Gran Turismo Prologue TGS Screens and Trailer

[Zenien]

http://www.gran-turismo.com/jp/movie/d1192.html
http://cdn.jp.playstation.com/4m/tgs07/sce_gt5p.wmv

 

[Devil May Cry]

I wish they'd show weather effects.

 

[Fenrir]

I have a feeling I might actually try to "bump into" one of those cars every once in a while when playing this on my friend's 100 inch Panasonic plasma, just to confirm whether they are real or not.

Sweet Jesus...

 

[Zenien]

To be a car fan and work on PD.

The small, youthful, stress-addled army of workaholics who meticulously construct the game byte by byte in a cavernous studio on the second floor of an anonymous office block in southeast Tokyo’s Edagawa district is taking a rare day off. Polyphony Digital, the wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment that produces Gran Turismo, has rented Tsukuba for a company-sponsored track day. Leading the parade of RX-7s, M3s, Evos, and STIs—salaries are relatively good in this line of work—is the game’s 39-year-old creator, Kazunori Yamauchi, in his all-white Ford GT.

GT's influence in the car industry.

Turismo’s huge catalog of cars introduced an international audience to then-obscure Japanese domestic product, including the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, Nissan Skyline GT-R, and Subaru Impreza WRX STi. The game deserves credit for helping make these and other vehicles into international cult cars, and for convincing automakers to bring versions of them to the U.S. market. Yamauchi consults informally on styling and youth culture with various car companies that once spurned Turismo and denied it licensing rights but now jockey to have their newest cars featured in the game.

At the center of the studio, across from Yamauchi’s glass-walled office—it’s completely obscured by curtains because, the employees say, he’s embarrassed about the mess within—is a two-story-tall, blue-lit, glass-sealed tower where Gran Turismo 5 lives in prenatal form. Polyphony’s 80-terabyte mainframe (one terabyte equals 1,048,576 megabytes) is said to be one of the largest among Tokyo’s major game studios. Chilled slightly to 64 degrees Fahrenheit, the tower also contains Yamauchi’s wine and champagne stash.

The software engineers who created the physics engine have stayed with Yamauchi through the years and have come to be known as the “Nine Samurai” (theirs are the Ferraris and Aston Martins in Polyphony’s parking lot), a takeoff on the famous Akira Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai. Asked for the basic cereal-box explanation of how the physics engine works, Yamauchi, speaking Japanese through his American-born right-hand man, Tsubasa Inaba, pictures a billiards table.

On GT's detail.

“In the past, each car was like a sheet, all just one color,” says Yamauchi, who is also an avid amateur photographer. “We are now taking it to a much higher level, studying the feel and texture of the materials.” There’s a difference between how light plays over metallic paint compared with a plastic headlight lens or piece of rubber trim. At the edges of body panels, car paint tends to bead slightly, causing light reflections to spear outward. Going around soft corners, the sun’s reflection pinches up and then spreads out again.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/13550/the-game-boys.html