I recently bought RAGE a few days ago and I have to say it was a really good game, but disappointing at the same time, for this reason:

I've owned RAGE for 3 days with 13 days played. I just finished the campaign and I picked up and finished as many side jobs as I could. The confusing part: the game is 21GB in size!

I've owned Skyrm since it's release with 85 hours played with only 1 character with the MQ finished and many other side quests and dungeons yet to complete and explore. The confusing part: the game is 5GB in size!

I'm glad I picked up this game for $20 (on sale) or I would've been kind of upset. Some might say that I rushed through RAGE, which I did in a way, but trust me when I say I finished as many side things as I could before continuing any main storyline jobs.

Not sure if RAGE was console port like Skyrim was, but this is still confusing to me.

The game has amazing visuals. Every single area has a constant smooth FPS. Alot of the development I'm guessing was spent making this right.

I admit the story kind of was weak and the character development was non existent but the enemies were great and I loved the gameplay. Really fleshed out and smooth.

But yeah, 3 discs. Wellsprings on disc 1, Subway Town on disc 2, and multiplayer on disc 3.

I don't know if all of that is textures, but damn, that is a big game for so little gameplay.

Rage has multiplayer, different engines and different compression methods. Also I am pretty sure it has more cutscenes than Skyrim. (Only played Rage for about 5 minutes so I dont know for sure)

Skyrim also has an abysmal texture resolution, so if Rage has better textures then that would also contribute to the size.

I bought it through Steam and downloaded it, and what a fun 6 hours it was...

Agreed though, the enviorments, creatures, and combat were fantastic.

Also it's id's first time actually making a more modern like video game.

In my opinion, it was a glorified extended tech demo of ID Tech 5. But it was fun while it lasted.

Here's hoping Rage 2 is longer and more fleshed out. And has John Goodman again lol

It's so large because every texture is different. Short game with a lackluster story, but the gunplay is a LOT of fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen

Let me rephrase: Also it's id's first time actually making a more modern like video game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGW5XaJ2kk8

Anyway, size and length don't really go hand in hand. Look at Daggerfall. Tiny game in terms of bytes, huge game in terms of content.

Doesn't it make sense?

Good, good, let the confusion crawl through you're mind, let it dance around you're brain like a madman trying to escape its cage. Let the uncertainty sear you're flesh and brand you're soul with its mark, let the pain itself baptize you, let life become death and death become life. When the moon is overhead and the stars sing with their music, when you're personage leaps with the very thought of proverbial liberation from that witch holds it...... when you stand naked before the heavens and scream up to them in mirth and conviviality.... only then will you be ready to be my minion, only then will you be ready for perfection.

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^Who or what is this..guy?


As for Skyrim, it is very well packed and wrapped to minimize it's size, but as you play the game your save files get bigger and bigger. Apparently due to radiant story, not sure.

Games with polygonal graphic engines generally reuse textures, which is the main reason games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment required multiple CDs while Morrowind only required one. RAGE does not reuse textures, which means they need a tremendous amount of space for all of the art. So where Skyrim may have half a dozen door textures that are reused, RAGE has a separate textures for every single door. Likewise, Skyrim's landscape tiles various terrain textures, and RAGE doesn't tile textures at all.

Quake 3 is extremely different from Doom 2. Sure both are FPSs, there's some similarity in art style, and in fact both feature the Doom marine - but in terms of gameplay they are quite different.

How exactly does RAGE's engine work, then? I know Carmack helped out, so a lot is likely done differently, but if they don't reuse textures, or tile them, what is their alternative? Creating multiple textures for a single model seems like the best way to go about it. Say, using your example, you have four door types, it'd look less repetitive if you had different textures for each door. So you can have something like a light metal door, dark metal door, rusted metal door, etc. As for tiling the ground, it's a very effective way to do so. Having one enormous texture, presumably the alternative (probably totally off), would look very much the same, and provide much less flexibility for creating an environment. From what you described, it sounds as if RAGE would be a smaller game than Skyrim, as it'd have less textures. Textures do fill a lot of space, but not nearly as much as sound or models, respectively.

From my understanding models each have their own unique textures and the terrain is done as a series of enormous textures.

Count your blessings, you're lucky it only takes you 6 hours -.-

The RAGE engine is capable of dynamically loading and unloading parts of the texture into the RAM, which means that it never loads the entire "megatextures" at the same time. That is a good thing since one texture can be as large as several gigabytes.

Since the textures are so large they don't need to be tiled like most textures on large polygonal surfaces (if the terrain is polygonal, it could be voxel based like the ground in Crysis)

This means that they can create a more realistic world since you won't see the same texture repeated twice, which is very much true for real life as far as I know (not a big fan of that game tbh). However the downside is that non-tiled textures have to be huge for it to deliver the same detail as normal textures.

It's a good idea in theory but it was poorly executed in the RAGE version of id tech 5 since the loading part of the process was quite buggy which resulted in a lot of textures failing to load properly and the user would only see a blurry mipmap of the original texture (mipmaps are low resolution samples of a texture, they are usually used to display terrain and objects that are far away.)

Yup, ^^ After every load screen or even turning around to another scene, youd have to wait 2-3 seconds for all the proper textures to load. Which was pretty annoying.

the tl;dr version of my post above is that RAGE is so large because it has a lot of unique objects in the world. Games like Skyrim however are built with modules, pre-made pieces that can be put together like Legos. There is only a small number of them (compared to games like RAGE) and many of them use the same textures, although sometimes they are applied differently (since models have different UV maps)

It looks to be an incarnation of Sheo. Best to leave lettuce, and yarn.

RAGE was a bloated tech demo for ID Tech 5. A bloated tech demo that I enjoyed every minute of. RAGE had great shooting mechanics, and looked pretty. But that was it. Showing off IT5 was it's sole purpose.

I still haven't really gotten around to Rage. I'm waiting for them to at least partially fix the texture blurriness.