Strange idea: simple menus

[Shaun]

I didn't read every comment, so hopefully I am not repeating someone.

What this game DOES need is button to jump to the Garage, GT Auto and the Tuning Shop from EVERY screen. It is ridiculous that you have to navigate all the way back to the damn GT Life screen before you can access the other important parts of the game.

I understand that there is a "jump to home" button on most screens, and that is helpful but the others need to be included as well.

This. 👍

Plus I wish I could turn off the animations in GT Auto (oil change, car wash and all others), first time ok, second time boring, after that just plain annoying.

 

[suXin]

There was a respond about GT Auto's long loading time because of car rendering (omg).
Car in a garage loads much faster same as a cars in dealerships.
GT Auto could have simple interface instead of these damn auto-slaves which coming in 10 sec.

But about other menus: my fault, they're all contains pictures, just in a great compilation.

 

[ikarys]

I feel like the menu system behaves like a poorly built flash application that you are accessing for the first time on a 56k modem.

The hardware is lightyears in front of what the experience consists of.

 

[RikkiGT-R]

Actually I wouldn't mind if my menus looked like a spreadsheet.

Nor would I, so long as the actual cars and tracks continue to look as sumptuous as they do.

 

[AMCNUT]

Go play Fallout New Vegas. It will change your perspective on GT5 load times.

I love Fallout, but he's got a point!👍 Everything's relative I guess....

 

[JTSnooks]

I just wish that when you hit the triangle button over a car in your garage, there would be a "change oil" option below "change car". I dread having to change the oil on all 250+ of my used cars before driving them.

 

[deftonesmx17]

And I can almost promise you that the car is the thing being loaded from the disk in that area, it makes no sense to put the car data on the HDD and the menus on the disk to be loaded.

The cars are installed on the HDD and that is a fact.

It is not the car model slowing it down that much. If it was the car models, it would make zero sense as to why they load very much quicker in both the dealerships and your garage.

An entire match in FIFA for example (which is not installed to the HDD like GT5), loads quicker than GT Auto, all while letting you play in a 3d arena.....that to me just proves how freaking ridiculous GT5's menu loading times are!

Needless stuff like it needing to change music tracks are more likely the suspect here. I really don't get why the Dealerships, GT Auto, and the Tuning Shop wont just continue playing my custom BGM. Even loading a race, it'll play the same song as in the menus while loading, but it wants to change my personal track once the race is looaded, and then changes again as soon as I hit start. This is a clear sign of custom BGM in the menus being a half-arsed effort; like much of the game, but I wont get into that here.

 

[calan_svc]

The menu load times (and layout in general, IMHO) suck, and it has nothing to do with blueray or hard-drive access or aliens or anything else along those lines. It's because PD is years behind what other game producers are able to do, and completely out-of-touch with what gamers in most of the world expect these days.

 

[naughtyaudio]

Actually I wouldn't mind if my menus looked like a spreadsheet.

👍

 

[Crumpet]

The menu, is to modern, and detailed in my opinion. It's a nice layout, but it lacks simplicity. It's like new cars, modern, but usually ugly.

 

[MilesMenace]

I have noticed that menu load times are longer if you are online wired and longer still if you are online wirelessly.
Turn off connection on ps3 and see if that helps.

 

[RODDUZ]

Even if it is Blu Ray etc which makes it long to load at least make the menus more user friendly in navigating. I wanna go to garage from pretty much wherever I am. A simple drop down menu on one side where I can choose where I want to go would be brilliant and very easy to implement! They've been around for years! I don't want to have to navigate all the way back to hompage then to garage! The navigation is terrible!

 

[Devedander]

I love how "it's bluray" is just tossed out there as the explanation for everything... especially when overall size of the content is thrown in.

For one thing GT5 was dumped from BR and was something like 14GB and overall size has nothing really to do with read speed anyway.

Then there is the fact that with the exception of the actual car model there is almost nothing in the menu assets that should take that long to load (that's how long many games load a whole level in).

And finally it's pretty bad planning if something as oft used and small as a menu screen isn't part of what's cached to the hard drive. Anything with a lot of small parts does much better chached than reading off a disc based storage which ultimately will suffer from seek time on top of read time.

The only thing of any decent size is the car model and even then it has nothing to do with how long it takes to "render" the car... the car is rendered entirely in under 1/60th of a second regularly... every frame the car is fully rendered. This is not raytracing or CGI or photomode where the model is rendered once off in super high detail... the car is drawn in the GT auto just like it is in game... "rendering" the car has nothing to do with taking 10 seconds to show the menu screen, at best it's loading the car into memory, but even that shouldn't take nearly that long and actually shouldn't happen at all because:

YOUR CURRENT CAR SHOULD JUST BE IN MEMORY ALL THE TIME.

The car you are in should be loaded into memory when you get into it or load the game and stay resident all the time in the menu screens... this way it's ready to go all the time, during menu's there is no other part of the game that needs a lot of resources freed up and your car is going to need to be drawn for almost every thing you do so there is no reason not to have it heald in memory.

So whatever the reason GT auto takes so darn long to load, it's pretty much gotta be some kind of poor programing and optimization... there is no hardware or design issue that would necessitate that long a load time especially for a game installed to the drive.

 

[deftonesmx17]

So whatever the reason GT auto takes so darn long to load, it's pretty much gotta be some kind of poor programing and optimization... there is no hardware or design issue that would necessitate that long a load time especially for a game installed to the drive.

👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Finally, someone else who actually gets it!

 

[Delrond]

I'd take the option of a simplified menu system, if that's what it took to improve the load times. But as has been pointed out, it's more likely to be the programming that's at fault here. It's easy to find examples of menu systems on blu ray and HDD that run more quickly - the main xmb playstation menu for one...

I also agree that many other games have longer loading times, and that maybe individual GT5 menu load times are bearable. It's the sequence of menus that you have to go through that makes the load times intrusive for me. I like the suggestions for persistent shortcut icons that can take you straight to the most important menus. A lot of PC software and websites are designed like this.