If at all?

I know Mr Carmack has covered the subject briefly in the past and has mentioned that modding for RAGE would be very difficult but I was wondering if id was still planning on releasing the tool kit.

I really want to see what I can do with the new generation megatexture tech.

Did he mention why it would be difficult?

I think it is the time and effort required to produce game assets, rather than anything being inherently "difficult". After all, idStudio is supposed to make life easier for the designers.
That, and Rage has less scripting and more C++ in the gamecode for performance reasons, which can be an obstacle to some.

Yeah, it's primarily because of the complexity of the assets. Willits said as much a year or two back.

I would assume Bethesda would be on board as far as releasing an editor, since they do so for BGS developed games.

I have a couple of hours worth of idStudio movies from Quakecon 2007 (I think) and I'll try and watch them this weekend. If they say something about the editor being the same executable as the game (as it was for Doom 3), then you can be reasonably optimistic about it shipping on the disc.

Thanks guys

While Bethesda is RAGE's publisher I imagine they'd leave things like editors wholly up to id.

Cool avatar!
As for the modding thing, would this be like the one in Fallout 3? Or something entirely different?

I haven't watched everything yet, but Matt Hooper takes over for the AI and starts driving in the middle of the demo, and starts stamping textures in the same demo. It seems likely that the game and editor are the same executable.

I suppose they could remove the editor functionality from the game, but it seems unlikely. We're unlikely to get a concrete answer unless somebody asks the question during the Quakecon keynote this year.

Edit:
I watched a different video this morning. Carmack specifically states that you can just bring down the console in the game and type idstudio to enter the development environment.

http://www.wegame.com/watch/Rage_idTech5_demo_Quakecon_2007_Part_2/

Lots of editor details there for those who are interested in such things.

The other problem is MegaTextures. Awesome tech, but a huge downside: trying to distribute the gigantic (complete with gigantic filesize) textures.

As far as I know they have media (textures, and such) servers in storage racks. a regular PC would hardly handle 20+TB of textures

Pretty different. The Bethesda editors involve snapping together various building blocks to make structures which makes it fairly easy to throw something general together that looks good but also limits you to the building blocks available. I assume RAGE requires that you custom build everything and then apply textures - this gives you much more freedom and doesn't require 3D modeling software to make new components but it does make world building more complex.

I would certainly be interested in making a few levels for Rage but then again I never did finish what I had started for Doom 3.

From the Quakecon videos a couple of years ago, They still have a traditional FPS level editor, which is kind of like a stripped down 3d modelling app, but you're not likely to build anything that looks as good as the retail maps with it. I believe most of the maps being created for retail are being built almost entirely in a professional tool of one form or another, exported, then imported into the game editor for texture stamping, entities, and other game-specific stuff.

Luxology posted this screenshot of the Wellspring map in Modo a year or so ago:
http://www.luxology.com/community/blog/images/ws1.jpg

Anyway, this is why they've made a couple of attempts to let people know that modding will be pretty hard for Rage. It's not because of any peculiarities of the engine, but because the greater the complexity, the higher the level of entry. If you want your levels to look as good as the stuff in retail, you're gonna have to be really, really good, and really, really patient.

You can probably still make some pretty good looking stuff with the game editor, but I'm not sure if you'll be able to do the crazy detailed geometry like you see in the cliff faces and stuff unless you're using a full fledged 3d application.

In the Quake 1 days, big mods would take a few months to release. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 mods took 3-5 years or more. It's not getting any easier.

yup there is an editor that is shipping with the game.

That's correct, as confirmed in this gameplay video at G4TV.

http://e3.g4tv.com/videos/46676/E3-2010-Live-Rage-Mission-Demo/?quality=hd