RAGE: That's actually what you do when trying to get the PC version to work

Yeah, it's something new - we'll see how the single player stacks up against the COD games...
 
Finished the game. Decided to watch the QuakeCon 2011 keynote again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28

at around 0:46...

"Another thing that RAGE will get knocked for - if you go and jam your face into a wall, the textures are gonna be blurry. We don't have detail maps on top of them. We are in many cases at a little bit lower resolution than a game that's just tiling textures would be at..."

Well... at least he was honest.
 
Otto Dafe said:
It has a single-player campaign, and a co-op one as well.
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Oh, well, that was news to me. Everyone's only talked about the multiplayer bits...

Well, not that it matters, since EA's only selling it via Origin, and I'm not jumping on that train...at all. Not now, not ever. They're gonna have to change their stance there, that's for sure.
 
BF3: They're selling it in loads of places, just not Steam (but talks are happening to try and resolve that).

Back to Rage: I can't help feeling like I'm running through a very pretty, albiet low res 3D painting. Doom 3 was more interactive than this.
 
NRP said:
At any rate, I just get tired of consoles being used as the default scapegoat for all of the issues with PC gaming.
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Then again didn't Carmack say that the game was planned to have around 150GB worth of texture data for PC but had to be compressed down to ~20G for consoles and for some reason they weren't able to release the full-quality textures for PC?
 
They never could have planned to release a 150GB game. The idea has always been to use lossy compression to get to a size that can actually be shipped to customers.
 
Ruining the looks of this game with lossy video compression would be like pouring coca-cola over some fine red wine... a crime.
 
suryad said:
WHy dont they just release a high res texture pack for PC peeps?
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A high res texture pack would be what? A 50 GB megatexture? The idea of a texture pack makes sense when you're tiling. I'll take low(er)-resolution unique textures over high-resolution repeat textures any day. Still haven't played Rage, but from all the gameplay videos people have recorded, the game is damned pretty. There were definitely some tradeoffs in interactivity, but most games are not interactive at all. Battlefield and Crysis are probably the only games I can think of where there is environmental interactivity that really affects gameplay.

Edit: Lionhead's tools for the mega-geometry and virtual texture system are supposed to cue artists into which textures need more resolution and which textures can have less. Not sure if id had something similar.
 
Rage has many separate files for the individual sub-levels of the game world. Basically there's the big hub which is the wasteland, and then each city, bandit hideout and other levels are separated. What id could do is to release one of these smaller levels at a lower compression setting; the vast majority of them are only 60 to 300 gigabytes in size, so even a 10-fold increase would result in a manageable download.

As for the texture res tool, id's works backwards - they brute force check the entire game world to see which tiles are never visible from the player's point of view, or which could work with a smaller resolution. It isn't really possible to change texture resolution upwards once the entire game world has been atlas mapped.


Although, I'm curious how that would work... How do they determine final texture resolution?
Let's say the artists work on a sub-level like Wellspring (a city) and finish all the individual assets - buildings, terrain, backgrounds, characters. Everything has UVs and textures are completed.

- Do they re-scale the individual textures so that they can fit into the selected fixed size virtual texture with 90-99% used space? This could explain Carmack's comments on how some of the original texture detail is lost during the process...

- Do they try a 1:1 fit of the unwraped UVs of the individual assets into a predetermined size (has to be power of two like 16k, 32k, 64k etc) and check to see how much space is left in the end? Then they proceed to add more stuff to fill out the otherwise wasted space? Or does the wasted space get compressed to 0?
Actually this one makes more sense, if they're using proper lossy compression then all the wasted space should simply take up a single byte ;)
Also, for the tiling to be really efficient with distant stuff, it'd make sense to fit all individual objects (especially small ones) into square areas - that way a single tile could contain all the texture data and no extra tiles would have to be loaded because 5% of them belongs to, say, an ammo crate or something.
 
Anyone know how much of the current install is actual texture data?

If they were to say release a hi-res pack with double the texture res (eg. 16kx16k instead of 8kx8k ..or whatever it is atm), wouldnt the data size be ROUGHLY around x4 the current texture data?
As mentioned earlier, hopefully it wont cause tex streaming issues.

(btw, I base this on zero tech knowledge:))

Sxotty said:
Well some of youguys got your wish
http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack
we probably will try a PC D3D port before D4 is done to see if it magically works better. Worry about the tex updates, though.
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Didnt someone say that the xbox version of Rage of D3D anyway?
 
One (heh, only one) issue that likely occurs with way the tools will check too see what the highest level of detail is required on a triangle is it needs to know what resolution the game will be running in advance. As the game was designed for the 1280x720 consoles, the highest required level of detail on distant terrain feature you can never get near is likely to be just high enough to be about 1:1 texel to pixel. If you run the game at a significantly higher resolution those areas could end up with worse ratios and look a little blurry due to texture filtering. The engine really seems like its best for Consoles. PC users will probably always complain about its tradeoffs.
 
slapnutz said:
Anyone know how much of the current install is actual texture data?

If they were to say release a hi-res pack with double the texture res (eg. 16kx16k instead of 8kx8k ..or whatever it is atm), wouldnt the data size be ROUGHLY around x4 the current texture data?
As mentioned earlier, hopefully it wont cause tex streaming issues.

(btw, I base this on zero tech knowledge:))


Didnt someone say that the xbox version of Rage of D3D anyway?
Click to expand...

D3D on Xbox will be quite different as far as texture management goes, not to mention all the other lower level features that the XBox gets, compared to Windows. Quite likely alot of the Xbox D3D code will be pretty useless with considering what is required for an optimal windows implementation. Probably want to use D3D11 anyway, not D3D9, so the XBox code will be even more useless.

I'm actually surprised that ID doesn't already have a D3D renderer.
 
Does D3D11 have any features that could help iD over the OGL implementation? Aside from obviously the IHVs having better D3D drivers.
 
slapnutz said:
Anyone know how much of the current install is actual texture data?
Click to expand...

Single player textures are 12 GB, multiplayer is an extra 7 GB but that includes coop too AFAIK.

If they were to say release a hi-res pack with double the texture res (eg. 16kx16k instead of 8kx8k ..or whatever it is atm), wouldnt the data size be ROUGHLY around x4 the current texture data?
Click to expand...

That 4k/8k data is the physical page used during rendering that contains all the tiles that are used from the larger virtual texture.

And they couldn't increse resolution but they could reduce compression if they were to release a larger dataset.
 
Carmack tweeted recently that they'll probably port the renderer to DirectX before they release Doom4.
 
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