisphere is definitely the more interesting when it comes to see sky objects. The best observatories in the world are the ones in the Andes, Chile/Argentina - South America.
 

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