For those of you chomping at the bit for any Rage news, here's a little Q&A.

http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/action/rage/news/6335872/rage-qanda-with-matt-hooper-and-jason-kim

Nothing new really - highlights are:

- id Tech 5 built as multiplatform engine from the start, geared towards PS3 and 360
- id wanted an engine that would allow them to concentrate on the game and free up the creative people from having to worry about technical constraints and issues
- id won't be licensing id Tech 5 engine outside of Zenimax family. All id IPs will be using id Tech 5 (to some extent), and good possibility sister companies will use the engine
- Borderlands and Fallout parallels being made as visually people want to compare it with a game that is already released
- post apocalyptic world allows game to be twisted to how they want - no need to adhere to realism.
- campaign about 15 hours, if you do the game's side quests, that adds up to 20 to 25 hours
- "We still care a lot about deathmatch and on-foot combat as a studio, but that kind of sticks to Doom, Quake, and those franchises."

Rage's assets were built for PCs at first - that's why everything is so high quality - just wait for the super quality packs "relatively soon" after release.

It wasn't geared towards consoles - the point is there is much work to do for consoles to make a sophisticated work that consoles need to operate smoothly - that doesn't mean PC was left out.
That's very inaccurate technical context to say that - you should never take these intervews as a fact - listen to John Carmack about technicals and ONLY to him.

Infact what they mean to say is that the engine is built to automatically convert and optimize assets for each platform - the fact why it sounds that more work gone into consoles is simple - ID never had a console engine before - THAT DOESN'T MEAN PC WAS LEFT OUT - CONSOLES ARE UNIQUE AND NEED MORE (HARDER) CODE TO EVEN WORK.

The whole point it was a CHALLENGE to make Rage on consoles - ofcourse it wasn't as challenging to make for PC since Carmack is a genius and whole studio is already PC geeks they know ins and outs, he already has +10yrs of PC experience ofcourse - it's so funny how these interviews get out of context to something completely wrong.



IDs engine was made to be as super-productive as possible - many 100 of hours was spent to produce tools and features to speed up production process and this is what you'll get in the modding tools too. The engine will smoke everything else in the modding department - though this is not a free version of the engine so it's incomparable with Cryengine 3 SDK or Unreal Development Kit.
A lot of time was spent to make the engine to be as automated as possible.


Borderlands and Fallout thing is a joke - marketing point - the game started in 2004 there was no borderlands or fallout 3.


IT's good that each IP is commited to it's own thing - i love that RAGE is unique and you guys will get deathmatch in Doom4

What this means: That vast amounts of work went into engine development before the game even started mass production - prepwork / idea / plan / demo was done from 2004 to 2008 (4-5 years) - The game was even scrapped once or twice in the middle - and started over from scratch - the technology keept going rapidly up through the whole process so you aren't looking here at a 7 year old game. And that's how you make a game - you don't suppose to know everything about the whole game in the start.

They have been concentrating more on the game once the technology settled down and this was in 2008 as i gather - Carmack is always making regular updates to the engine that will be used for Rage Rage ships - and ID TECH 5 will be keept updating for Doom4 - so "Doom 4 version of IDTech5 engine" will be better than "Rage version of IDTech5 engine" (new code called "id super script" a C++ derivative , and Doom4 will have new rendering engine(DX11) as well as something with geometry )

What he wanted to tell with example "less on the techicall issues and constraints" is that other rookie developers are (inexperienced) and they don't know the correct development process - rather putting all effort on making an engine - they start making a game on an unfinished engine and the programmers simulaneously develop the engine and then when a big CHANGE occurs stuff stops working and they're battling to wait the programmers to fix stuff and lose precious time and effort on. Similarly - for example, as engine is not completed the artists and designers want to do something better and they need to wait the programmers over some days to fix a bug or problem there so they can continue working. This was not happening in the main production stage of Rage at ID Software.

So Carmack and programmers builted a super duper omg ultra platinum engine and editor that takes care of whattheheckeveryouwant so they made 90% of the game in 3 years with super duper efficiency and the optimizations as well as ALL bugfixing sothe result is a game that blows everything else to the ground. This game will be the most BUGLESS game ever made. RATIO! The game is huge so there is a chance something slips but come on Carmack viewd warnings as errors. Rage was tested with 3-4 different code anolizing tools and every error and warning was fixed - except PC-LINT there is some warnings that weren't fixed but the game was delayed one moths so maybe carmack got some extra time for that.

Way more programming work has gone into console optimization - simply because consoles have so little RAM. And that was the main challenge for ID Software - their first console game. Challenge or no challenge - in the end they still made the best looking console game at 60 frames per secon.
Achievement unlocked: You just owned the gaming industry.

If you look the PC specificatinos - there is no doubt that this really is one heck of an optimized engine - but we should wait what shall sys req be with super quality pack.

In other words - this is just a very productively powerful engine - designers and artists go in and make stuff happen without limitations "Exception: OH you can't place rectangle here" errors. They make stuff happen! Puff ... SKY IS THE LIMIT.

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Because of how much work they spent on making the engine artist friendly the next engine will just add on to existing features and we may not have to wait like 7+ years from start of development to game release for an id Tech 6 game. *fingers crossed*

Exactly.

Doom 4 is coming in about 2-3 years. The whole Rage team is going over to the Doom4 team to help.

Doom 4 in 2013

Wow, 15 hours is pretty good for a shooter nowadays. I haven't really been keeping up on this game, but now that its just around the corner I'm interested =P Haha