DVD9 and the 360 show once again there a bit behind in "next Gen"
Fully flexible PGR4 textures too big to fit on a DVD.
Chalk this one up to delighted giggling in the Sony camp. According to series of posts on the Bizarre Creations forums made by multiple staff members, Project Gotham Racing 4 will only feature a limited set of day / night options for each track, due largely to the difficulty of fitting the required pre-rendered textures onto a DVD.
Ben, a Bizarre Creations staffmember, kicked off the probably unintentional kerfuffle by stating, "You won't see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we've worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city. For example, Macau is always in the daytime, but if you play it during a storm everything looks darker and more foreboding. If you play during a blizzard then things are slightly tinged blue and everything seems more frozen. Of course, playing this track in sunshine will make everything appear bright and yellowy."
Alan M, another staffmember, then clarified by saying, "In the past we've always had day and night and to do this we've had to create a duplicate set of textures for most of the buildings, obviously there is the space on the disc and the time it will take make all those night time textures."
He continued, "For some cities night time is important, as good as Vegas looks in the day everyone really wants to see it at night, so in PGR4 only night will be available, and if you thought Vegas and Tokyo looked good at night wait until you see what Shanghai looks like! So at it’s base there is only one time of day, add to that the different weather settings and you get more variation to each of the cities than just Day and Night would give you."
Those hoping for a second disc had their expectations dashed when Ben jumped in again, adding, "Having the game spread across two discs isn't an option for a number of reasons. Sorting out gameplay both in single and multiplayer where you always have to swap discs around would be difficult, and detrimental to the flow of the game. Also, having two discs puts the price of manufacturing up, and that's one we'd have to discuss with the publisher."
Based on these discussions, Sony was quick to get in on the act and point out the benefits of using a larger storage medium. Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, Dave Karraker, Sony's spokesperson, pointed to the importance of selecting Blu-ray over standard DVD storage as a mechanism for avoiding these problems.
Karraker happily pointed out Sony's foresight, stating, "We took a lot of heat at launch for including Blu-Ray in PS3. Now it looks like that investment is being justified. Next generation games simply need more space on the disc to contain all that high definition content. Take a look at Lair, for example, already pushing 25GB of content, and that is a first-generation title. At 50GB storage capacity, Blu-Ray gives the PS3 plenty of headroom for developers to fully realize their visions well into the future."
Did Sony call it right? Is the lack of storage space a real issue? Did Bizarre Creations take the wrong route by avoiding purely dynamic lighting and using pre-rendered textures instead? Jump on the forums and let us know, as this is only going to become even more interesting as all three consoles move deeper into their lifecycle.
