The wait for Driveclub has been agonizing. With only glimpses shown, fans are more than ready to get their hands on the PS4 exclusive racing game. Today, PlayStation Blog's, Fred Dutton, shared 51 details about Driveclub. Unsurprisingly, a lot of them detailed just how pretty the game will be.
Some of the more impressive details include:
1. NASA data was used to accurately map out the night sky — so wherever you are in the world you’ll see the correct star constellations for your location.
11. Each location has a draw distance of up to 200km to the horizon and even simulates the curvature of the earth in both skies and terrain. Distant landscapes are built out and fully modelled, instead of “painted on,” to ensure that they support the dynamic, volumetric nature of the skies and lighting.
13. Some tracks boast more than 1.2 million road-side trees — and this number keeps going up as the artists try to out-do each other as development progresses.
21. A typical Driveclub car is made up of 260,000 polygons. The staggeringly detailed cars you see in promo videos are the same models you drive in the game — they’re not pre-rendered CG versions.
28. A full shader-driven procedural system is used to simulate car damage. Multiple layers of scratches appear in the most exposed areas and edges, revealing undercoat and bare metal or carbon. A parallax mapped dent layer provides minor crumpling, and a physics driven vertex deformation system is used for severe damage.
40. When you race, the engine sounds are different based on which of the six camera views you choose — inside or outside of the car. You’re not hearing the same engine audio with a filter — it’s all recorded separately.
All these are pretty damn impressive, and even more so when you actually go through the entire list of details. It shows that Evolution Studios has certainly put in the time to make Driveclub really special, and breathtakingly gorgeous.
However, the last detail makes all of this even more impressive:
51. Despite all of the above, once selected a track will take no more than 15 seconds to load.
In a time where loading times can sometimes take 30 seconds or more, really breaking up the flow of gameplay, it's nice to hear that players will be in a track a mere 15 seconds after it's been selected.
