Rage (id Software)

[Farid]

Is Rage really open world in the same fashion as Just Cause 2, RDR and Fallout 3, though?

From what I know, it's more a case of hub maps (with more than two branches, direction-wise) connecting to linear maps. It's a bit like Soul Reaver/Darksiders/Metroid Prime type of open worlds. Which are just linear maps interconnected by hubs and not open maps like say Just Cause 2.

 

[N_B]

I'm guessing it will be more like Borderlands. If it can't do a day-night cycle because of the static lighting/shadows a real open world would look strange.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Don't worry. The only thing that's going to hit your eyes is the grill of my dune buggy.

Bah, someday a console game is going to make me really want to play multiplayer and then I'll have to give you a "boot to the head."

Regards,
SB

 

[Arwin]

Love the art style. Love the outdoors !Lighting in corridors look bad and we can see polygons on characters. Otherwise I love the "look" of this game's outdoors ! :smile:

I like the outdoors, and I can see it being really immersive with such a huge open world with so little repitition. That must really give a good feeling. On the other hand, it is yet another post apocalyptic steam punk type shit game and I couldn't be bored more with the theme if they added zombies to it. I'm getting more fed up with it each time I see it and it's not out yet for quite a while.

I really hope that sometime soon someone uses this tech for a much, much cooler setting. And yes, that's a personal point of view - there will be plenty of people in its intended audience that will love the theme I'm sure, but there's room here for expanding the universe!

 

[Colourless]

It's taking far too long for this too come out, just likr it took far too long for Doom 3 to come out. In fact with Doom 3 it took so long to come out unified lighting and shadowing wasn't interesting other than being a gameplay gimmik. Other games at around the time were also doing it too. Id Software needs to fix their project management issues otherwise they might become a 3d Realms like industry joke. This game was supposed to be finished years ago. What is taking so long? In every preview it look like a release should be nearly finished

 

[BRiT]

RAGE September 13th in North America, September 16th in Europe

Wow, finally a release date. I do hope for their sake it's a good game.

 

[NRP]

If it's not, I doubt publishers these days will accept the "when it's done" attitude that iD could get away with in the past.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Last time id released a game was Doom3 and it's their best selling one to date. I think it's still too early to draw any conclusions.

 

[NRP]

Come on, Laa-Yosh. Doom 3 was released in 2004! They have to do better.

I certainly hope Rage is good. I also think it has to be or iD is basically done as a dev house.

 

[Rangers]

Come on, Laa-Yosh. Doom 3 was released in 2004! They have to do better.

I certainly hope Rage is good. I also think it has to be or iD is basically done as a dev house.

Id's "problem" is they are too slow. But I guess they are rich enough to afford that.

I dunno, I'm just not that big on Rage though. 60 FPS means it doesn't look the best and I'm mainly a graphics whore. I'm waiting on Doom 4. It is an interesting game and a possible purchase though.

I'd say they'll show Doom 4 this August at Quakecon as they've hinted, but then again it is Id...Carmack will probably come out and say sorry no Doom 4, trailer next year.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Oh, I think id's problems go beyond that. The company's model since some time in the late 90s has been to release ground-breaking technology, then license out the engine to other developers. The problem is they totally misjudged where game development was going with Doom 3 (unified lighting ended up not being the next big thing, and IIRC, Doom 3's method isn't necessarily optimal), which is why Unreal Engine 3 grabbed such a huge part of the market.

So to me, the real questions for Tech 5 are whether it's really going to do much to sell it to developers when Unreal Engine 3 is so successful for them, and it sounds like CryEngine 3 might be more forward-looking.

 

[Kittonwy]

Id's "problem" is they are too slow. But I guess they are rich enough to afford that.

I dunno, I'm just not that big on Rage though. 60 FPS means it doesn't look the best and I'm mainly a graphics whore. I'm waiting on Doom 4. It is an interesting game and a possible purchase though.

I'd say they'll show Doom 4 this August at Quakecon as they've hinted, but then again it is Id...Carmack will probably come out and say sorry no Doom 4, trailer next year.

If they were rich they wouldn't have to be sold to Zenimax. I wonder what more Doom can offer as a franchise given so much has changed in the shooter genre since Doom 3, graphically is id the studio that can lead the pack?

 

[NotTarts]

So to me, the real questions for Tech 5 are whether it's really going to do much to sell it to developers when Unreal Engine 3 is so successful for them, and it sounds like CryEngine 3 might be more forward-looking.

It's not being licensed to third-parties, hasn't been for a while :
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29886/id_Tech_5_Rage_Engine_No_Longer_Up_For_External_Licensing.php

 

[Neb]

IIIRC Bethesda said they wouldn't use ID Tech 5 engine either as it isn't suited for big dynamic worlds.

 

[Kittonwy]

It's not being licensed to third-parties, hasn't been for a while :
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29886/id_Tech_5_Rage_Engine_No_Longer_Up_For_External_Licensing.php

It's too bad they're basically out of the engine licensing business, it'll be really hard for them to get back into that since first-party Sony will use Sony internal tech and everybody else will end up using UE3, except for maybe Rockstar and Capcom who use their own tech, but if Rage is any indication they've really missed out by focusing on their mega-textures tech.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The problem is they totally misjudged where game development was going with Doom 3 (unified lighting ended up not being the next big thing, and IIRC, Doom 3's method isn't necessarily optimal), which is why Unreal Engine 3 grabbed such a huge part of the market.

There's some truth to that, but it's more like they were far too ahead of their time. I've just looked at Dead Space 2 yesterday and it looks and feels very much like Doom3, even if the actual implementation of the lighting is a different technology (fully deferred renderer and shadow buffers).

Unreal engine 3 on the other hand is still very much grounded in the past with static lightmaps and a BSP-based visibility model. The main reason it's so successful in licensing is that Epic has put a really serious effort in both the marketing and the actual support part, at a time when id was still small and out of sync with the console generation changes (Doom3 was a bit too much for the Xbox1, not enough for the 360, and Rage is a bit too late).

 

[Farid]

The main problem of the Doom 3 Engine (or id Tech 4 as it's referred to now) is that it was too niche from day one and by design. At that time, it required too much CPU power with all its shadow volume extrusion workload. Because of that, it forced the engine to remain confined in small spaces and use very low poly models to remain playable. And all of that in order to produce way too precise hard edge shadows, that in the end were quite ugly to me.

So, being stuck with low poly models, low poly small scale environments, all for the benefit of some ugly hard edge volume shadowing are the exact reasons why that engine was such a no-show on the middleware market.

 

[sebbbi]

It probably has something to do with the 60fps, the megatexture lookup and decompression part, and so on. I'm not sure how the COD games use HDR (if at all) or what GT5 does, and I'm not really aware of any 60fps game doing HDR the right way on current consoles.

The virtual texture lookup doesn't affect HDR rendering at all. All console game textures are DXT-compressed anyways (in all major engines, including CE3), and the interpolated 565 texture precision has proven to be enough even with HDR lighting and tonemapping.

The reason might be that their light maps are actually baked in their color textures, instead of sampled from a separate light map texture. I assume other lightmapped engines currently tend to use HDR lightmaps. Id cannot save that much baked texture color data in HDR format (if your lights are baked in the color texture, you basically need to save the color texture in HDR format if you want HDR lighting). But if you look for example at Brink videos (another game using virtual texturing), you will see that they are using separate lightmaps (lightmap resolution doesn't match the texture resolution). Also our forthcoming game is using virtual texturing and has fully dynamic HDR rendering (with adaptive tonemapping). We use no baked lightmaps at all. Virtual texturing is basically just another texture streaming technology (a really fine grained one).

I personally suspect the reason would more likely be that Id is still using standard forward rendering with hardware MSAA (unlike most other companies that are moving to deferred rendering techniques). Tonemapping after MSAA resolve tends to remove the antialiasing almost completely on high contrast edges, as the simple linear hardware blending (MSAA resolve) doesn't stay linear any more after tone mapping. This might be a good reason to skip tonemapping. And HDR rendering doesn't basically exist without tone mapping (since how else would you map the high dynamic range to the [0,1] screen range).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

That makes sense, although I don't know if id is indeed using MSAA - the few native res screenshots we've seen so far didn't have any if my memory doesn't fail me. Not sure what they spend their cpu/gpu time on, though.

And this lightmap issue also suggests that Doom3 might not have HDR either - although it's still possible to combine the megatexture part with dynamic lighting, so I guess we'll have to wait a little more to see where they're going after Rage.

 

[Blazkowicz]

what I missed most was the lacking of weapons projectiles acting as a light source - big disappointment as that was in quake 2. (jedi knight 2 was also inferior to the first one for that reason )

I agree with you, the other reason being it was probably too much work for a 3rd party developer due to the specialty nature of the engine and its status of a very elegant dead end.
I liked it as it made a lowly geforce 4ti output insane graphics (with the 2x quincux antialiasing and 2x AF no less)