Gran Turismo 4 - Over 450 screenshots

[Eoin]

Ok, if such is the case, then how come on the longer replays on the original GT on the PS1 - i'm talking the races which took over an hour to complete - did you only get the first twelve laps replayed (yes I'm that sad that I watched them but at the time I had never seen anything so good so forgive me). Surely if it's just remembering the joypad inputs then it should have been able to show the whole race.

The original GT's replay system worked in a weird way though, IIRC. It had you pre-allocate space towards replays and then used that space for saving, so it would be fairly logical to cut off the replay after a while so it didn't go over that space. I also seem to remember the original Formula 1 game (which couldn't save replays) letting them go on for much longer - with the PSone's 2MB of RAM and a lot of that already taken by the engine it's hard to see how that could have been done other than by remembering just the inputs.

[Sprite Machine]

Can't remember if GT made full use of analogue sticks or not, which would impact,

Yes it did. (GT2 did, anyway).

Incidently, I remember hearing about a Formula One game on PSone ages ago that finally made use of the (optional) analogue sticks, but it had the replays removed as a result.

(Your explanation was very good, by the way!)

[jeff mills gran]

back on track (hohoh! Snigger!) - some of those shots look painfully jaggy..

Im just going to rock myself back and forward in my office and say "its not finished yet, its not finished yet"

[squirtle]

GT was the first game to use analogue sticks on the PS1.

[Eoin]

Can't remember if GT made full use of analogue sticks or not, which would impact

The original GT supported analogue control of acceleration and braking on the sticks, subject to my memory having failed miserably.

but let's just say for the sake of example, you need to store the following information: steering & braking.

And gear changes .

If this info could be stored in 1 byte (not sure if it could), and say the game runs at 30FPS. 5 minutes worth of race will need:

5 * 60 * 30 * 1 = 9000 bytes. Which is 9k which doesn't actually seem like that much. Although I'd guess that with GT running on a PS1, spare memory is at a minimum.

Not sure how sensitive the PSone's analogue sticks were, but on the PS2 the sticks and the buttons have 256 levels of sensitivity. GT would only need to measure the left-right axis of the left stick (256 possible values - one byte) and 1 byte each for acceleration and braking, which brings it up to 21Kb for 5 minutes. That assumes no compression at all though, and presumably in a racing game there'd be lots of sequences of frames where you weren't turning, or were turning fully left or right, or accelerating/braking as hard as possible (or not accelerating/braking at all, mostly not braking), all of which should lessen the space you'd need for a replay (and in fact does, because GT3's replays aren't all that big).

[Pug Fugly]

back on track (hohoh! Snigger!) - some of those shots look painfully jaggy..

I'm not being a total fanboy or anything, but I kind of like jaggies in racing games. It seems to retain a kind of vibrancy that anti aliasing sometimes loses.

If you know what I mean

[Popo]

Is it just me or are the Prologue shots on that site much jaggier than the ones not market as Prologue?

It still looks lovely.

Edit - this'll be my first GT game since the original, has much changed since then?

[Caleb Newcastle]

GT was the first game to use analogue sticks on the PS1.

I thought the first was Ape Escape...

[Sprite Machine]

this'll be my first GT game since the original, has much changed since then?

Rally mode.

[Sng]

Online play!

[Spacehost]

There's no way that's a genuine screenshot... I mean, it's out-shinying PGR2 almost, isn't it?

My two cents Re: Replays. You can't always just save the controller inputs. Anyone who'd played Dropship knows what happens if you do that and just run the game with the recorded inputs- somewhere along the line, the AI or physics will do something a little different to what happened last time, and boom! Thing Fall Apart.

And Ape Escape came out years after GT, but was the first to *need* analogue controls (tho try playing GT with a D-pad!).

[Sprite Machine]

My two cents Re: Replays. You can't always just save the controller inputs. Anyone who'd played Dropship knows what happens if you do that and just run the game with the recorded inputs- somewhere along the line, the AI or physics will do something a little different to what happened last time, and boom! Thing Fall Apart.

That shouldn't happen. No randomisation, remember? Dodgy coding, perhaps? (not played Dropship)

[Spacehost]

That shouldn't happen. No randomisation, remember? Dodgy coding, perhaps? (not played Dropship)

I could be wrong, but do game developers still use random-number generators to make the AI a bit less predictable?

[Sng]

I thought all programming languages had a simple randomisation function?

Whether or not this has anything to do with anything in this thread, I don't know.

[Spacehost]

I thought all programming languages had a simple randomisation function?

Whether or not this has anything to do with anything in this thread, I don't know.

Well, yeah, but I dunno if devcos still do "roll a 5, Trogg the Invader uses his Space Arrow, 6, his Lightning Lance" etc to decide what the AI characters do sometimes...

Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah. GT4! t3h boobmb!11!1onenoeoeeo1!

[Sng]

They do with certain racing games.

It's always just "follow the line" but then when you get near it rolls a two-sided dice, 1 being "ram the cunt", 2 being "do nothing".

[Kapowza]

GT must only have 1 side of the dice then

[scottcr]

w00t... you can drive Cooper S'... my very own car.. w00t w00t.

erm.. hold on.. I can do that already in PGR2

Tbh.. never been a huge fan of GT series, a bit po-faced and tedious, I prefer the more arcade oriented PGR and Burnout. But what do I know.. screens look nice tho'.

[roadkill]

I thought all programming languages had a simple randomisation function?

Generating anything like a truly random number is very slow, so most games for random numbers would simply look up some obscure thing in the hardware, generally a clock or whatnot. That kind of thing will be up to the coder to sort out.

As an aside these shots are top, although I'm still in disbelief over the Burnout 3 ones. These two games prove the point that the PGR games would look infinitely better with some well designed lighting.

[Sng]

Broom, broom!

I don't care about the graphics, GT3 was good enough, this'll be a tad better. That's fine with me.

I just wanna see the selection of caaaaaars!

Even if the game is average, online play is good enough for me.

I'd buy it anyway just to thank the developers for putting all that damn effort into it. What's the car count again, 5 billion or something. Woo!

[nohsa]

it ios the first driving game I look forward to since GT1.

[layten]

I had Prologue and personally the graphics were a bit meh. They were not that much better than GT3 and much worse than what is offered by PGR2.

[Dimahoo]

I had Prologue and personally the graphics were a bit meh. They were not that much better than GT3 and much worse than what is offered by PGR2.

The rally graphics are fantastic, and i think the game runs faster and smoother then PGR2, but the textures have a tendency to update whilst already drawn, which the Xbox can do without problem. Also, there is some pop-up evident. Its only really bad on the long straighted sections.

Its really bad on the New York track.

The new backgrounds work wonders. Its sound anal, but on the Italian village track, you get a really cool sence of height.

[Beertiger]

Even if the game is average, online play is good enough for me.

isn't it only 4 players online?

i hope they spend more effort with the online mode than the other online PS2 games (SOCOM excluded)

does it have voice comms?

[Alex W.]

I'll take Sprite's driving-through-walls malarkey and resultant effects on replays as evidence that he's right and the AI is just very deterministic.

Regarding random numbers, short of having a die mounted inside the PC, how do they come up with random numbers? Picking whatever value happens to be in a certain memory register and multiplying it by the current time?

[Sng]

isn't it only 4 players online?

i hope they spend more effort with the online mode than the other online PS2 games (SOCOM excluded)

does it have voice comms?

No idea. I hear they're concentrating on online play a lot though so I hope it'll be special.

Voice comms is almost a cert. I just hope it's more than 4 player. I don't see why it wouldn't be.

[Beertiger]

Voice comms is almost a cert. I just hope it's more than 4 player. I don't see why it wouldn't be.

just done some snuffling and it seems it's six players online. while it's 2 behind PGR2 and 6 behind SEGA GT online it would be nice to play against something with any kind of intelligence in a GT game.

it also doesn't have voice comms in game.

you would've thought they'd try to push the boat out a bit instead of being happy behind the evil green and black.

[Sng]

A press release says vThe online mode offers amongst other features a chance for players to race head to head with up to six other players and of course interact and chat with others to form a complete automotive community.

So they don't say it but they hinted at it. I guess they weren't sure themselves so left it a little cloudy.

But yeah, I think I remember seeing something about how it was being left out to satisfy their need for complete lag-free online play or something.

But I sure hope it's included!

[Pug Fugly]

Regarding random numbers, short of having a die mounted inside the PC, how do they come up with random numbers? Picking whatever value happens to be in a certain memory register and multiplying it by the current time?

I don't know from practice - in any of the games (if you can call them that ) that I've wrote, I've just used the available functions, such as RND in Sinclair Basic!!

However, I think real random number generators work with a 'seed'. Given a 'seed' (a number), the random number generator will give you a sequence of random numbers. Not sure if the sequence is endless, but that's basically it.

Of course, the seed needs to be random, but you could use the system clock for that for example (eg. the number of milliseconds between the game booting up and the player pressing start is random enough).

So, if a seed is calculated at the beginning of each race, and then used for the 'dice rolls', each race will be able to be reproduced exactly based only on the seed and the joypad inputs.

So using this method, a replay in a driving game is simply a case of running the same race code, the only differences being grabbing the joypad inputs from a list rather than a joypad, and have different camera views.

I suppose an alternative would be to make decisions based on the time elapsed since the start of the race - would again be suitable for replays, but it would be less random.

Can I just stress I don't know all of this for a fact, but it does sound convincing doesn't it? I guess we need some real developers to tell us the TRUFAX, as it were.

[Beertiger]

A press release says vThe online mode offers amongst other features a chance for players to race head to head with up to six other players and of course interact and chat with others to form a complete automotive community.

So they don't say it but they hinted at it. I guess they weren't sure themselves so left it a little cloudy.

But yeah, I think I remember seeing something about how it was being left out to satisfy their need for complete lag-free online play or something.

But I sure hope it's included!

you get to chat before the race, then race in silence and then talk afterwards. So no calling someone a cock after they just rear ended you and span you like a cheap toy.