^^
If you read the article then you would know, YES!
Wow, those screens are amazing, thats the first time I have ever seen images of crowds etc, looks ace (they actually look real, not like stick figures in most other racers).
FROM IGN.com
September 16, 2003 - Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of the Gran Turismo series, flew all the way from Japan yesterday to attend Sony Computer Entertainment America\'s late summer Gamers\' Day, an event featuring its huge list of excellent looking fall games, in addition to next year\'s early lineup. On that list was Gran Turismo 4, of which we were able to use the new Logitech Steering Wheel and play a brand new course.
Yamauchi was polite but honest when he said his team and he are in the midst of development, and in the midst fo chaos. He explained there is very little new information to provide, but the devil is in the details, as former President Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton used to say. Before essentially repeating the core points he made during E3 this past May, Kazunori revealed a few new tidbits.
The newly revealed course, Citi Di Aria means, in Italian, "City in the Air." The course gets its name from being high up in the Italian hills, and the design, which was painstakingly re-created using 50,000 photographs over a two-week period on location, is a relatively hilly, narrow-walled course that offers high definition textures up close and gorgeous photo-realistic from far away.
The new details are mostly for those fanatics who want to know just how hard the Polyphony team is working. The amount of reference and background work this team puts into the game is staggering, to say the least. All of the courses were created using photographs of the real location in addition to the team using GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) technology, satellite photos and topography maps to re-create the most accurate heights and depths of each course. Each course was created using anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 still photos; each car uses 300 parameters, 150-200 reference photos, and a core professional database to measure real life racing times versus their own AI racing completion times.
The game was also playable via LAN network, and we entered into a three-way race, which, happily, I was able to win. Using the Logitech Driving Force Pro, which offers a more accurate turning radius (900 degrees of rotation, which means two and a half times around, exactly like a real car steering wheel turns), a sturdier feel and a heavier feedback response, I could tell that much fine tuning had been implemented in GT4, which felt better, more subtle and more responsive than the version we played at E3.
For those who didn\'t read our huge summer preview or the E3 Q&A Sessions, the underpinnings of this new iteration are as follows: The main points comprise three elements -- Cars, Environments and Human Elements. There will be more than 500 cars in the game, each comprising more than 2,000 to 3,000 polygons per car. The game includes a history of driving, and so Polyphony will try to represent the lineage and history of the car from its earliest origins until today, including historically significant cars. Environments will feature photo-realistic new courses ranging from all over the world, including the Grand Canyon, New York, the Japanese Tsukuba Circuit and the new Italian course, Citi Di Aria, among many others. And there will be online play, the subject of which Polyphony has been very quiet. SCEA revealed no new information on the game\'s online featue set. And to reiterate, GT4 is due sometime in 2004.
Kazunori explained with less confusion (than at E3) the evolution of the game\'s AI. By creating a database of the fastest drivers on each of the courses in the game, his team was able to use the times to bring his AI cars to within 0.3 seconds of the human drivers. This won\'t mean that human drivers will always lose because the AI is so damn good, but it will indeed up the competition level, creating a more intense and hopefully more human AI to the single-player game. On that note, no new online aspects were announced…sadly.
The two additional human elements, which breathe a little bit of new life into the generally unpopulated series, include newly animated human crowds and human drivers in convertible cars. The human drivers, for most GT fans, are a very welcome change to the series, which offers an amazing assortment of features, yet no drivers in any of the cars. Kazunori explained that the artists now feel more comfortable with human characters and so at least the convertible cars will have drivers. Everything else will not have any drivers.
All in all, the game looked and felt like it had reached several new, albeit subtle improvement milestones, and to be honest, the new Italian city course was incredibly enticing. It was hard to put the controller down, and only because a new demo was about to start did I finally lay it down. We\'ll have more on Gran Turismo 4 in the near future. Until check out the new screenshots and enjoy.
Crowd images (ridiculously large)
http://vert.wnerd.com/gt4/gt41.jpghttp://vert.wnerd.com/gt4/gt42.jpghttp://vert.wnerd.com/gt4/gt43.jpghttp://vert.wnerd.com/gt4/gt44.jpg3D crowd footage -
http://franck.paul.free.fr/gt4spc2_qt.movIt is not pre rendered, this is apparently how it will look in the final game (it is still not featured in the demos).
Topic: Simply wonderful GT4 Preview (Read 878 times)