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

I think part of it is the steampunk style and part is that the realistic terrain and interiors contrast with somewhat weak human models and animation. The animation of the speaking models looks cartoon related to me.

 

Why is it hard? The general texel density is still quite high, 2 to 5 per inch, and the amount of work they had to do was simply insane. There had to be a line drawn, far back in development, and I'd say they still expected to ship Rage about 2 years ago, roughly at the release of Modern Warfare 2. Compared to that game it has nothing to be ashamed about.

But even today it isn't hard to find lowres textures in console games...

And I really hate to do this, but I told you so, there's no texture downsizing in most of the environments. They traded the normal/specular channels and dynamic shading for less disk space instead.

 

Rage Against the (Benchmark) Machine

 

I hope that when the Dev stuff is released they remove all the CVAR limitations and stuff.

 

I wanted the satisfaction of bringing down something big and horrifying at the end. Something that kills you the first couple of times you try. A FINAL BOSS BATTLE!!!! It's a fuck1ng FPS after all. Stepping on a thousand cockroaches instead of taking down a final boss just doesn't give you that same feeling.

Game is still a 9 out of 10 for me.

 

I think the story is fine but the end run gameplay was certainly nothing special. What a weak ass presentation for the super foreshadowed scary end area. The music made me think of Turok, btw.

 

Terminator for me in the british punk area.

 

That is because of the art style

Nothing stops a normal engine loading up unique textures for objects! and no, other than repeating patterns with grass and the like it has not.

The fact is that rage has textures that are baked into the megatexture more than one! and because of that it does not have unique textures in all places and even if they did have unique textures everywhere the art cost is huge!

You clearly did not read my post in full!

The textures in rage are not fully unique! and nothing stops a normal engine from having a lot of unique textures with the large VRAM usage rage has but at the same time save space my reusing textures that have been baked more than once in rage, (no one has has addressed why it needs stupid amounts of of VRAM, something that goes against the whole idea of a small tile cache that only needs to store the a few times the tiles that are seen on screen!) all megatexture does is waste RAM and bandwidth because of that.

 

You really have no idea about all of this, so try to read up and do some math before arguing with people who already did that, please.

 

I think you may be mixing two stories here. As far as I was aware, the question in this quote is about the higher res texture pack.

The answer though wasn't the answer to this question. The answer is in relation to the patch for Rage coming out that was gonna be using a different ingame sampler for the textures (Bi-cubic or whatnot, I forget which technique) and trying to "clean up" the texture compression which happens on the fly in the game. Carmack was saying that this technique hadn't helped as much as they hoped, because the textures that have ALREADY shipped don't have anymore information that the better sampling technique can gain, over the method already used.

 

Megatexture just dosn't sound like a good solution at this time. Sure unique textures "everywhere" but it doesn't make a huge difference vs other games with cleverly placed textures and tiling. Tons of manhours pent on creating all unique textures, average texture detail at closer distances, eats up VRAM.

ID white knights take a seat at the upper left corner.

 

No, it's you who's confusing stuff.

Carmack's speech made people think that the source textures on id's servers were all downsized and thus if id's going to release them, it'll provide a significant increase of detail.
But the truth is that there are no higher resolution textures for most of the game world anywhere. The only areas that could improve in resolution are unaccessible to the player, that's why they decided to downres those textures.

The storage space they eventually saved was the discarded normal and specular maps, going for completely static shading on most of the environments.


The other thing that Carmack mentioned is that they will add detail textures through a patch, but only for the PC version. This is probably already in testing and should arrive within a few days.

It's basically another texture layer with a tiled pattern, something first seen in Unreal 1.

 

I'm sorry but you must be blind then, Neb. The game looks like nothing else out there.

One could probably prove it with some extensive image analysis... it's a question of taste beyond that. You like tiled textures blended together, I don't.

 

I'm going to come back to my forest for the trees statement. The benefits of unique texturing through megatexturing pops out at me right away. I'm sure you can easily pick out individual textures, up-close, that don't look nearly as good as comparable textures in other games. But the overall benefits of unique texturing are great, though there are other technical limitations that may not suit some games.

 

What's up with the totally static lighting (even specular channels? )? Seems a little 2004 to me.

Some of the screenshots I've seen look very good, some look very bad. Gonna have to pick it up eventually to see what it's all about.

 

Sure except for one simple thing. Not a single game up to now has done so. Every game released up until now has had horrible...read again, absolutely HORRIBLE...repeating textures.

Rage is the first game where I don't immediately see repeating textures virtually surrounding me everywhere. Especially in large outdoor areas which are the most problematic.

I got the chance to play it on a friends machine recently for a little while and the outdoor areas are absolutely stunning. But it's obviously not perfect. There are cases where there's sharp looking textures right next to blurrier looking textures. And up close you can obviously see the tradeoff for having that many unique textures. But even then, it is extremely refreshing to wander around the small settlement and not turn around and go, "Oh look there's that texture again." Or yay, more repeating road textures. Or more repeating wall textures. Or, oh look, it's that same book case with the same books again.

It's certainly not as groundbreaking as it could have been. But then again without releasing a potentially 10-20 TB source texture I doubt it ever could have been. It is however quite refreshing, revolutionary, and incredibly impressive to someone jaded by the repeat texture syndrome that plagues every single 3D game made except perhaps for smallish adventure games with limited exploration options.

Regards,
SB

 

It's been discussed before, although maybe in another topic.
Cutting the specular and normal channels for the environments except the cities has probably saved about 5 to 10 GBs of disk space for id, which means 3 DVDs instead of 4 for the PC/X360 release. It also reduces streaming and transcoding overhead, which is already stressed to the limits on the PS3 and the non-HD install X360 versions.

This is basically the price for the texture variety and to some extent the 60fps speed. In my opinion it was well worth it, visually the game is dramatically different from everything else that follows the standard texturing paradigms. And most games still have baked lighting anyway, even if at a variable level. Gears 3 and Halo Reach are using lightmaps, but even Uncharted and Killzone have a lot of their lighting precalculated.

Next gen systems that are better suited to such amounts of constant streaming should be able to support full dynamic lighting and higher texture resolution, although at some even higher content creation budgets.

And Neb will get a detail texture patch with tiled detail textures to make him happy, too

 

The funny thing is that id has attempted to deal with the two most annoying issues for me in games, but not at once and not satisfactorily.

I hate repeating textures and they jump out at me very quickly. I also love real time lighting that is consistent. Unfortunately these haven't been dealt with at once. It seems likely to me that dynamic world lighting with cycles will have to be faked still if this sort of thing is going to work, but I hope someone tries it sometime.

 

Well, someone else could try an evolution of ETQW's overall decision of having uniquely textured (and virtualised) terrain with baked lighting + regular texture mapping & shading for other geometry. Maybe tilt the balance a bit towards unique texturing by having characters/vehicles, etc. like Rage which are uniquely textured but with enough channels to support normals/specularity/etc.

Brink already had virtualised (but not unique) texturing. Texture virtualisation is (mostly) a programming challenge. Unique texturing is (mostly) an artistic challenge. As such it requires a lot more careful planning as it impacts the artistic work-flow pipeline of multi-year projects and dozens of people.

 

The decision to bake the lighting in Rage had very little to do with artistic constrains - if anything, it even added to the development time. Map compile times were slower, it took longer to finetune the lighting, bake the highlights and so on.

They decided for static lighting because it looked better overall, allowed to run the game at 60 fps and with less texture loading problems, and helped to fit the game to only 3 DVDs.