RAGE : It Deserves its own thread now!

[Scott_Arm]

I'm not familiar with Gears2 (thanks to MS wanting to revive the PC so much ). Do you mean WRT texture streaming?

About the slides. Am I reading too much into slide 23 or will we need a tri-core or above for a 60fps game on PCs?

38 msec of processing in 16 msec? That's how you got tri-core or above? They're also allowed some jobs to be completed 1 frame late, so they don't stall for synchronization. I guess it would still end up being the same 38msec, even if jobs were being deferred. Aren't some of those jobs GPU functions like "rendering"? I think dual core would probably work, depending on resolution, detail settings etc. Are we talking 60Hz at 720p, 1080p or higher?

 

[AlNom]

Do you mean WRT texture streaming?

Yeah. I'll see if I can't find a better video of it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO-2M43YIrE#t=1m50s

The person sped up the video, but you should be able to pick out the progression of texture lod on the pillar there.

 

[Richard]

Yeah. I'll see if I can't find a better video of it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO-2M43YIrE#t=1m50s

The person sped up the video, but you should be able to pick out the progression of texture lod on the pillar there.

I have no idea what you're trying to show me in that video.

WRT to DVD read, there's an interesting paper by J.P.

Most of the data is read from the two highest detail layers at 6 MP/s (= 275 tiles/s). At an average compression ratio of 14:1 without storing mipmaps per tile this results in 1.25 MegaBytes worth of useful tiles that need to be streamed from the DVD per second. Furthermore, at an average compression ratio of 14:1 without storing mipmaps per tile there are about 30 to 40 tiles per 128 kB block read from the DVD. In practice about half the tiles streamed from DVD are dropped and as such wasted. This results in about 15 to 20 tiles being read per seek.

 

[liolio]

Thanks man, finally some more details.

Thanks for the link, liolio.

You're welcome but Cho deserves the greetings as he first linked this presentation and others in this thread:
SIGGRAPH 2009: Beyond Programmable Shading papers

 

[ultragpu]

http://www.xhardware.com.br/index.p...to-da-siggraph-2009&catid=47:games&Itemid=100
Smoking hot screenshots! I assume these are from the presentation no? Must say they look drop dead photo realistic.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Weren't we meant to move the tech discussion into another topic? Just asking...

 

[Richard]

Here's a gallery of the screenshots at their native (PDF) resolution.

 

[Rangers]

The new Edge article was summarized by Gofreak over at GAF

- the mac version 'is a first class citizen' in development; two of the programmers use it as their main development system (Willits & Duffy)

- Single textures range up to 128000x128000, weighing in at 120GB each uncompressed. The game currently weighs in at 'probably a couple of terabytes' according to Carmack.

- The sweet spot would be 1 50GB Blu-ray and 4 8.5GB DVDs, and Doom 4 may wind up as that, but that wasn't indicating what Rage will ship on as reported by CV&G. Just the 'ideal'.

- Every version starts with the same base data and then is compressed to suit each host's medium in a process that takes a couple of days.

- Carmack says they have the 'option' of providing a higher quality dataset with less compression for PS3 if they don't mind doing that process seperately for PS3. Similarly they could do a 'super platinum' PC edition with an 'incredibly rich' dataset if someone doesn't mind assigning 60+ GB for it.

- A lot of id Tech 5's lighting effects are prebaked into the textures. It doesn't handle global dynamic lighting. Edge notes differences between the dynamic lighting and shadows of the say the torch in a NPC's hand, and the subtler higher quality shadows thrown by static objects in the scene, and the irony of the departure from the 'no smoke and mirrors' approach of the Doom3 engine. They don't see it as an issue for Rage itself, but they point out that it might make it a less easy fit for other developers

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Still as amazing as I've expected. Can't wait to see more though

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Lights baked into textures makes a LOT of sense. They don't need lightmaps with the unique enviroment textures, they can bake at a quality level where they'd need weeks to calculate the lighting...

 

[Scott_Arm]

Lights baked into textures makes a LOT of sense. They don't need lightmaps with the unique enviroment textures, they can bake at a quality level where they'd need weeks to calculate the lighting...

I'm guessing this means no day/night cycle in Rage? Not that I care, but it is something to think about when making an "outdoor" game.

Those screenshots are awesome, but I'm guessing those are on very high-end computers, the likes of which I will not be owning any time soon.

 

[Richard]

I'm guessing this means no day/night cycle in Rage? Not that I care, but it is something to think about when making an "outdoor" game.

They've confirmed no day/night cycles exactly because of the baking.

EDIT: I forgot to link this before. A report of the EDGE article (in French) where they mention the no-day/night cycle.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Anyone know if the PC version will have renderer options? And for Linux will it just be a binary made to run with the Windows release a la most iD games, or is it actually going to be functioning out of the box? Then I wonder if the PC/Mac versions will ship together like WoW........Anyone know? Love to get RAGE running on my Ubuntu installation.

 

[Demirug]

Anyone know if the PC version will have renderer options? And for Linux will it just be a binary made to run with the Windows release a la most iD games, or is it actually going to be functioning out of the box? Then I wonder if the PC/Mac versions will ship together like WoW........Anyone know? Love to get RAGE running on my Ubuntu installation.

Wolfenstein is pretty unlikely, since it was developed at Raven, and published by Activision. There are no firm plans for linux ports of the idTech 5 titles, but it certainly isn’t off the table. I don’t think it will be very difficult to get them running on the binary nvidia drivers, but bringing them up to functionality and acceptable performance on other OpenGL drivers would probably be a more significant undertaking than we could afford.

http://www.linuxgames.com/archives/14005

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Lights baked into textures makes a LOT of sense. They don't need lightmaps with the unique enviroment textures, they can bake at a quality level where they'd need weeks to calculate the lighting...

In a way RAGE is branching away from the complexity of modern game engines. Where developers are trying to find solutions for GI faking for a fully dynamic world, RAGE is kinda like a 3D-ified version of the old 2D hand painted adventure games. It's basically a huge painting, with the glorious quality and variety that goes with like.

It's a solution that'll suit some games really well, but won't work for everything. I wonder if the overheads of Megatexturing will prevent it being included in more complex lighting situations? There isn't really anything to stop a deferred renderer using megatexturing for the albedo colour.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Full dynamic lighting is certainly possible, they may also be able to store some global illumination related information in addition to the color texture. Although I wonder about how much fragment processing power a deferred renderer would require, as virtual texturing is already quite fragment ready.

I guess we'll see with Doom4, although id is pretty quiet about the direction they plan to follow - close quarter survival horror style like Doom3, or a shooting fest like the first two games?

 

[V3]

I remember them (Carmack?) said Doom4 would be 30 fps with higher fidelity graphic compare to RAGE. So my guess is it will be survival horror again along the line of Doom 3. If it was action oriented they would stick with 60 fps.

I think also the decision to pre baked the lighting has much to do with the 60 fps choice rather than megatexture.

 

[Richard]

I remember them (Carmack?) said Doom4 would be 30 fps with higher fidelity graphic compare to RAGE. So my guess is it will be survival horror again along the line of Doom 3. If it was action oriented they would stick with 60 fps.

The reason for the 60fps was the fact Rage had vehicle racing where 30 vs 60 make a lot of difference.

I think also the decision to pre baked the lighting has much to do with the 60 fps choice rather than megatexture.

This is true; JC mentioned how the game runs much slower if they don't bake the light in.

 

[zed]

looking extremely beautiful, great to see someone try something a bit different (it had to be carmack + co )

though the water/fog looks strange!, it looks like theyve baked the water into the ground texture!!! thus no animation, also Im not sure about all the sand + stones driving through them youll expect to cause some major ground disturbance.

also part of the reason it looks impressive has nothing to do with megatexture but the shape of the landscape i.e. not using the standard heightmap approach (though perhaps they are underneath), good to see megatexture operating there

but all in all this is the title Im looking forward most to see

 

[JardeL]

- Carmack says they have the 'option' of providing a higher quality dataset with less compression for PS3 if they don't mind doing that process seperately for PS3. Similarly they could do a 'super platinum' PC edition with an 'incredibly rich' dataset if someone doesn't mind assigning 60+ GB for it.

So this means ;

- Rage will not take advantage of every platform ,
- We'll get a cropped version because of X360's storage limitations ,

and confirms Tim Willits' a-year-old comments ; [ http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3169963 ] ?..