What's with the craptastic shader?

[Freddyisready]

i know its sucks and disturbing. oh and i just bought a DLC code for Nissan GT-R stealth on ebay for 10 dollars I have the NSX GT500 but i also wanted the Nissan so i bought it really cool

 

[Crash]

brently300, please don't triple or even double post, if you have to, edit your first one.

i know its sucks and disturbing. oh and i just bought a DLC code for Nissan GT-R stealth on ebay for 10 dollars I have the NSX GT500 but i also wanted the Nissan so i bought it really cool

What does this have to do with the thread?

 

[reaperman]

(Edited out because I caught myself being wrong about something.)

 

[Nightingale]

Good lord, this game is both the best and the worst GT... I really get the feeling that the higher-ups just got tired of waiting so PD had to put out a game that was half-masterpiece, half-nonsense.

 

[Sage]

Setting your PS3 to 720p seems to make the shadows better. Still lousy, but noticeably better.

 

[TheROADKRAKEN]

The awful part about this shadow problem is that it's most noticeable when the car is deliberately being showed off - before races during multiple views of the car on the starting grid... a LUDICROUS DANCING BLOB OF BLACK CRAP underneath your car! During replays in the cinematic view... side view mirrors cast a BIZARRE fluctuating tattered shadow on the door, and on the rear of the car you are treated to more of this strange looking crap. YES IT IS CRAP that we SHOULD NOT just let stand. This better be fixed in one of the first patches. It is SHAMEFUL!

 

[Pako]

It's hit and miss for me. I also have a jagged wheel well that would cut your arm off on a Miata I picked up used. The shadow's on that car in particular are horrific, but like I said, hit and miss. Some are ok, some are as they should be, and others are just horrible.

 

[Snedz]

LMAO, My copies still being shipped, but yeah SD player's probobally won't be able to tell

 

[outtanames]

It's funny how one complain and some trolls jump right at him with this stupid expresssion "don't complain". Just shut up will ya? Some things in the game are annoying to the extent it's unreasonable considering it took 5 awful years to get it released.

 

[Lawndart]

The biggest thing with the shaders is that they actually detract from the beauty of the game... I hate to say this but no shadows are almost a better option at this point than the dynamic blobs...

Worse I don't think this is an easy fix as a shadow is generally a second rendering of the car... We'll have to see if they can find some global refinement, it is as easy as making them higher fidelity but that comes at a major overhead cost...

 

[Touring Mars]

It's hit and miss for me. I also have a jagged wheel well that would cut your arm off on a Miata I picked up used. The shadow's on that car in particular are horrific, but like I said, hit and miss. Some are ok, some are as they should be, and others are just horrible.

This is my one and only owned car thus far, and I have to say that I was very disappointed at how bad it looked on the starting grid, and the blocky shadows (with random white squares flashing all over the place) had me pleased that my Forza fanboy friends were not in the room. It is the first major example that I have seen so far that demonstrates what we already knew, which is that GT5 is not perfect. I just hope it doesn't spoil the enjoyment of the game too much, and it would be nice to know that it was on the 'fix list' (if there even is such a thing)...

 

[Jo3f1sh]

Snapped these with my phone (didn't feel like going into "photomode" just for a quick shot).

I didn't realize i had bought GT4.5

 

[trk29]

@Duke. Concerning the high beams and low beams at night.

I haven't raced many cars at night but I have raced a few. The new Mclaren's lights look a whole lot different from low to high beam, I took it around the Nurburgring and couldn't hardly see anything with low beam and changed to high beam and could see a whole lot more.

Concerning the trees it is weird to see missing pixels and you can see it really good from a distance on Nurburgring. I hope they can fix it besides that the smoke and rain and the way it mixes with the car needs some work and one thing I do not like about it all is the way the wipers look when behind a car throwing up spray.

But other than all of that I am enjoying the game and I think the day to night transitions look excellent.

 

[cannedReality]

i hate and love the game in the same way. the physics are mostly great, the premium cars look fine and there are enough tracks to choose from. the small number of cars with cockpit views shocked me when i first played the game. i bought some used car, went to the racetrack, eagerly anticipating the cockpit view of my celica or whatever it was and: same options as in GT4.
That moment i really thought about selling the game. i mean, seriously: 6 years and all they managed is to copy the stuff from GT4 and mix it badly with GT5P while taking away tracks and options??? i felt so ripped off i cannot express it here...
the shadows are something i don't quite understand. i work as a cg-artist and know a lot about cg shadows, but i don't know a lot about game engines, i have to admit. but normally, a game engine shadow is a so-called shadow map, where the light in the scene uses a pixel map to project shadows from and on objects. the bigger the map, the better the quality of the shadow... also, bigger maps use up more memory and are costlier to calculate. the usual solution is to use a smaller map size and blur it slightly, so the blockiness of the shadows is not that noticeable. that should not be so much of a problems to fix. but maybe its different in the PD engine.
what i really hate though is the reward system of gt5 (and gt4) you can only win every car once and you cannot win different cars for the same racing series. why they took that away is beyond me. what is the encouragement to do a racing event more than once if i can only win (ridicolously small amounts of) money??? i think that sucks most.
also that you do not get money or experience for online races is big no-go. but thats just my 2 cents...

 

[wills2084]

I just can't believe they would spend all their time on a select number of interior car views, but then to have them ruined by the shadows... completely baffles my mind. Just race any premium car on the top gear test track and check out the shadows on the interior view... AWFUL!!!

 

[Tenacious D]

the shadows are something i don't quite understand. i work as a cg-artist and know a lot about cg shadows, but i don't know a lot about game engines, i have to admit. but normally, a game engine shadow is a so-called shadow map, where the light in the scene uses a pixel map to project shadows from and on objects. the bigger the map, the better the quality of the shadow... also, bigger maps use up more memory and are costlier to calculate. the usual solution is to use a smaller map size and blur it slightly, so the blockiness of the shadows is not that noticeable. that should not be so much of a problems to fix. but maybe its different in the PD engine.

I think there are two culprits for the blotchy shadows. Sun transition and 3D. And a third might be a consequence of the way the game engine is built. I notice Forza has a problem doing proper shadows, Prologue too, though much less. Prologue wasn't built with 3D and day transition in mind.

Since Forza and GT5 both have some pretty intensive physics calculations running all the time, GT5 more so, I'm afraid a patch won't do much. I'm assuming that the game engine would have to be fine tuned and matured further, which means GT6, and possibly PS4, to see the photo-real world we covet.

On a side note, I hope we all smack the next guy that says Porsche is in competing games because 'other games' have bigger budgets. PD is not some tiny operation, it is by far the biggest kid on the block.

And agreements with Porsche, by the way. EA is rich enough to keep a stranglehold on that exclusive with Porsche. Microsoft is rich enough to buy a sub-contract. And before someone comes along to insist that SONY makes as much or more as MS every year, no. Revenue is massive for both, but "revenue" is a fancy word meaning gross income. Yeah, your paycheck might look pretty, but take out bills, rent, groceries, family matters etc, and that big check starts to look pretty small. M$ makes about 40 times as much profit as Sony. And by the way, PD is a subsidiary of SONY Computer Entertainment. Kaz makes requests, but he has to count on SONY writing the check.

How would you like it if Dan Greenwalt took over?

Well since the physics are already pretty well worked out, I'd *love it* if he took over. He'd communicate with fans, develop the online aspect, outsource modeling when needed, and generally have us a new game to buy by this time next year. He'd probably call it GT5v2.0 to be mean, but that's just how he is.

Oh no. Oh HELL no!

You obviously haven't done much in Forza games other than run around in circles or drift. You're obviously unaware of what storm troopers the mods are on the official Forza boards. Any major dissent gets threads locked and people banned. And Dan throws his weight around with a Mob boss machismo, spouting buzz words incessantly in case you missed them the first dozen times. Some "communication" going on there.

And you obviously haven't experienced the joys of that outsourcing, with car models wrong, having bugs and flaws - in fact, the same bugs and flaws from Forza 1 in some cases. Car models which cause headaches to those of us wanting to get the livery editor to work right on surfaces that seem to exist in another dimension. I know people keep using that "Forza 3 has 400 cars in two years" mantra, but they conveniently ignore the fact that those models are ported from game to game - remember flaws unfixed since FM1. So yeah, Forza 3 shipped with 430 cars, but that modeling started at least as far back as 2004, probably earlier. Do the math on that.

And, you obviously haven't noticed that a large number have gone back to racing in Forza 2 because of the issues with Forza 3. Have you saved many photos in F3, or decals? Tried to upload a few pics to the Forza boards? Hassles with Forza 3 had me quit the game in two months, sadly, because it was a nice game in concept. But somehow while we grouch about shadows and missing interiors in GT5, in Forza you had to deal with the game crashing because you scrolled through too many cars in your garage or the Auction House, perhaps getting perma-banned from Live if the game crashed or disconnected inadvertently, or taking literally hours to fight T10's insane file handling and photo sharing system in F3 to get some pics uploaded to their site, only to have the process compress the image badly.

You can have Dan Greenawalt and his talking mouth. I'll take a humble man who's accomplishments are measured by tens of millions of games sold, and real life racing feats.

 

[cygnus_zero]

Really Duke? This game took so long because there are over 20 tracks with 70 variations, over 1000 cars (which they shouldve taken out premiums and slow cars that wouldve saved time, no wants wants to drive a Honda civic), track creator (not anything special but...), weather development, time changes, physics, graphics...etc., STOP COMPLAINING

Gotta be real here, Forza 3 has like over 120 track variations, almost 500 cars with full physical and mechanical damage, more customization options like engine swaps, brakes, full exterior like painting, all with interiors. And and the game has pretty sweet looking shadows.

Im not about to defend GT5 after how long it's taken, sorry. This game is not what people thought it would be.

I just can't believe they would spend all their time on a select number of interior car views, but then to have them ruined by the shadows... completely baffles my mind. Just race any premium car on the top gear test track and check out the shadows on the interior view... AWFUL!!!

It's called piss poor direction. Resources werent used properly, time was wasted on unimportant things, not enough time spend on what does matter to a racing game.

I love how I can change the horns in my cars, but not the brakes. That's really cute.

 

[Pako]

This is my one and only owned car thus far, and I have to say that I was very disappointed at how bad it looked on the starting grid, and the blocky shadows (with random white squares flashing all over the place) had me pleased that my Forza fanboy friends were not in the room. It is the first major example that I have seen so far that demonstrates what we already knew, which is that GT5 is not perfect. I just hope it doesn't spoil the enjoyment of the game too much, and it would be nice to know that it was on the 'fix list' (if there even is such a thing)...

I was disappointed at first to, but it hasn't taken away my enjoyment of the game. Currently sitting at 80+ cars (20 or so being premium) with 60% of the game yet to complete, I have had a blast, graphically and otherwise. My brother and I had some of the most intense racing experiences this past week that rivals any other heart pounding experience that I can recall from any other racing game. I am glad, however, that I don't have to race that Miata any longer. I just couldn't handle looking at how bad the rendering was. If all the cars looked like that, I would not be a happy camper.

Like everyone else, I hope through patches, that GT5 Beta will graduate to a fully mature game. In the mean time, work through your licenses to get some of the vehicles you need, check the used car lot often, and hold on.

 

[infamousDee]

Gotta be real here, Forza 3 has like over 120 track variations, almost 500 cars with full physical and mechanical damage, more customization options like engine swaps, brakes, full exterior like painting, all with interiors. And and the game has pretty sweet looking shadows.

Im not about to defend GT5 after how long it's taken, sorry. This game is not what people thought it would be.

You clearly have no interest in handling dynamics whatsoever, that's all I can say.

 

[AgentGT]

I must agree with OP, what should be fantastic looking cars are crapped on by shadows that look like they're being looked at through a heat haze and at the very worst place to do it, the starting grid.

I think they make the standards look worse than what they actually are too.

 

[code_kev]

"You clearly have no interest in handling dynamics whatsoever, that's all I can say. "

I'd say both games have pretty damn good handling.

Also, the blocky edges on the car windows and wheel arches is pretty crap. On a positive note, just did an online night race on the nurb, utterly brilliant.

 

[jonny_goddard]

the name of this thread made me laugh!!

 

[Bigbazz]

The second post mentioned they should have taken out the premium cars to save time.

This makes me giggle as the standard cars are from GT4, so what you're saying is that they should just release GT4 on PS3? as GT4 also had more tracks than GT5. infact GT4 was a much bigger game.


I love GT5, but there are problems and it has been devoloped for years, you cant defend against that, sony overhyped it a lot.


Though i love it, theres so many things, mostly little things that could easily be fixed.

 

[Tenacious D]

Like everyone else, I hope through patches, that GT5 Beta will graduate to a fully mature game.

That's an interesting way of putting it.

But I guess I can't quibble with it. I suppose I must be easy to please, but honestly, I can hardly tell the difference between most of the Standards and Premiums. I have yet to explore Photo Mode, but seeing as I'm still in love with GT4's cars, I don't think I'm going to be flabbergasted over the whole lot of 800.

Online structure can certainly get some attention, but I have a feeling that it won't until SONY gets some more server backbone running, and that's not cheap. Standards can be seen to with DLC, either adding cockpits or swapping with Premium cars on the most popular models. I expect new tracks. While nothing in life is free, if SONY is now rolling in money from holiday sales, and smarting from criticism over GT5, they might cut us a break on GT5 expansion. We did get a bunch of content on Prologue for free, almost doubling the game, which would have cost us around $25 from Microsoft, so who knows.

A lot of GT5 can be patch fixed, but as for sketchy shadows and particle effects, I think we're just going to have to live with that until the GT6 engine.

 

[DrTrouserPlank]

I like this game, let's get that out of the way so that I can criticise without getting slated.

It's the inconsistency that is the game's downfall. The premium vs standard disparity was always going to get a lot of column inches and it's just one of many compromises that PD obviously had to make. (it actually doesn't bother me that much, but of course I understand why it's brought up)

I actually think that the story of GT5 is that they wanted to make 1000 premium cars, started modeling them, and a year or so later realised that it just wasn't possible in this time-frame. Then the compromises and decisions began. What would get their precious time on the to-do list?. Probably a multitude of things that they wanted to do along with basic stuff that they had to do in order to put a working game together.

Long story short, I think the project was too ambitious, it was evident shortly after starting that the game needed to be a compromise of the vision they had, and they basically had to spread themselves too thin in order to include a bit of content from all the things they wanted to do.

Expectations for this game were unrealistically high of course from the start due to the ridiculous development time, so in that sense they were always going to be in for some strong criticism in one way or another.

 

[Stradivis]

They should have dropped 3D support and head tracking. Maybe put it in Gt6, but not in GT5.
More free time to invest in critical areas.

Peace

 

[SlipZtrEm]

...spouting buzz words incessantly in case you missed them the first dozen times. Some "communication" going on there.

Surely not as often as "Vietnam"?

PD leaves us in the dark on a lot of fronts, so in some ways, I see what people are saying about wanting more community interaction. Interestingly, GT5 seems to be heading in the right direction, and they have done a lot right with the online aspect, so while I can easily find problem issues in nearly any aspect of the game, I see the potential.

Duke's point about shadows is an excellent one because, hell, we had better ones in Prologue. I'm also really, really disappointed that they've raved about their interior modeling for how long now, and other than in-race, I can't really appreciate them unless I take a convertible to Photo Travel. It's also a bit odd that Photo Travel can accept Standards... in the screen saver main menu. There are a great many strange, strange design decisions in GT5, it can feel both more and less polished than previous iterations within the span of a few minutes. I'd go so far as to call it a bit schizophrenic.

An example? We can create and share custom tracks (which aren't random, by the way, as fiddling for an hour on Mt. Aso showed there's only so many "sections" a track can use), but we can't actually race on them with friends.

Do the math on that.

Completely over-looking another game-vs-game situation; if you really want to do math like that, then GT5's "amazingly huge" car list took a decade. Having 800 of those done before the mid-decade point though (with a great many being little more than badge/colour jobs), can be both a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it (and which side of the decade you're focusing on).

I'll take a humble man who's accomplishments are measured by tens of millions of games sold, and real life racing feats.

This is more a statement of years of fan-based mystic lore, at this point. Any man who tells people to "expect perfection" of his next product, no matter how great it might be, is not humble. GT5 is an utter blast for me right now (dead-eyed Jeff Gordon excepted... and a few other things), but I'm not turning a blind eye to the fact PD, and specifically Kaz, are just as guilty of marketing spin as nearly anybody else in the industry. Par for the course, really, and I don't hold it against them, nor do I deny they have made some fantastic, fantastic games, to me. We all know what we like... which is why we're here.

But Duke's right; the shadows still suck. The joys of modern gaming means hopefully, some of this can be fixed. Even more hopefully, soon. I'm still having a blast though; it is a new GT game, one that I can race with people I've talked with about the game for over a decade.

 

[RedSuinit]

Wow, this is a whole new low. It's a dynamic lighting system, meaning that the shadow is from a MOVING ray-traced system, which is NOT easy. It's a BIG step in the right direction, and it can only get better with time.

 

[SlipZtrEm]

Wow, this is a whole new low. It's a dynamic lighting system, meaning that the shadow is from a MOVING ray-traced system, which is NOT easy. It's a BIG step in the right direction, and it can only get better with time.

Honest question, since I genuinely don't know enough about it... but that shouldn't affect the vast majority of tracks that don't have dynamic time of day, right? I mean, the shadows don't move on them...

 

[Fusion]

I don't think you can fairly look at it how you are.

It's not a matter of if they took away the small details they could make the obvious details look better. GT5P had the same shadows mostly, just there were no standing starts so it wasn't as noticeable. High res dynamic shadows are taxing on the system, and the PS3 is a very dated system these days. I really doubt that removing blades of grass or the simple 3D crowd would allow them to make the shadows better.

That said, the shadows scale depending on how far away from them you are and what is going on in the camera view. Sometimes they look fine, but don't have a defined outline. IMO this is what they should have stuck with. Dynamic shadows are nice and all, but not when they look blocky! The under car shadows should be made with soft/blurred edges all the time so that it doesn't stand out. This is less accurate to reality, but better looking. You ill notice in replays that the shadows switch to this sometimes and it looks much better.