[Vyse]

Do you ever get the feeling we might be getting a bit too obsessed about photorealism in games? Well, if you're a car modeller at Polyphony Digital, nobody would blame you for starting to feel that way.

When it comes to meticulous attention to detail, the Gran Turismo series has always been the gold standard for petrolheads the world over – old vacuum-cleaner sounding engines of the PS2 days aside, that is.

But have you ever instead stopped to think about just how much work it takes to get those raytraced wing mirrors, buffed spoilers, and polished headlamps ready for their 4k (and soon-to-be VR) close-ups?

No, of course you haven't. You only think about yourself. Luckily for the rest of us, Japanese outlet Impress aren't quite so selfish, and in a recent interview with their Game Watch team, series creator Kazunori Yamauchi gave us a little window into the madness. And it's fair to say the numbers are pretty mind-boggling.

When it comes to car production, we spend 270 days, which is a huge cost, to make each car from scratch. Compared to the past, the development cost is incomparably higher, but players simply evaluate the number, saying, "There are fewer cars than Gran Turismo 6."

Now, as comical as it might be to imagine, that obviously doesn't mean there's some poor fella at Polyphony flailing his arms around and screaming "I've told you, Dave! I can't move onto the Mazda Demio exhaust notes until I've finished modelling the turbo wastegate on this 1993 Nissan Skyline!"

(Although in fairness, that sort of bespoke, hand-crafted artistry would go some way to explaining the game's somewhat divisive approach to microtransactions.)

No, of course we're talking 270 days' worth of man hours spread across the entire team here: think modellers, sound designers, legal lawsuit type people, the folk who have to make sure the Mazda RX-7's arse end slides out juuuuust right when you tip it into a corner at 60mph. That sort of thing.

Still, it's a truly eye-watering amount of work. And if you think it's just a case of Polyphony being a bunch of anal buggers (new death metal band name there if anyone wants it) think again: Turn 10 Studios – developers of the competing Forza series – have previously gone on record to say that the whole process of adding a new car to their game takes around six months, too.

To take you back a quarter of a century — because why not? — N64 classic GoldenEye 007's entire multiplayer mode was coded in around 40 days. When you stop to consider that, it begs some important questions about the complexity of modern day video games.

Are we willing to accept less content in exchange for shinier graphics? Is true photorealism even a feasible pursuit at this point? And will Dave ever get the exhaust note files he's been waiting for since September?

Whatever the answer, we think it's pretty cool to stop and think about these things every once in a while. God bless game developers, eh?

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/202...es-devs-270-days-to-make-one-gran-turismo-car

 

[infinitys_7th]

That's just not sustainable. At this rate next gen will not have any games because it will take 8+ years to develop a PS6 game and they are still trying to catch up with remaking PS3 games as PS5 games.

And they look better, but. . . 9 months per car better for what mostly amounts to an asset swap when picking a car? Nah.

This is what AI is needed for - this is just completely nonsensical and drawing resources away from actually making a game.

 

[Snes nes]

To me its kinda stupid this craps taking so long. Maybe were just not ready for photorealism yet.

 

[Zefah]

Really hard to tell how significant that is without knowing how many people typically work on each car or how long (in what capacity) and how many cars they are working on in parallel. I'm sure each car has a long approval process, but it's not like everyone is working on a single car and getting it signed off on before working on anything else.

 

[Grinchy]

From the article/OP:

No, of course we're talking 270 days' worth of man hours spread across the entire team here: think modellers, sound designers, legal lawsuit type people, the folk who have to make sure the Mazda RX-7's arse end slides out juuuuust right when you tip it into a corner at 60mph. That sort of thing.

This isn't just 270 days of modeling a car. Maybe that's the fastest part. But it's also including how long it takes for the car manufacturer's legal team to sign off, tweaks to the car's physics based on real world driving, etc. I was going to say AI will save us too until I read that part. Kinda feels like development of the full game can progress just fine while waiting for lawyers to print out endless documents.

 

[and 3 others]

"3 billion hours played."

 

[Stifler's Mom]

Like I wrote in another thread here, I have been at a company doing this kind of work for car configurators at car sales places and online.

It's really crazy how much work they need to put into a car to look good in the end.
There were dedicated teams just for getting the rough CAD models into shape for being worked on. And this took some weeks already.

 

[Vyse]

From the article/OP:

This isn't just 270 days of modeling a car. Maybe that's the fastest part. But it's also including how long it takes for the car manufacturer's legal team to sign off, tweaks to the car's physics based on real world driving, etc. I was going to say AI will save us too until I read that part. Kinda feels like development of the full game can progress just fine while waiting for lawyers to print out endless documents.

In the same interview with Impress' Game Watch team, Kazunori Yamauchi also mentions having started work on Gran Turismo 8 but is not allowed to talk about it.

 

[Boss Mog]

I think Yamauchi is too much of a perfectionist for his own good. I doubt it takes Turn10 270 days to model a car in Forza 8 and I'm sure they'll look great.

 

[Nobody]

To me the game would be equally as fun if it had one or two car models for each class. I like racing a lot more than I like cars and I would take more tracks and better systems over more cars any day.