PGR4: No day/night cycles per city. This feature doesn't fit onto a DVD

[zed]

ild ditch the night/day just have the single set of textures but work on improving the lighting model.
this ways more flexible there would be no lightmaps like they have at present, thus sun could be low in the horizon casting shadows over the tracks, whatever, of course the downside its gonna be slower to do

How much will Carmack's mega-textures drive up the demand for disc space?

quite a bit i believe the minimum thats been mentioned is 500MB per level (realistically this would allow 4-6 levels on a dvd, thus multiple dvds would be required for a shipping game)

 

[AlphaWolf]

quite a bit i believe the minimum thats been mentioned is 500MB per level (realistically this would allow 4-6 levels on a dvd, thus multiple dvds would be required for a shipping game)

compression?

 

[Arwin]

That 500mb figure is referring to the compressed texture, yes, not the uncompressed texture, which would be about 20x larger.

 

[V3]

They also might need to repack those lightmap textures with the other maps and data thus creating two pack night and day for load time sake.

But why can't they just released it on 2 discs, one for day and one for night. End of story. People with the hdd can install or whatever thus requiring only one disc to play.

 

[phat]

I don't think you understand what Carmack's mega-textures is. Its not some super high resolution textures to be used instead of normal ones. Its one big texture for most of the world instead of using small induvidual ones.

I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that I know little about mega-texturing, but I do know that much.

What I'm thinking, though, is that with conventional texturing, a single texture often gets replicated over many walls, many trees, many ground sections, etc., whereas if new technology enables and encourages each wall, tree, ground region to have its own unique texture, wouldn't there be an explosion in the amount of texture data? Of course, I expect new compression techniques to be employed to manage this data explosion, but how effective will they be at fitting artists' ambitions into available memory and disc space?

 

[V3]

I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that I know little about mega-texturing, but I do know that much.

What I'm thinking, though, is that with conventional texturing, a single texture often gets replicated over many walls, many trees, many ground sections, etc., whereas if new technology enables and encourages each wall, tree, ground region to have its own unique texture, wouldn't there be an explosion in the amount of texture data? Of course, I expect new compression techniques to be employed to manage this data explosion, but how effective will they be at fitting artists' ambitions into available memory and disc space?

I belive those are what mega texture and Carmack's new engine will address. He has some clever compression and data management that's more predictable towards performance compare to say UE3.

 

[Naptime]

If they really want to get the size down they could simply switch to procedural texturing. maybe something for PGR5?

 

[archangelmorph]

If they really want to get the size down they could simply switch to procedural texturing. maybe something for PGR5?

10 minute loading in between races for PGR5 Confirmed!

 

[pipo]

10 minute loading in between races for PGR5 Confirmed!

The last thing I heard about it was it's about as fast as loading (and decompressing) a normal texture.

 

[blakjedi]

So why do PC games that dont use Blu ray have higher rez textures than either console and can do day and night transitions. PC and Xbox360 are in the same boat. :shrug:

 

[BoardBonobo]

So why do PC games that dont use Blu ray have higher rez textures than either console and can do day and night transitions. PC and Xbox360 are in the same boat. :shrug:

Probably because you are guaranteed access to a hard drive and far more memory on a PC than on the 360.

 

[archangelmorph]

The last thing I heard about it was it's about as fast as loading (and decompressing) a normal texture.

This depends entirely upon what algorithms you're using to procedurally generate your textures, size of textures, processing power etc..

 

[Naptime]

10 minute loading in between races for PGR5 Confirmed!

Biggest problem would be on whether they first load everything into memory or if they are streaming most of the data.

 

[valioso]

Rather than having two "fixed" times of day, this time around we decided to use our time to create a dynamic weather system, which effectively creates a much more dramatic palette from which to work with.

http://www.bizarrecreations.com/article.php?article_id=5257

 

[zed]

procedural textures wont help at all

the reason theres day + night methods is due to the lighting (eg creation of lightmaps which will prolly take 10hours to compute not 10minutes)

as i said before they could have both day + night + twilight/overcast whatever if they switched to a better unified lighting model, the reason they dont do this is its much more expensive thus the creators are unwilling to sacrifice framerate/resolution etc
AO

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So why do PC games that dont use Blu ray have higher rez textures than either console and can do day and night transitions.

Because they have less textures. PGR is a city racer, with high-res textures for every different building. That's a lot of textures! Most other games get away with a fraction of that, repeating textures often.

 

[warb]

http://www.bizarrecreations.com/article.php?article_id=5257

As I'm sure you've seen, some of the comments made on our forum have been blown out of all proportion. This has been reported on certain web sites. It seems that a number of fanboys have jumped on the topic... sigh. So it's time we cleared this one up...

When we started designing PGR4 our primary goals were to create a great and unique experience over and above PGR3, to push the hardware as far as we could, and obviously to ensure that we give great value for money. DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games... and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys.

The previous game, PGR3, had five environments. That's how much we could create given our time and resources for that game. With the longer development cycle we've had for PGR4, as well as the advantage of having final hardware, we wanted to create a far bigger and better game by this time including 10 environments, as well as a whole bunch of new gameplay features.

Rather than having two "fixed" times of day, this time around we decided to use our time to create a dynamic weather system, which effectively creates a much more dramatic palette from which to work with. To show you where we're coming from, have a look at this screenshot crop sheet. This is something we use internally to compare our environments, lighting, and weather effects... but it's certainly useful for demonstrating the breadth of the game here!

We've never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.

Well, those environment shots are amazing.

 

[Nesh]

Yeah they are but there are still no night and day cycles on the same track from what I can see in these images which still shows that the DVD size was a problem. Despite that their route with weather changes and lighting are very impressive

 

[valioso]

Yeah they are but there are still no night and day cycles on the same track from what I can see in these images which still shows that the DVD size was a problem. Despite that their route with weather changes and lighting are very impressive

They said, they didn't try to do that, they worked on the dynamic weather instead.. they didn't design the game to have night an day...

 

[Nesh]

They said, they didn't try to do that, they worked on the dynamic weather instead.. they didn't design the game to have night an day...

That could mean anything. These could also mean they always planned dynamic weather, considered night and day cycles but never made it, so they stayed with just that. Which still doesnt change the initial point.

Decisions are limited to what they have available. They could have added dynamic weather conditions on both night time and day time versions of each of the tracks if they had the size. That still wouldn't change their focus on dynamic weather conditions.

So there focus on weather is pretty irrelevant to the absence of both night and day