rec.autos.simulators

Obviously not.

Beats it in what? Realism? Well for one thing, no matter what you do
you can't end up upside down in Gran Turismo, like you can in both GPL
demo and F1RS. That is one thing, it appears to lack real 3D physics
model. So does Nascar 2 too, though, but that's beside the point. :-)
The other one, the only thing why I regard Gran Turismo more as a
arcade racing game than all-out simulation, is the lack of damage
model. And albeit not totally necessary,***pit view should be there
too. These last two things should have been at least optional.

True, but as I said above, it still has a few unnecessary omissions
for a simulation. That's ok though, because these may make it more
playable for many people, who for example don't want to have to worry
about crashes. But it should have been optional.

I think the only reason for it is to make the game more playable, the
same reason they made the physics a bit less realistic for the US
market. Unfortunately that also makes it less a simulation than what
it could have been, and some other racing titles already are.

Fair enough. But like someone else pointed out, having no damage model
allows you to race in a manner you couldn't race with a real car,
using walls and other cars as some kind of speed limiters. This was a
problem also with TOCA and the original Psygnosis F1. Because they had
no damage model, you could in many cases approach the curves at full
speed if there was another car in front of you. You would just hit its
back and keep racing. In a real race with a real car that could
destroy your motor, and at least affect the handling of your car for
the rest of the race. In damage model you could also include such
things as tire wear and engine/clutch/gear box failures.

That said, I'm not trying to put GT down. It is a great game and a
great reason to have a Playstation. But in my eyes it isn't directly
competing with such titles as GPL and F1RS, which are trying to
simulate real life races as accurately as technology allows them.

I frown on neither (read my review of F1RS <G>).  

Is it really beside the point?  Or is it exactly the point.  Not being
able to put a car upside down has not been a big drawback for Indy Car
II or NASCAR 2.

We must agree to disagree on this one.  I like a good damage model,
too, but I absolutely refuse to buy into the theory that damage =
simulation and no damage = arcade.  It's a basic philosophical
difference in what defines a simulation and I don't think either of us
will convince the other.  Aside from that, in many cases, even those
sims that DO have damage models end up with them turned off for many
online leagues because the AI is often so reckless it results in
unbelievable amounts of damage for things that aren't the driver's
fault.

I agree with you on***pit view and stated this in the review.
Again, doesn't make it less of a 'sim' though.

Unnecessary?  Well, given the Playstation's limitations, they may have
been VERY necessary.  Hopefully a PC version of GT will come out and
have these things.

I really don't think so.  I've been following GT for some time now and
I've read in numerous places that car manufacturers are far less
interested in signing on if they are going to see their cars get
trashed.  Remember that car manufacturers are interested in selling
cars, and that means they want them to be seen at their shiny best.
Formula One and the IRL similarly have made developers limit damage
models beyond reason (though F1 has loosened up on this a great deal
and it shows in the most recent sims).

That's a very valid point....at a certain level I guess that people
who want realism in a sim are not going to be satisfied using walls to
get better times.  To me there's nothing more disgusting than seeing
my car bounce of a wall in replay -- to me that's a "you screwed up"
indicator, regardless of my time.  Obviously the fact that there is an
arcade mode in the game means Sony is trying to appeal to the broadest
possible audience but lets just admit that even in the most ***
sims you can turn off the damage and bounce off walls and other cars
all you want, often gaining advantages in the process.  Usually its
the user who decides that they are going to drive the car the way it
was meant to be driven, regardless of whether damage is or isn't an
option in the game.

Well, it isn't competing directly with them because its a sports car
simulation rather than a Formula racer.  

Randy

Randy Magruder
Contributing Reviewer
Digital Sportspage
http://www.racesimcentral.net/

Joe McGinn
===================================================
Author of Inside LotusScript
http://www.manning.com/McGinn/459.html
===================================================

Climbs down from soapbox and heads home for the day.

Pete

I'll jump in here on Randy's side.  While I like a damage model, what makes a

very well reviewed, definitely arcade, game.  I tried the demo.  Fantastic

demo.  Great graphics, no damage, WITH a hood view MUCH better car physics, but
homicidal AI that put you off the road at every opportunity.  Arcade city --
the hood view doesn't help.  It seems there's potential for a sim in there
somewhere (and reportedly a sim mode will be in the final version).  Sega
Daytona has a damage model, but is certyainly no sim.  For me, it seems that GT
has the 2 most important factors in qualifying as a sim, driving models and AI.
 Now if I could just get my hands on it..........

Where the frack is this Digital Sportspage?

http://www.digitalsports.com/ps2/granturismo/review.html

[about Randy considering Gran Turismo's graphics slightly better than
 NFS3's, something I just can't understand]

So you don't think that replays are just a graphical gimmick that's
nice to watch during the first days but gets less and less important
the longer you play? It's always been this way when I played so I
don't consider a great-looking replay anywhere as important as good
in-game graphics.

Great term, huh? :) What I mean is that some in-game textures and
especially the backdrop images have been chosen badly and show some
_huge_ pixels, especially during replays. Drive the "Sunday Cup", 2nd
race. Watch the replay. Right at the beginning you'll see some very
strange huge pixels covering the top of the screen. This is the
backdrop image (a mountain or something), zoomed in a lot. Watch the
replay and you'll see that this kind of "heavily zoomed in backdrop"
that looks really crappy. Another example is the stands where
spectators are just random colored pixels.  They actually look like
little rectangles each. Other games have done the same thing better.

I've checked yesterday. There's only a few occasions of really bad
pop-up (like in the 2nd track of the clubman(?) cup where a bunch
of trees that hang over the track pops up right in the center of
your vision) but it's pretty omnipresent, other than in NFS3 where
you have to look hard to find any.

This all sounds like nitpicking of course, but there's no way around
it if I want to show that a game with good graphics looks worse than
a game with stunning graphics. :)

Yes, you're right. The problem is that at times GT tries to look
like an arcade racer (ie. spectacular tunnels, bridges to drive
over, and even a rage-racer like "cliff-section with columns"),
and that's precisely where it fails to compete with NFS3.

Karlheinz

--
      Karlheinz  Agsteiner         |  phone: *49/371 531 1667
 Institute  of Computer Systems    |  fax  : *49/371 531 1806

Chemnitz University of Technology  |  http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~kag

[excellent point about realistic tracks in sims deleted for space reasons]

This is where I totally disagree. In my opinion, the world of racing
games changed forever after V-Rally (for those without a PSX: V-Rally
was the first PSX racer that replaced the typical cheap night modes
like adding black to an object's color depending on how far away it is
or even painting the screen increasingly dark towards the top
with real headlights that illuminate the night around the car. IMHO
this resulted in far more real and stunningly beautiful night races).
This game has shown that it's possible to depict night driving roughly
the way we're seeing it in real life. And NFS3 even improved upon this
effect by adding high/dimmed light (and even opponents that get mad at
you if you're approaching them with high beam turned on). This kind of
night races IMHO is no "cool little arcade racing feature", it's a
definite step forward that I simply want to see in every racer. As
beautiful as GT's night races are, once you've experienced real
headlights it looks stale (to me at least).

Nope, no dust on cars in NFS3. On the other side there are tire-marks
that stay on the track, the game remembers every roadsign I've rammed
in my last lap so there are a bunch of nice little touches present in
NFS3 that add to the realism.

But that's the problem. GT features rather convincing race tracks in
day races, on the other side in night races it has to use special
well-lit city courses (I guess night races through cities are not that
realistic). If GT would have real headlights the designers of the game
could have added night races to about every track, just like in NFS3.

Yes, definitely. Actually I found me in the strange situation of
painstakingly pointing out every minor fault of this incredible
game in order to make my point.

Very true. Still, if we're talking about graphics only, I
consider NFS3 superior in about every respect except replays
and actually don't see why a lot of reviews praised GT's
graphics as the best ever. For me in terms of graphics
GT redefined the state of the art of replays, NFS3 did the
same for about everything else.

Karlheinz

--
      Karlheinz  Agsteiner         |  phone: *49/371 531 1667
 Institute  of Computer Systems    |  fax  : *49/371 531 1806

Chemnitz University of Technology  |  http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~kag

Likewise, nothing in Gran Turismo lets you drive a modern high powered
F1 car, or one from the sixties like in GPL. I don't quite see your
point. If you are saying they can't be compared, I agree.

Ok, so you were mostly talking about eye-candy then? ;-)
I'm sorry, but I'm more concerned about the racing/driving aspect in
these games (no, GT does not fail in that).

But for some reason Papyrus decided to fix that... er... feature in
GPL. I don't know why it wasn't modelled in GT, either because it
would have made the game harder, or Playstation might not have been
able to handle the extra CPU load. I think the latter was the reason
for that omission in Nascar 2.

In your article it was mentioned that Sony claimed they simulated
every millimeter of how these cars handle in real world. I guess they
didn't then, if their physics model is still incomplete compared to
some other driving sims.

Once again, I'm not saying GT isn't a great game, but the hype claims
this is the first racer to simulate driving characteristics so
carefully like in real life. I just don't feel that is true.

There's a hazy line between simulation and arcade, just like I have
said already, but it is clear that not implementing something like
damage model does make a racer _less_ a simulation. It is a very big
part of simulating how you drive cars in real life, because it
prevents you doing things you can do in a racer with no damage model.

My definition for a racing simulation is that you can clearly see the
programmers have tried to take into account as many things as possible
when trying to simulate what would happen in real life races. When you
start seeing how they have made big compromises just to improve the
easier gameplay, then it starts to slip on the arcade side.

Yes, but the difference is that it is optional in these games. If you
could enable damage model in GT, naturally I wouldn't be complaining
at all about it.

That is settled then. It wasn't quite clear in the review. I agree GT
wins in that genre, after all what PC racers are there in that genre?
Ultimate Racing Pro? NICE 2? Motorhead? Not much of a competition.

Its very amusing reading your increasingly desperate nit-picking of GT
(you used the word, not me), to support the rolling-scenery show of NFS3,
You can classify and sub-classify it all you want, in the end GT is much
the better title, in almost every single way that matters.

I particularly enjoyed your complaint before that GT had no sound of the
shifter. The only cars where the shifter makes a sound, particularly
to be heard at speed, are the open metal-gate ferraris, which GT does
not have. Otherwise its as pointless as modelling *** dice***
from a mirror.
So give up the defense, you are fighting a losing battle, GT algorithms
are streets ahead of NFS3, as are customizations, sound effects, control,
and the eye candy is great also. So whats the point even trying to
compare? Come back when you can do a sub 2"11s lap on the 3rd night
course, from a standing start, in the TVR, and you will get more respect
from me. "arcade racer" is an excuse when you cant get the physics to feel
good enough, its simply not enough anymore.

: [about Randy considering Gran Turismo's graphics slightly better than
:  NFS3's, something I just can't understand]
: > Remember that there is ONE graphics score in the review, and I stated
: > that they really needed to be divided up into two.  The replay quality
: > lifts the graphics score above that of NFS3.    I tried to address
: > this in the review:
:
: So you don't think that replays are just a graphical gimmick that's
: nice to watch during the first days but gets less and less important
: the longer you play? It's always been this way when I played so I
: don't consider a great-looking replay anywhere as important as good
: in-game graphics.
:
: >>It can't compete technically (there's slight polygon distortion,
: >>some serious pixel problems especially in the backdrop images,
: >
: > serious pixel problems?!
:
: Great term, huh? :) What I mean is that some in-game textures and
: especially the backdrop images have been chosen badly and show some
: _huge_ pixels, especially during replays. Drive the "Sunday Cup", 2nd
: race. Watch the replay. Right at the beginning you'll see some very
: strange huge pixels covering the top of the screen. This is the
: backdrop image (a mountain or something), zoomed in a lot. Watch the
: replay and you'll see that this kind of "heavily zoomed in backdrop"
: that looks really crappy. Another example is the stands where
: spectators are just random colored pixels.  They actually look like
: little rectangles each. Other games have done the same thing better.
:
: >>and more visible pop-up than in NFS3,
: >
: > I really haven't noticed pop-up in GT.  I'll take your word for it
: > that there might be some, but I really didn't notice it.
:
: I've checked yesterday. There's only a few occasions of really bad
: pop-up (like in the 2nd track of the clubman(?) cup where a bunch
: of trees that hang over the track pops up right in the center of
: your vision) but it's pretty omnipresent, other than in NFS3 where
: you have to look hard to find any.
:
: This all sounds like nitpicking of course, but there's no way around
: it if I want to show that a game with good graphics looks worse than
: a game with stunning graphics. :)
:
: > I understand your complaint, but I really think that GT is more about
: > the cars than the tracks.  The generous use of red/white racing curbs
: > and more technical style circuits is an indicator that this is first
: > and foremost a racing sim, not an open-road eyefest like NFS3.
:
: Yes, you're right. The problem is that at times GT tries to look
: like an arcade racer (ie. spectacular tunnels, bridges to drive
: over, and even a rage-racer like "cliff-section with columns"),
: and that's precisely where it fails to compete with NFS3.
:
: Karlheinz
:
: --
:       Karlheinz  Agsteiner         |  phone: *49/371 531 1667
:  Institute  of Computer Systems    |  fax  : *49/371 531 1806

: Chemnitz University of Technology  |  http://www.racesimcentral.net/~kag

:)

You're right, of course. I'm also enjoying GT at least as much
as NFS3, it just can't be beaten in terms of realism, number of cars,
setup options. Actually if you take a look at my reviews of
NFS3 (http://www.racesimcentral.net/)
and GT (http://www.racesimcentral.net/)
you'll see that I've rated GT higher than NFS3.

But that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about graphics
(you know, it should be possible to like a game and still be aware
that it's graphics are good but not as perfect as in some other
game). I'm still amazed that about every review I've read is praising
GT's graphics. To me it seems everyone is stunned by the fantastic
replays and forgets that the in-game graphics aren't as good.

Please check who you're quoting. I've not written anything like
that.

Try to read my posts before replying to them. I've stated several
times that I like GT a lot and I haven't tried anywhere to compare the
two games (at least in this thread) in any respect but graphics. And
despite your bold statement about what arcade racers really are I
don't think the two games even can be compared. "arcade racer" isn't
an excuse, it's a decision by the game's designers. Sims are about
accurately modeling car behavior, arcade racers are about driving real
damn fast. Since real cars obviously can't take a 90' turn at 150mph
the physics get changed to give more adrenaline rush even if realism
suffers. This way you get a totally different genre of racers and one
that's just as enjoyable as sims (IMHO).

Karlheinz

--
      Karlheinz  Agsteiner         |  phone: *49/371 531 1667
 Institute  of Computer Systems    |  fax  : *49/371 531 1806

Chemnitz University of Technology  |  http://www.racesimcentral.net/~kag

I gotta jump in here just a bit I got NFS3 right in front of me and enjoy
it, but even if you eliminate the replay mode of GT I do feel the overall
in game graphics in GT are better than NFS3. NFS3 does deserve kudos
for attempting more with lush racing environments like the train passing
overhead or the amazing looking tunnels,but there seems to be a slight
jerkyness at times when compared to GT's in game graphics. I use outside
car view in both games and GT cars look better and the flow of the track
GT is superior. Part of this may have to do with when you play outside view
the camera in GT seems to follow the car more realistically that
I actully feel like I am pumping the breaks going into turns. And since the
other cars are more distinguishable it becomes more enjoyable to me from
a graphics standpoint overall.

I hope other NFS3 fans don't get upset I really like the game, some things
like hot pursuit mode make it great fun just sharing some of my things
I noticed.