Patch change requests

[jimsin]

Can't see another thread along these lines, so again forgive me if I'm going over old ground.

Don't know if any of the developers use this forum, but there were a couple of small tweaks that I thought would improve Wipeout HD, and would be fairly easy to implement during a future patch.

Firstly - I am trying hard to get all the elite gold medals - but I find it annoying that getting a novice gold medal means that you can't see which skilled or elite medals you have achieved. Would be good to see each, or at least to be able to delete your novice medals so you can see your elite results instead.

Secondly - there have been a couple of races where I have been destroyed just at the finish line - so it says 'Contender Eliminated' then 'Race Completed' - but then in the results it shows as a DNF. Think it would be more exciting if your race result was honoured, even though your were in the process of exploding when you crossed the finish line.

[sny]

...getting a novice gold medal means that you can't see which skilled or elite medals you have achieved. Would be good to see each...

Actually, there are separate medals for Novice, Skilled and Elite. The Novice one, for example, has nothing in the middle, while an Elite medal of any colour would have the logo of the Single Race event type in the middle. I'm surprised that this wasn't apparent for everyone.

EDIT: Forgot to add that the elite medals only appear if you previously had a medal of the same grade in a lower difficulty setting. In other words, Novice Gold can only be superseded by Skilled Gold and Elite Gold.

[SaturnReturn]

Online, if you get blown up over the line then it counts that as you completing the race, so you can be eliminated, but if you're ships goes over the line before the 2nd place ship then you still get 1st place. But online you will respawn, whereas offline in single races you won't. So I guess that's why. They'd have to change the whole thing offline so that you respawn there too.

Also, I haven't played campaign in a long long time. But when the patch was first released which added the difficulty levels to all the events in campaign, I remember the cell for that particular event was filled with a different kind of badge. I can't remember exactly, but if it is done on novice I think it just fills it with a flat colour, but if you do it on elite then you get something that looks more like a badge, embossed with the logo on it. Does that not happen any more? Do the cells just look the same whether you do them on elite or novice?

EDIT: Looks like sny beat me to it.

[sh1kamaru-]

Online, if you get blown up over the line then it counts that as you completing the race, so you can be eliminated, but if you're ships goes over the line before the 2nd place ship then you still get 1st place. But online you will respawn, whereas offline in single races you won't. So I guess that's why. They'd have to change the whole thing offline so that you respawn there too.

Also, I haven't played campaign in a long long time. But when the patch was first released which added the difficulty levels to all the events in campaign, I remember the cell for that particular event was filled with a different kind of badge. I can't remember exactly, but if it is done on novice I think it just fills it with a flat colour, but if you do it on elite then you get something that looks more like a badge, embossed with the logo on it. Does that not happen any more? Do the cells just look the same whether you do them on elite or novice?

EDIT: Looks like sny beat me to it.

Or remove respawn from online, at least on phantom class (so that newcomers on lower class aren't fed up and stop playing online)

[SaturnReturn]

I'm not sure what you mean. Why does respawning make people fed up? Surely if people had to wait for the race to finish every time they got eliminated, then that would be more boring and people would get fed up more quickly?

[jimsin]

... I'm surprised that this wasn't apparent for everyone.

EDIT: Forgot to add that the elite medals only appear if you previously had a medal of the same grade in a lower difficulty setting. In other words, Novice Gold can only be superseded by Skilled Gold and Elite Gold.

Thanks for reply - but yes, I'm well aware that you get a different graphic for novice, skilled and elite medals - my gripe is the the second bit, that novice gold can only be superseded by skilled/elite gold - Even an elite bronze is harder to get than a novice gold, so in campaign mode I'd rather see my elite bronze or silver than the novice gold.

Thanks also Saturnreturn for the info about online/offline destruction at the finishline - didn't realise it was different online. Hopefully I'll have this elite campaign legend thing out the way with soon, and I can look forward to many happy online race wins in an exploding craft

[Aeroracer]

My patch would be an option for all tracks to be night or day tracks. Imagine how cool sol2 would look with nice night with all the stars and the moon.

easy to do and is cool to look at.

[jimsin]

That's the best idea yet!!

[NeilSmith]

Great idea, I would absolutely love for the tracks to change between night and day. Thumbs up!

[BARTgai]

I agree, night and day would be awesome! Not sure how difficult it would be to implement though..

[Darkdrium777]

It would require reworking the whole lighting of the track as well as the creation of new textures to apply to the 3D models, probably a reworking of the ship skins so they have appropriate lighting during the night, maybe also weapons effects to hide things that could possibly make them look worse at night than they do during the day (I am thinking about the bomb effect mainly, how do you do bloom at night?)

TLDR: a lot of work. Would it be cool? Yes.

[Handmadelion]

I agree, night and day would be awesome! Not sure how difficult it would be to implement though..

There was that one track from pure that took you through that city at night and had that really nice descent right before the last few turns. I used to love popping my boost at the beginning of it. But I mainly remember it for being a night track. It is a very fun experience at night. Just like Sincuit from Pure was all night-timey AND overcast! I loved those two tracks. And we do, need more like them.

[djKyoto]

Options to change options during multiplayer games / lobby rooms would be useful. I keep wanted to change the music in the middle of a round of online games.

[Aeroracer]

I agree, night and day would be awesome! Not sure how difficult it would be to implement though..

I think it wouldn't be too hard as the tracks look like they have lighting built into them as shadows and light/dark change as you move around.
3d modelling programs which wipeout was probally made on can do that.So i think a press of the button would solve most of the problem. with a bit of work on things like weapon effect.

If i remember when i was a kid wipeout 1 had day and night tracks.
venom daytime rapier at night.

wipeout apart from being a really hot game looks so good when you look at it. I am still amazed at the graphics and tracks it's just so hard to see everything when your racing as you are focused on the track.

[jimsin]

Hard to say how hard the day/night thing would be to do - when you do the level design in Little Big Planet you just have to apply a filter and that changes the lighting for everything - I'd imagine that SL must use some sort of lighting filter for their environments, and it's probably adjustable so they can get them just right for the particular tracks - just guessing though, I have no idea what sort of magic they use to create the wonderful worlds of Wipeout HD.

[Darkdrium777]

Except level design on the console is simplified to an extreme, and LBP was made with night/day in mind, so the assets already have the appropriate parameters to react well to the change in lighting.

The current WipEout HD tracks, textures, models, effects, were not made for use in a night environment. They would have to rework a lot of data to create a night environment, and let's not even think about cycles.

I don't know which game it is on Xbox, I think it's Forza (AG-Wolf can correct me on this) that will be/is on multiple DVDs because of the need of multiple textures and art data for the day/night cycle effect.

WipEout HD was made on a PC, I don't know which software it is exactly, but from the making of video you can see that the lighting is composed of multiple static lights which do not cast dynamic shadows for the most part (I've shown/said this before when ProblemSolver was talking about the shadows and lighting in WipEout HD Fury), and of course a sunlight which casts the very detailed (for the console) dynamic shadow you get under your craft most of the times. Now these lights were all tweaked in hue, radius, brilliance, for the day time environment. I can tell you, having used some level design software myself (Unreal Editor 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0) that uses the same system of static lighting and precomputed shadow maps or light maps, that the current settings for each of the static lights on any track cannot be transferred over to a night time environment and expected to look good. You have to redo everything over for a different time of day, so they would have to at least do that for the current sixteen tracks, and the eight new tracks in Fury (In the reverse way for The Amphiseum, as it's already night.)

Now, that means they would essentially double the size of the lighting data, as there are already two different light maps for each track: one for Forward, and one for Reverse. Don't believe that? Go look on Moa Therma Forward, that turn right at the end of the mag strip in the tunnel. See those lights from the advert panels? Go on Moa Therma Reverse, same turn. The lights are gone. This means there are two different light maps containing the lighting data for Moa Therma at least, because as I said the lighting is made with precalculated static lights. Now you'd want them to take that to four light maps so that you only have a day and night environment on Forward, and on Reverse. Notice how we're not even talking about cycles here, just a fixed day time and night time. If you want cycles, you have to exponentially multiply the number of light maps you will include depending on how detailed you want this cycle to be.

This is why real time raytracing is so important to achieve. With it, gone are the heavy light maps, just program the lights and the real time calculations in engine will render lighting, shadow, dynamic effects, all without the need for precomputed stuff.

So I've only talked about the lighting here, I'm not even mentioning the issue of textures/materials/shaders that sometimes fit well withing a lighting environment, but not another (This means they would have to redo this as well, once for a fixed time of day, multiple times if you want a day/night 24 hours cycle), some weapon and particle effects might need tweaking too, sprite effects (The clouds on Sol 2 for example are sprites and are not lit, or unlit I'm 90% certain of that, those would need to be redone), so like I said, it's a lot of work.

Now, I also said it would be cool if they did do it, but from their previous posts (Colin's latests especially), I get the feeling they are not too ready on undertaking such a daunting task. Essentially, they would have to rework the whole game... Unfortunately that's how it will happen until real time raytracing is achieved, that would eliminate probably the biggest problem of all when you wish to achieve such a day/nigh cycle effect.

[Aeroracer]

Lots of good technical stuff there, most of which i do not understand.It dosnt need light to dark cycles just a few tracks can be played at night or day.only on the tracks that would benifit the most.

But i think whatever work it takes it would be so cool to do sol 2 at night and maybe a few other tracks.It would be worth it.As the look would be so good new players would just have to buy it.

I dont think there is a player who would disagree with how cool it would look. As wipeout looks so beautiful to look at already and has room for even more.

[Colin Berry]

I would love to have SOL 2 available to race at night time alas it is not going to happen. Our lighting set up, (which I dont fully understand nor want to) takes time, actually everything takes time, from doing 1 ship skin to buildign a track. When fury was started there was a HUGE list of things we wanted to do.
I mean HUGE.
It was prioritised into 3 or 4 groups from essential must have to would be nice
Then we ditched pretty much everything that was not a must have
this left us with a HUGE list
which we reprioritised etc etc etc
We just didnt have the time and resources to do everything we wanted, not by a long chalk, which is a shame, but i suspect its the same for every game with DLC etc.

Sol2 at night, would fkin rock, alas I dont think it will ever see the light of day...
hrm
is that a pun ?
if it is, its bad

[eLhabib]

Shame really, but understandeable!
Speaking of lighting: is it just my imagination or were there really subtle changes made to the lighting of the tracks with v2.00? I might be seeing things, but the shadows seemed quite a bit crisper to me today... (but then I haven't played in over a week...)

[Spece2goin]

does any one noticed the new plates?

what are they all?