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

Richard said:
What? Menu Options? No, their auto-balancing system will heuristically determine whether the player wants it or not. ;)
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Hey it worked for me :devilish:

I think it has become clear though that someone is really overly concerned about keeping frame rate up over there :)
 
BTW, why is swap-tear preferred over triple buffering? The prevention of fractional framerate drops is brought up but id has never even mentioned TB AFAIK. I suppose it's a sign of their one track mind fight for 60 fps.
 
swaaye said:
BTW, why is swap-tear preferred over triple buffering? The prevention of fractional framerate drops is brought up but id has never even mentioned TB AFAIK. I suppose it's a sign of their one track mind fight for 60 fps.
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Probably because TB requires more video memory? Which in case of Rage it's important to keep as much video memory free for transcoded texture caching, as possible.
 
swaaye said:
BTW, why is swap-tear preferred over triple buffering? The prevention of fractional framerate drops is brought up but id has never even mentioned TB AFAIK. I suppose it's a sign of their one track mind fight for 60 fps.
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Even triple buffering can cause a sudden drop in fps. If it can't make 60fps, it has to be 40fps with triple buffering, which is actually not that much better than 30fps with double buffering. Not to mention the additional latency brought by triple buffering.
 
It is really bugging me that people keep on praising megatexture!

Why does it need so much VRAM?
megatexture's big selling point was the lack of memory usage yet also having maximum texture res due to breaking the texture down into tiles that got put into a tile cache.

But in practice it uses large to huge amounts of VRAM and also does not load the highest res tiles unless you force it to (and in doing so use said huge amounts of VRAM)!
If you already have the transcoded tiles in VRAM why do you even need the tile cache????
With the size of the VRAM usage you could just use a normal approach to texturing (and in doing so save storage space and higher res) but also with a fair amount of unique textures!

You also have the fact that due to the lack of reusable textures the base res of the main pretranscoded megatexture has to be far too low to have good quality in a lot of places yet still takes up much more storage space than most other games.

The art asset cost also goes though the roof if using unique textures and asset cost is one of the big problems that I see being brought up, the only way around this is to reuse a texture by baking it into different parts of the game world (something that RAGE does sometimes). But in doing so you toss megatexture's only remaining draw card into the bin.

But the big thing is, when has reuse of textures been a problem in the first place?!
 
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TheD said:
But the big thing is, when has reuse of textures been a problem in the first place?!
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It's always been a problem. But without any options for non-repeating textures we've just had to live with it.

Similar to the time before practical methods of AA and AF were introduced. Or hell lack of detail textures back before Unreal was released (or was it UT that introduced the detail texture layer?). Or dynamic lighting versus static lighting. Or shadows with hard pixellated edges versus various new shadow algorithms.

It's not like the state of 3D graphics is perfect. And it's not like Megatexture is perfect. But it does attempt to solve one of the more glaring problems with modern day 3D rendering. It fails at providing up close detail, but is superb at introducing a world without repeating textures.

I myself can't wait to try it. I've checked out some youtube videos (but had to stop so I don't spoil it for myself) and the tradeoff to me is quite acceptable.

Regards,
SB
 
I think some people just have a hard time realizing what fully unique textures mean for visuals. Sure there are a lot of uglies in Rage but on the other hand it looks like a matte painting half of the time. It's just that the tech has some rough edges right now, primarily due to them dropping the base texture rez and then also cranking the compression high.

Hopefully next time they can go for a much larger game file size. This feels like an old floppy game struggling to make the best of a horribly limiting storage medium.
 
What I do not understand from an artistical point of view:

sometimes textures (not upclose of course!!) look photorealistic to me, sometimes the setting and the environment look photorealistic to me...but then you throw in the weapons, throw in the enemies...and you get this weird cartoon look...it is such a high contrast to me that I wonder if anyone else feels the same?!

this half pseudo cell shading look disturbs me! rage strongest moments are settings, with some light beams from a window or so without any enemy and no weapons in your hand...I simple don't get the reason behing this artistic choice...so maybe it is tec related??
 
just finished the game...overall the game is good and I had lots of fun, needed 17hours on normal finishing all missions, except the driving stuff which I don't care at all.

But....wtf about the ending?!?!?

again, to all devs out there, to all gamedesigners and game story writers out there, major rant:

an open ending, a cliffhanger, no conclusion to your game... is NOT a sign of being overly smart and super cool...just write good stories god damn it and find a good ending!! if you want to make a second part to your game...fine with me, but go and write good stories.

me concluding about rage's ending: ultra boooooooooooooooooo!

It was so surprise ending without even a big buy, or a boss...just some mutants...I did not even tried out the damn BFG rounds because I thought I need them...hell, I did not even need 5% of my ammo in this last mission...lameness, your name is game stories and game endings! Yours sincerly....boooooooooooooooooooooooo!

PS: Killzone3 story, Resistance 3 story, Crysis 2 story...we need inspiration back in the industry, need good stories...thank god Uncharted 3 and Skyrim are only few weeks away....
 
As far as the ending
I already said and reaffirm that I actually quite like it. It makes perfect sense from a story perspective where it ended. They have professional writers doing it and it shows. Getting there was a bit silly

If I had control of the story I would have created a stealth mission instead where you basically need to sneak in and hack a system through the walls and ducts etc... it would make more sense. Imagine hacking into the system and then you could have alarms and the bots chasing around through the ducts. Needing EMPs to disable bots before they can raise the alarm. I would make it so that if you went the way you go in the game you just get overwhelmed unless you are superb and have basically full ammo on every single gun.

However I missed out on getting to really use the BFG much as well. Also as I said the textures were super jarring and repetitive there. If you did the sneak thing it could be like portal's hidden rooms with graffiti and stuff from prior people. Also no boss fight actually makes some sense. You aren't going to keep a raging giant mutant in the capital :)

I think I should write stories :)
 
homerdog said:
Does he mean that the actual source material is low res?
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If we just look at the [strike]twat[/strike] twit by itself then it's for distributed textures and trying to make do with them. The full conversation however tells this is about id created source material:

q: @ID_AA_Carmack Will you release the oft-mentioned higher-resolution texture data?

a: @DesignerDon our first test of a higher res page file didn't help much, because most source textures didn't actually have any more detail.

I find it hard to believe that artists created the textures at such low quality.
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Indeed. Either Carmack didn't understand what is an obvious question or he wasn't answering it directly, which happened before. Then there's the QCon 2011 mention of releasing a higher res mega-texture (for one map); I don't believe JC would be so in the dark about the artists' source resolution two months before the game ships.
 
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