<Kagoi>
This is just an idea that might be incorporated into GT5 that'll make it, for the more hardcore racers, more enjoyable.
What if you could (before you started Career Mode) select an option where you would only win a prize car if you did not incur any major crashes. Or possible in an even more 'severe' sense, they could make it like the GT4 Prologue licence tests where you're not allowed to even bump the opponents at all.
This would really bring into perspective the concept of speed is secondary to safety that real race-car drivers deal with.
So when you are appoaching the final corner of your 10 lap race and the computer in their Castrol Mugen NSX or whatever is 100m ahead of you, you would no longer have the option of using the opponent as your breaks (ie. ramming the cr*p out of them) to snatch away that, otherwise impossible to obtain, victory from the computer driver.
... its just a thought that would really make the game not neccessarily more realistic but definately more intense
i just hope PD goes for REAL damage as their target, i can see them strugguling by pondering things like "if we make it 100% real, people will get frustrated! lets just make it LOOK realistic!"
fact is, if they did go for real damage, it would be a little too much for some people, ramming people would mean game over, taking high jumps would mean game over (suspension WOULD break for sure, at the very least.)
so, i just want them to have REAL damage sa their default target, newbie users can always turn on aids and have their brakes and steering aided to the point that it makes it hard for them to crash, or even have the less desirable solution of having various damage difficulty levels... i mean this would be less desirable because most people would choose unrealistic damage, i would really much rather have realistic damage on all difficulty settings and just have them aided to the point where they just can't screw up unless they are really dumb. i mean, people who don't want to crash the car because they doubt their skills could ALWAYS play B-Spec.
Here's what i hope i see in GT5: i hope that at least half of the computing power goes to physics calculations, in the past PD has used up all the CPU it can for amazing visuals, and while it's tempiting to do this again with the PS3, because the level of detail would be so high it would be nearly identical to reality while watching replays at least, it would be the wrong path IMO. i think that a compromise in graphics is the way to go this time, because it would still look amazing, and the visual impact that serious physics would bring would actually surpass visual quality alone. examples:
-Rain on the windshield, mud, broken windshield by small stones, etc.
-the way objects such as plants move as a car goes next to them. and fallen leaves fly, etc.
-The look of water as a car goes by in a rainy surface (this would greatly enchance the look of the game, wich IMO is more important than just graphics), same goes for other surfaces such as snow and dirt.
- the TRACK surface!, this is a make it or break it IMO for GT5, specially for "road" courses, in the past both rally circuits and "togue" courses looked just like a circuit (gt4 changed this a bit... but road courses still have that "flat" feel to them even with the new engine, but it's a big improvement over GT3 none the less.)
if you want a decent example of what a rally track should look like, i suggest you give richard burns rally a try.
-Crash physics and materials, car has a roll cage? then if it tips over the damage should look different than if it doesnt. your car has carbon parts? then those should be stronger.
-Sounds... this is not visual related, but the impact on the overall experience, while GT4 is leaps and bounds over GT3 in this dept. it still has somethings wrong, transmision sound doesnt sound like their reality counterparts at all, specially in racing cars. for examples see GTR or play the "rFactor" demo. sounds are 50% of the experience, i hope they get it as real as real life this time, also, N/A cars that are highly tuned sound as if the engine is having trouble burning gas when you let go of the accelerator. this is also missing.
-car interiors... this one is hard for the developers, and would completley make it impossible for them to be able to include 600+ cars again, but... who cares! less is more, i'd rather have cars properly represented from insde, and have a GOOD cockpit view, hell, you could even "mod" the inside too!
basicly they will have to ask themselves "do we want quantity, or quality?"
i'd go for the later for sure, i dont care if it means half the cars, the fact is that a full interior would even make for some new nice modes of play, you could even have a "real drive" where you don't even have to race.. just drive your car in traffic at regular speeds to get to other courses (this wouldbe been great in GT4, seeing as you can "travel" to other locations, it would be great to do it in a virtual city that connects you to all the courses.). and while you just drive.. you can actually take the time to see the detail of the interior. this would also enchance photo mode.
-Real tyres, not just wheels, it would be great if this time around they would actually test real tyres and use those instead, this would actually help you test what tyres to get in real life: "these tyres suck" or "these have tons of grip but wear out too fast". etc.
-brake fade... this one is very important, if you've watched any best motoring you would see that after a few laps some of the cars they test would lose their brakes. also important here would be oil temperature.
-realistic wind, water, etc. pretty much realistic material behaviour. add to this deformable objects, crashed into a rail? it should bend like one, crashed into something weaker? then the car should go trough it.
So the conclusion is, this time PD should take a very different path than it has taken in the past. i know that they like to have the best graphics possible for the console they work on (GT4 is proof of this, best graphics at 60 FPS, period.)
but this time sacrificing graphics to add those other features would actually give a superior visual experience.
if you look back to the PS2 launch you would remmember that this was the ps2's main sell pitch on the "emotion engine" sony claimed that since it was a dual vector CPU, one should be used for physics, and the other for graphics, we all know PD didn't choose that, and considering the fact that the graphics in GT3 and 4 would suck if they hadn't done that, then maybe it wasn't such a bad idea back then. but with the PS3, they really should take that other route...
With the in-depth performance-altering of the damage, as well as real-time deformation, it's perfectly understandable that he's waiting for PS3. Hell, an entire Cell could be set aside for damage calculations. 
(testing some applications in my modded ps2 
