Would you prefer a significant upgrade in the weather system?

  • Thread starter Duphman
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Duphman

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It is a rather large feature but one not spoken of as often as it should and when it is talked about all that is mentioned is the visual aspects. Does GTPlanet feel there is room for improvement.


As we know, real race tracks after a heavy rain have more than just a level sheet of water over the track surface. Puddles are a significant hazard that are a common part of racing. As are the effects of tyre surface temperature and the rate that heats up your tires after placing on a cold set.

Also many may remember a feature of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (GT5:P had a lot of great features that were removed from the final game) that involved a live weather update for a stable of tracks (including some who made it to the final game). This feature utilized information from AccuWeather.com (@5:10 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMmIhsROb60) and was never seen again. Scrapping this feature was a missed opportunity and could provide a live and accurate weather model in the game that would match up with real world conditions. The weather readouts included snowy conditions in Germanic based circuits and heavy thunderstorms. I am aware that allowing weather like this to be in game would require significant resources on PD's part but if there is one developer that can afford and allocate man power to something like this, it is Polyphony Digital.

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Would GTPlanet like to see something more done with the weather system? Time of day is already a common feature from what we have seen in Gran Turismo 6, but would you like some more realistic weather variety besides the light showers we saw in Gran Turismo 5?

Any other ideas?
 
Raggadish
In my mind, it's a pretty novelty feature. They should spend their time on other features that need work instead.
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Weather is a pretty significant aspect of motorsport. Just my opinion (obviously) but it is as important as car/tyre/suspension physics and much more important than something like liveries.
I am very appreciative that PD has taken it into account (likely due to Yamauchi's experiences when he participated in the VLN over the past half decade).
 
I think the weather system is fine. It accomplishes what it is set out to do. The main improvement that is needed is more tracks & A-Spec events that actually utilize said feature.
 
There are bigger issues of course, but I would love to see improvements in this area. Some tracks like Spa, Sarthe, and the Ring are famous for their varying conditions along with their signature corners and sections. Allowing tracks to come with different conditions (dry, humid, hot, cool, etc.) would bring more personality to each track. It would be cool to see some tracks to be known for having less grip or higher tire wear than other tracks. It's just a small detail for some people, but would add to the driving or racing in a big way.
 
I wish the weather system more accurately reflected reality. When it rains it real life it doesn't always last for 10 hours at full downpour...

Really made me sick playing Le Mans and Nurburgring 24 Hours... Even Suzuka 1000km rained for the last 4-5 hours.

Instead it'd be nice to have actual showers or spurts of rain, or have it barely trickling a be a little wet. That would be much better than all or nothing. It's also important to see the wetness of the track properly, or the rain coming down a little more (if not in cockpit view it's hard to notice sometimes).
 
Conquerer
I wish the weather system more accurately reflected reality. When it rains it real life it doesn't always last for 10 hours at full downpour...

Really made me sick playing Le Mans and Nurburgring 24 Hours... Even Suzuka 1000km rained for the last 4-5 hours.

Instead it'd be nice to have actual showers or spurts of rain, or have it barely trickling a be a little wet. That would be much better than all or nothing. It's also important to see the wetness of the track properly, or the rain coming down a little more (if not in cockpit view it's hard to notice sometimes).
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Yes, I feel the weather is a little too predictable. Also partial track weather should be a feature on large tracks like Spa and the Nurburgring. That is, rain showers only effect parts of the track at anyone time. This may be too advanced of a feature for a PS3 game but it is still an achievable goal within Gran Turismo's future.
 
Duphman
Weather is a pretty significant aspect of motorsport. Just my opinion (obviously) but it is as important as car/tyre/suspension physics and much more important than something like liveries.
I am very appreciative that PD has taken it into account (likely due to Yamauchi's experiences when he participated in the VLN over the past half decade).
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Oh I'm not detabing the importance of weather, just the implementation of real world weather conditions being reflected in realtime into the game.
 
I think it needs work. That a water level meter is a necessary part of the interface is not quite right, IMO. You should be able to see and feel how wet the track is.
 
Imari
I think it needs work. That a water level meter is a necessary part of the interface is not quite right, IMO. You should be able to see and feel how wet the track is.
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The tyre wear meter being introduced is also not exactly ideal in my opinion. I think the main gauge that GT is missing is a fuel gauge with a numerical display.
 
You should be able to feel how much fuel is in the tank! :sly:

I think the best way to improve both the realism and the variety in the weather system, even leaving it with the same modes of operation it had in GT5, is to use real-time weather (or historic, if necessary). If it's raining in London, it's raining in London in the game etc. and will update as you play (this should not override the existing options).

Kaz said the weather system has difficulty in the in-between cases, which is not surprising given the bulk nature of the simulation vs. the distributed nature of weather (and all that chaos stuff, too). If they can improve that, too, to give us more stable intermediates such as "overcast" or "partly cloudy", then it'd be much appreciated and would work even better with real world weather info.
 
sorry for my english

I hope to find a weather feature that can be synchronized with the state of the real circuit (weather situation and temperature / humidity asphalt)

in addition

Also a weather feature that works only on a particular sector of the track with the track map that changes color depending on the situation of the asphalt

imagine:
24h nurburgring

asphalt 100% dry in most of the track and map beautiful red

coming to karussell you see that the map will change color
is no longer red but turns blue and you see that in that section of the track it started to rain and you have to be careful with the slicks in that part of the track until you put the wheels on dry asphalt

this is the improvement that I would like to see
 
Raggadish
Did you read the rest of the thread?
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The thing is, the easiest way to get realistic weather is simply to take real weather as it happens - it's already done in GT5:P. All that's needed is to translate the weather report into the numbers needed to drive the weather system in the game (which, since it's sort of a physically modeled "simulation", shouldn't be that abstract).

This is a trivial extension of the system that exists in GT5 already, and is not really something that would detract massively, if at all, from development time on "other features".
 
Griffith500
This is a trivial extension of the system that exists in GT5 already, and is not really something that would detract massively, if at all, from development time on "other features".
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Without knowing the innards of the systems in GT6, I don't think you can call it a trivial extension. Unless you have experience is programming, that is.
 
Raggadish
Without knowing the innards of the systems in GT6, I don't think you can call it a trivial extension. Unless you have experience is programming, that is.
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It's pretty trivial.

Put it this way, the computer already changes weather in-race according to some algorithm we're not privy to. Instead of having an algorithm that randomly decides "start rain now" and "stop rain now", all they have to do is monitor the weather at a selected location (which they've shown that they can do) and when certain weather conditions turn up either start or stop the rain.

It's nothing that hasn't been shown in game already, it's just not linked up that way. Unless they've got it rigged up in some horrible ass-backwards way, I can't see that taking any competent programmer much time at all.
 
Imari
It's pretty trivial.
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If it is as trivial you guys make it out to be, then what would be the reason for it's absence in GT5?

The reason is probably one of these three, or a combination of:
1. It's not a trivial thing to implement
2. It took away workforce which could work on more important things and since GT5 was taking time to finish, the feature was scrapped
3. It's a cool, but novelty feature not worth the time and money.

All in line with my previous posts.
 
Raggadish
Without knowing the innards of the systems in GT6, I don't think you can call it a trivial extension. Unless you have experience is programming, that is.
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I have some minor experience of actual "programming", nothing especially useful (although I read a lot about it), but I have more experience in scripting, and some of that is scripting for "systems" (both characterisation - poking it in interesting ways and seeing what falls out - and design), especially physical systems such as the weather appears to be in GT5.

None of that really matters, of course, because the weather in the game has output states with numbers "measuring" real physical things (which we've seen in GT5, and moreso in screens of GT6), and must also have internal "state variables" that the weather evolves off of, and the weather "display" (the graphical effects) at any given time is conditional upon.

Logically, these would be things like temperature, humidity etc. (which I seem to remember Kaz saying some time around GT5's release). The trivial part is getting those numbers from a weather station and putting them in the right place in memory. The hard part is sanitising that input, translating it as necessary, and maybe exposing the functionality to the player in a nice UI.

A simple example would be a numerical model of a mass-spring system, i.e. a mass constrained to move in one direction attached to one end of a spring, the other end attached to a solid object. You could randomly feed forces into the mass, change the mass and spring rate etc., to get it to move and "evolve" "on its own", or you could just look-up snapshots of other spring-mass systems and input their mass, spring rate, damping, positions and velocities and you can reproduce any set of circumstances that are physically possible (most of the input range will actually be situations that aren't physically realisable, but that doesn't matter if you're using inputs from data collected from real systems). That is trivial once you've built the model, and is in fact the only way to test it!

If your model is in any way abstract, that process isn't as straight forward - but you can just ignore the inputs that are "made-up" (or make it up), or use whatever translation / approximation you are using internally for "simulation" on the data you've collected from the weather station.
Raggadish
If it is as trivial you guys make it out to be, then what would be the reason for it's absence in GT5?

The reason is probably one of these three, or a combination of:
1. It's not a trivial thing to implement
2. It took away workforce which could work on more important things and since GT5 was taking time to finish, the feature was scrapped
3. It's a cool, but novelty feature not worth the time and money.

All in line with my previous posts.
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Or its development, as a feature in its own right, wasn't quite that far along when it was pulled-in by crook for showtime in the primetime. It could just have been something like somebody not getting around to exposing the right inputs in the UI, or somebody else not renewing the licence to use accuweather or whatever it was called. Perhaps the few tracks that could use weather weren't worth the effort at that time. Et c.
 
ShiftingGears
It was implemented as if it were a novelty in GT5. It had no effect whatsoever on 95% of the offline gameplay. If it is similarly sparsely implemented in GT6 I would hope that PD spent more time improving factors affecting the core gameplay instead.
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While for the most part true, the same can't be said for the online portion which, of course, is a huge part of the game as well. I don't see why it's impossible for them to do both improve the weather system and core gameplay mechanics.

Raggadish
Did you read the rest of the thread?
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Yes I did.
 
The best weather I've seen in console racers was in F1 2010. I haven't played '11 or '12 but would imagine weather equal or better there. I would like something like Codemasters' weather system.

What I don't want is weather based on reality. By that, I mean I don't want it based on weather in my location or on weather in the real track location.
 
IceMan PJN
What I don't want is weather based on reality. By that, I mean I don't want it based on weather in my location or on weather in the real track location.
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I agree, but I'd like to see track behave similar to their real life counterparts. Ideally, it should rain more often at Silverstone compared to Willow Springs or Laguna Seca.
 
Griffith500
Or its development, as a feature in its own right, wasn't quite that far along when it was pulled-in by crook for showtime in the primetime. It could just have been something like somebody not getting around to exposing the right inputs in the UI, or somebody else not renewing the licence to use accuweather or whatever it was called. Perhaps the few tracks that could use weather weren't worth the effort at that time. Et c.
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Yup, pretty much. The exclusion of this feature in GT5 makes me believe they didn't find it that important.
 
Raggadish
If it is as trivial you guys make it out to be, then what would be the reason for it's absence in GT5?
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How many real tracks are there with weather in GT5?

Suzuka
Monza
la Sarthe
Nurburgring

And tied to real world locations you also have:

Chamonix
Eiger

Is that worth making any effort for? I could see how they wouldn't bother for a feature that only affects such a limited amount of tracks.
 
This is the direction I want to see weather going in GT:

-realistic weather patterns such as short spurts of rain and light rain/showers, as well as absolute downpours (but not ones that last 10 hours all the time)
-varying weather/wetness at different sections of larger tracks like Spa, Nurburgring & Le Sarthe (light rain in one area, dry in another)
-drying racing line, puddles of water, and sections where some parts of track are drying more quickly (even in the same area)
-water much more visible on the track and more reflective as per real life
-water drops and streams of water visible on all cars
-track surface is affected as soon as water starts coming down, rather than like 20-30 minutes after it starts (GT5)

Of course most of this, if not all, won't make GT6 and I in no way expect it to. But hopefully PD takes a good look at these things for GT7 and implements at least most of them because it would make for a great weather system.
 
I would like to have the ability to set the surface water permanently when the weather change is set to 0. That way the track will not dry up when you practice, like Tsukuba wet in GT4.
 
fbmautopilot
I would like to have the ability to set the surface water permanently when the weather change is set to 0. That way the track will not dry up when you practice, like Tsukuba wet in GT4.
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You can kind of do this if the track is set in the middle of night. The lack of sunlight slows the evaporation rate, but it isn't permanent like you would want.
 

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