John Carmack: Developing RAGE for consoles was a big mistake, future titles will put priority on PC hardware

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=23760

seems worthy to dig this up for discussion - again

John Carmack

" When we started on the game six years ago, I looked at the consoles and said ‘These are as good as the PCs that we're on here’, and our development strategy was set up such that we basically developed live on all the platforms there. And now when we’re looking at PCs that have ten times the horsepower of the consoles... I’m making a large change in my direction, just saying ‘We should be focusing on building things efficiently on the PC and [then] deploying on to consoles.’ And we didn’t make that as crisp of a distinction as we should have. "

He goes on to explain how that will change going forward:

"My development system now has twenty-four threads and twenty-four gigs of memory, and we can start putting on half a terabyte of solid state drives, and these are the things that are gonna drive the development process on the PC. So, I’m actually as excited about how we’re developing tht titles in this coming generation as the graphics enhancements and things that I’m gonna make.

Further, he comments on the high-end graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA being "an order of magnitude more powerful" than the consoles, and that the only thing holding developers back from tapping into that is not having direct access to the hardware.

"It is a little bit of a shame that, despite the raw horsepower, we are hampered by kind of the arms-length API interface. Because it is... unhappily true that we have the consoles here running at sixty frames per second, and we could have these massively more powerful PC systems that struggle sometimes to hold the framerate because of unnecessary overheads. Where, if we were programming that hardware directly on the metal the same way we do the consoles, it would be significantly more powerful. But there are a lot of moves afoot to be improving that, and we are working closely with all of the vendors to kind of address that. "

Oh wow, was expecting this kind of statement AFTER RAGE came out

Looks like he knew it wouldn't go down well, but they couldn't turn back. I also remember him saying (at Quakecon I believe) that consoles stream textures much faster than PCs, which could be why the megatextures have issues, they're probably designed to work with console hardware.

I love jons attitude.
hes the coolest programmer that I know of.
im very novice programming. but he inspired me to learn everything i know.

too bad they had to renig on my ability to trade in my copy of Rage. ( I can "sell it" but it wont be "100 percent" ).
I refuse to buy "limited software".

Sadly. 20 year customer.
lost.

More like

Consoles are indeed [censored] compared to even the most middle of the pack PC now. But you let them drag your PC release down, like far too many developers before you. Highly dissatisfied with him saying "welp, we [censored] up," after a six year development cycle.

Wish I had seen and heeded this interview - but fool me once . . .

I'll be waiting a month or two after the release on their next projects before I jump into an id product blindly on faith alone next time ... so far I'm very disappointed, not in the "story" or the "rpg" or even how id does what they do, I enjoy all that, I'm HIGHLY disappointed in not only the incredible number of bugs, but the AWFUL ... yes AWFUL textures, I feel like I'm playing something on NES if I look solely at the walls/objects - character skins are excellent, as are weapons/vehicles/many "non-mega-pixel(?)" objects.

Thanks for the link.

I've cancelled my pre-order of Rage and will not pre-order Skyrim as I expect the same for that. The only game I have pre-ordered is Battlefield 3 as I have actually played it and it actually works...

Save Face John and give us the Mod tools x64 and 125 GB texture pack...K? or are you running to the bank before we get wise?

Yeah, right. So John you rocket scientist you... You 're telling me that you couldn't have foreseen that the PC hardware market would get insanely more powerful than a fixed system five to six years down the road.

I'm not buyin' it.

The issues are being overstated. I only have a PNY GeForce 545 (1.5gig DR3, 750Mhz) video card and while the texture pop is irritating in large areas, as a racing game or corridor shooter (which is what the game is most of the time) Rage looks great.

There will probably be a patch for PC's in a month or so. If the texture pop bothers you enough that you don't want to play the game (and I don't think it's really that bad) then just wait until the patch comes out.

Yeah anybody happen to notice this article is from June?

I hope they actually do develope their future games for PC then port them to the consoles or just go PC exclusive altogether(but that will never happen.)

I'm almost about to cancel, can anyone tell me if this game is going to be fixed for the PC, and who will be fixing it - video card makers or RAGE game makers?

yep it seems John knew early on that some aspect of this was going to happen..the solace we take is that future dev won't be designed for consoles. it will be ported to them like it should be all the time and should have been for Rage. hindsight is as they say 20/20

This stuff seems from June
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/306236/id-softwares-john-carmack-20-minute-video-interview/

So he talked about this before rage release

What? The Battlefield 3 Beta is terrible. Dice dropped the ball.

? What does Skyrim have to do with Rage?

Same company, I canceled my skyrim pre-order too.

Don't tell me you say that because of the lag.

Lag is almost always present during the first stages of a game's public beta period. It's been fixed since then.

Not true, they have the same Publisher, but they are developed by completely different developers using completely different engines.

Tell that to the people who over exaggerate technical hiccups/bugs in the Skyrim forum because of footage/hands on of an ALPHA build, not even beta :laugh:

But no, it's not that I don't dislike the BF3 beta because of lag. I actually haven't encountered much lag at all. I just feel the gameplay is lacking and the graphics were overhyped.

The comparison to Skyrim is off. Internet connection lag is entirely different than buffer bottleneck and a half baked renderer.

Also, if you played on PC, you would have seen that the max quality options are disabled.

What? I'm playing on PS3. So Alpha footage is cause for concern in Skyrim, but beta gameplay in BF3 isn't?

I thought you were referring to the PC version's graphics. Check them out they 're awe inspiring.