[360, PS3] RAGE Discussion

I was a bit disappointed by the animations of the characters. They looked sort of stiff and jerky like in PC games a decade ago.

 

IMHO shaders excellent and very clean graphic too but I don't understood that absolute defence about Carmack's engine in its 'flaws'. I think is normal it has some reserve. 60 fps is a huge target & I'm not surprise to the end of the low polycount result (I doubt it's simply occasional ...every character is full of raw 'angles', no exception for now) and shadow/lighting dynamic very limited. Carmack and id are humans after all and it's surely a great engine ( far away better of ue3) but not a miracle how someone has expected. However it's just a build, will be improved surely.

 

Is there anyone who didn't think "OMG, Fallout 3 should have had this engine !" ?

 

They aren't. All footage at QuokeCon was PC. They were given a live demo on a PC version using an Xbox 360 controller - hence some confusion.

 

Well, that might explain why Bethesda bought ID.

 

Um, bethesda didnt buy id

 

It looks like Fallout 3, but replace the RPG elements with driving. Could be good, but iD has a track record of interesting technology and mediocre games.

 

I thought have MT component but then keep dynamic HDR from F3...

 

How big is Rage? (xx km² or so)

 

The game has excellent textures and baked lighting for static geometry but it looks to me that anything that is not 'megatextured' (part of the large scale immovable terrain) has low res textures.

The geometry looks bad in many spots, especially the models, like Doom3, they're low-poly apparently poly-bumped. Look at the club-fingers on some of the characters.

Dynamic shadows look mostly pretty good.

The shaders I think however are bad to non-existent. With something like mega-texture, you'd need to have a channel in the texture to express the ID of the shader you'd like to apply, and either use one big uber-shader with switching, or a bunch of separate shaders. I'm guessing that like Doom3, they are using a single generic pixel shader for mostly everything. D3 didn't even need more than PS 1.4. Why do I suspect this? Because almost all of the surface shading, especially indoor, whether it is furniture, vehicle, or person looks similar to me, with similar artifacts.

I would agree with you Laa-Yosh that the overall environment looks fantastic and unlike anything seen in other games. But the rest of it looks substandard to me. Especially the character models, which look terrible, especially the big-fat boss guy and the zombies. The eyes on most characters look pretty bad.

 

Shaders are kinda lame, yeah, but even the characters are megatextured so they shouldn't have low res textures compared to the rest of the game world.

I guess we have to wait until they're done with the final polish pass to see how it looks like...

 

Note to id:

not releasing Rage gameplay vids and not even allowing shakycam recordings of the presentation either is LAME.

 

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/926/rage33.jpg

Nice...

 

If you read the following IGN preview of Rage gameplay to the end you'll see the following:

Important points: a) needing a third disc for multiplayer would most likely mean they threw away COOP, b) PS3 getting better megatexture quality than even PC, c) keep the discussion civil, we don't need any platform fandom trolling.

 

It'd behoove id to release a premium PC only crazy-quality version though. A lot of PC gamers would pay through the nose to get bragging rights over the PS3.

One question is if the PS3 version is going dual layer or not? At the moment it's about 14 GBs data dual XB360 DVDs. 25 GB of BRD would be substantially more without having to go into the slower second layer. That said, wouldn't a 50GB BRD be the best media for a Leet PC version? Are PC gamers fitting BRD drives? I suppose they're not, because PC games are made for DVD.

 

Yeah, we're having a similar discussion in the PC thread. WRT the PS3 version, that EDGE article mentioned the sweet-spot being 1 50GB blu-ray disc (or 4 DL DVDs) which is corroborated by this IGN article mentioning a DL disc.

This article by id's J.P. Waveren does mention the layer transition impact:

 

Well Carmack has already mentioned the possibility of that in previous interviews. I know there'd be plenty PC gamers lining up for it, myself included. Heck, ship it on a BD-ROM if you must, infact I'd prefer it.

Obviously you can compress the data on the discs themselves even more on the PC version, so it'll be higher quality than the 360 version even if there's only a two disc version.

 

I wish Carmack would show us a picture comparison of the compression level with those MT. If it's the same difference of say Doom3 high vs ultra high then one could say the extra space does not justify much benefit. Anyone has an educated guess on that?

 

Where did you get that from? That's what they hope for, but they've talked about 3 DVD's as well. It's terabytes "at the moment".

 

Um, all high end PC games that come out towards the end of the storage medias life time come out on ridiculously large amounts of discs. This is unproblematic however, as you only need them once, during install.

Also, more expensive to release both DVD and bluray versions of the PC game, than just DVDs.