It blows my mind that every facet of this game was hand painted./ That there are absolutely no two places in the game that are the same. That isntead of making a tiny bit of texture and repeating it ad nauseum, actual artists painstakingly created every inch of this game.

When everyone says "but this game has been in development for 'X' years" that they fail to realize that this is a tremendous undertaking.

Thank you id, for bringing us this new tech. Please dont think too badly of peopel complaining about blurry textures, they'll catch on eventually.

It blows my mind why they decided to uniquely texturize thousands of generic clutter objects and make them very-low-res, instead of making a single high res texture for each clutter object and re-use that on all instances of each object.
Eg. I'd rather see a 1024x1024 texture reused several times, than hundres of unique 128x128 textures.

The idea is no re-used textures..... you gotta start somewhere.
I would imagine if you could get a hold of the uncompressed textures, you may feel differently.

One of the untrumpeted advantages of megatexture is that it becomes possible to stuff insane amounts of geometric detail into a game. When drawing stuff, every state or texture change means breaking a draw call batch, which means that the drawing gets progressively slower and slower. There is a ceiling here beyond which you just cannot go, as the performance becomes utterly horrible; as the number of draw calls heads into the thousands, then the tens of thousands, performance falls into single digit frame rates, even if the hardware is still capable of the triangle counts required.

With megatexture you don't actually need to break the current batch, you can just continue adding as much as you like and the texture doesn't need to change. That means that you can hugely ramp up the amount of geometry on screen, have everything textured differently, and still maintain high performance, even on older low-end hardware. At the cost of not being able to see subpixel detail when you ram your face into a wall.

Personally I think the game looks great - but it's obvious how they're up against the limitations of the technology. I thought it was quite clever how bland things like certain pipes have low-resolution textures so that they can make detailed things like rocks look more interesting without suffering slowdown. When you're playing on an xbox 360 Arcade (i.e. off the discs, not the hard drive) and/or on a fairly bog-standard PC you do really appreciate having something that looks nice but doesn't play like you're wading through treacle.

Yes, I did spend too long looking at the rocks when I first started up the game.

Finally somebody who actually seems to know what they are talking about Anyone who has worked with Unreal Engine 3 professionally knows that draw calls start to become an issue in nearly every level so many steps need to be taken to keep those down. The idea behind ID Tech 5 is absolutely genius, not having to worry about drawcalls in itself would be insanely awesome, but when you add the ability to paint as much detail as you want without it hurting performance at all is absolutely amazing. In UE3 we are mostly limited to decals, the more we add the more it hurts performance. In Rage they are frikin lucky as they are capable of using an infinite amount of painting in stuff.... I'm jealous

They even invented a way to automatically generate some of the geometry. Sometimes I think of a far off future game where you can walk and drive forever and never see the same place or characters twice because the machine generates everything as you go. That's what I call open world.

Well, that's pretty much how Daggerfall worked, if I recall correctly. From Wikipedia:



It has to be said, I much prefer the hand-placed approach.

One possible vision of the future might involve hand-placed bigger details with the smaller stuff being procedurally generated. Sort of like - pop a town here with these 4 or 5 significant buildings and 9 or 10 significant characters but procedurally generate the rest. In terms of texturing, that might mean that a lot of natural textures (rock, grass, maybe even some walls) might be low-res with procedural detail, which would free up space for higher res textures where it matters. The next iteration or two of this technology is definitely going to be very interesting to watch.

Well, I'm talking about a game that has enough AI to do it intelligently, perhaps neuromorphic circuitry, rather then pseudo randomly and using sparce voxel octrees.

What's the point when the textures look like something that was developed for Super Nintendo? The advertised screen shots WERE indeed breathtaking, but that was on their 100+gb RAM PC that was running with uncompressed textures and built to "wow" us. .... what they rushed to the PC 'gone gold' production house looks like it relates to Mario, I'm so disappointed with the promise and failed delivery that I won't be forking over 1cent for DLC - hoping id studio is released so that I can appreciate what the community comes up with - they've already "fixed" id's failure, so I'm sure it will make the game more enjoyable.

Kudos to the art team though, you're right on that one, for the "Advertisemant" PC that displayed things was awesome, as were the "official" screenshots -- it isn't their fault I was compressed into 4bit textures.

Well th epoint is that it is most definately a starting point.
Any of the blurriness is as you suggested, that you arent running the uncompressed textures on your machine.
I dont see that as an engine issue, i see that as a hardware issue.

It isnt as if that is new. it was discussed well before hand that the textures would be over a terabyte, thent ehy announced that it would be released on 3 discs for 360. You know its gonna get compressed. I feel it should be taken witha grain of salt for that reason.
It wasn't I'd releasing a bad looking game, IMO, it was id Releaseing a game that has room to grow in future itterations for some time, because it is again, HW that has to play catch up in this case.

I am sure there are some with huge hard drives out there, but it isnt practical for most people.


Thank you for keeping it civil as this is an apreciateion thread for what they have done.
I am sorry that we dont share the same viewpoint on this matter.

LOL, get a hold of the uncompressed textures? Are you serious? Didn't we already go through this? The many ways people find to excuse the horrid graphics and grotesque file size of this game never ceases to amaze me. They already admitted, albeit rather deceitfully, that offering an HD texture pack was a no go. Instead they're going to be offering smaller detail texture overlay files as a bandaid solution, no doubt due to the already too large file size of the game and the logistics nightmare offering a 50GB texture pack would create.

It takes a LOT more than just good concept art to make good graphics. In fact it's obvious they have completely ruined the nice concept art with muddy textures. Worse yet, they don't even stream the textures they DO use very well. You always see things popping into view when turning around.

Honestly, for a game that takes up over 20GB of HDD space, the texture and texture streaming quality is crap. There's nothing brilliant about hand painted objects if they're too blurry to want to look at.

Simply put, Megatextures = Megafail. The game DOES have great concept art, I'll grant you that, but it's potential is squandered on Carmack's crazy Megatexture concept and the resulting sea of the many eye straining blurred objects.

Are you serious? Didn't we already go through this?

The file size is necessary because every surface in the game has a unique texture on it. The compression is necessary because otherwise the file size would be at least an order of magnitude larger.

That's not an excuse, it's a reason.

Despite that the texture detail is still better than Doom 3 up-close. That's no mean feat.

And because of this technology the polycount is insanely high (wouldja wook at teh wikkle powycount in other modern games by comparison) and it still maintains high performance.

Tradeoff man, tradeoff. Just because you don't like the tradeoff that was chosen, it doesn't equate to some universal truth.

So, ummm - in the words of a wise man: "why don't you knock it off with them negative waves?"

The problem with this massive painting is it is a painting. A nice one! However because of the limitations of the engine it really lacks dynamics. This is one of the reasons it is unlikely to ever power a game I find interesting.

A really dynamic engine and there a few is much more immersive. Immersion is the main problem I have with this game. It is fun a lot of the time and I'm going to have to raise my $ value from $40 to $45 although it's largely because of the fun I have had playing along with a friend who is a console veteran and does most of the driving. Because of the limitations of the engine I think it makes a better racing game than an FPS.

I like days and nights and weather and if done well you just get pulled into the game. At one of my crazier times playing Stalker 10 - 14 hours a day for days on end, I remember on a trip to the store reacting to a nearly staggering old man as a zombie and reaching, figuratively, for a gun. Immersion like that comes from the role you are playing, master Stalker in my case, carefully harvesting wealth from a very dangerous place. Zombies stagger around but shoot very straight in the Stalker game. In Rage you are a faceless, voiceless non entity going from mission to mission for reasons that never make much sense and unable to change a thing.

As some one said it's the artists that destroy the 'game' part of games these days.

That's not a programming limitation. Id has always specialized in fast paced corridor shooters with high frames per second and a million monsters coming at you. With Rage they cut back on the number of monsters mobbing you in order to maintain 60fps on even consoles, but with Doom 4 they intend to have 30 at a time running at you. Little things like interacting with the environment take a backseat to being able to put another monster on the floor. Such games are sometimes called a "clickfest" because of the carpel tunnel inducing fast pace of the games. Its not for everyone, but its perfect for developing cutting edge graphics engines like the id tech 5. As hardware has become more powerful other programmers have taken the basic engines id has developed and added more bells and whistles. Half Life 2, for example, built on the original Quake engine and added all kinds of physics and interactivity with the environment. If it were not for the kind of work id has done you'd likely have to wait a lot longer to play games that allow more interaction with the environment.

I have all ids games. I used to waltz through the first 6 levels of Doom2 on nightmare for exercise. I know about how they make their games. I played Q3 endlessly for about 2 years. I think Quake actually was ids pinnacle. A perfect online and offline game.

I have also played games I feel are superior and have developed more demanding tastes. I've moved on and value game immersion and play more than anything now. Id has kept doing what it does and what they produce does not challenge me much anymore.

It's a nice game, I do stand by my allusion to artists ruining the game though. So it's pretty but shallow. A dumb blonde for the console crowd. Perfect really, but I'm an old man with a somewhat overbuilt, for Rage anyway, game machine.

Where did you hear about this with Doom 4? I'd love to find any news on Doom 4, but have yet been unsuccessful. Could you please direct me to a page that contains this information?

I gotta ask you to stop being condescending to console users.
Just tired of reading it, really. As someone who has been gaming for 25+ years, its a slap to my face- that somehow I am not a gamer, or that i can't possibly know what a good game is. Enough.

I hate em'. Look what they did to Rage. I'll say whatever I want.

That was a quote from Carmack I came across. He's also said Doom 4 looks at least twice as good as Rage, but he's not exactly the most objective source. If you really want information on future games from id the only real source is Carmack and I'd do a search for anything he's ever said.

First off, pengun, "they" didn't do anything to rage. Second, all I am asking is to not disrespect other gamers. It shouldn't be that difficult for a man of your age, should it?

I think Rage was id's first attempt to move beyond their usual run-n-gun and its a bit too soon to write them off based on a vague conspiracy theory about artists taking over the world.

Funny how no one has really said anything new here, the same old arguments reworded.

As far as I kno, artists have nothing to do with the end quality of a game in its gameplay, because they do the art, not the story or the gameplay. They stick to art, they don't tell Willits how to make the game. If you think the gameplay suffered, blame the designers, and the creative director himself. But I think he did his job just fine, and so did his team.

The art is just fine, it's beautifull, even if it's blurry up in your face. So is as a painting, you begin to see it's flaws. Let's not be so picky, eh? If Rage was too ugly in its textures, wait untill Doom4, that will be the game to show what idTech5 and megatexturing are really capable of bringing to the table. Judge them then, but not any sooner.

Rage is the way it is because it was built for consoles. I am disappointed that so much potential was wasted just to cram it into the consoles, both very limited machines.

Respect is earned not demanded.