I think the work required to make a game on the graphical level of RAGE is a big turnoff, as well as the massive size of the SDK.

Because why would you use the engine to make mods and maps when they don't really fit in? If you are making something completely out of place, e.g. a TC then you'd want to use a different engine anyway 

That's why I think their builtin "map-editor" will succeed for DOOM 4, because it's simply more convenient and you mainly work with prefabs.

Though I do have my concerns on the game-play side of things, from what I have seen so far it reminds me a lot of Duke Nukem Forever - because enemies seem to jump out of random locations at times in linear form + DNF styled kill-moves (which can get old really, really quick).

Plus the game wasn't as fast as I had hoped, felt like Doom 3 running level at best, especially the HL styled scripted sequences slow the action down. Also everything but hell looks like a boiler-room to me?! 

Well yeah, the pool of people who want to spend their spare time trying to make content that can compete with the graphics of Rage, Doom4 or whatever, is pretty small now.

IMO, it's way more rewarding to go retro and thus hopefully be able to bang out some playable content before the heat death of the universe. 

Not sure the map editor/prefabs thing is going to fly. I mean ... I dunno, maybe. It will get SOME use sure, but I think from a different crowd of people rather than traditional modders and level designers. People who like to get their hands dirty with detail are going to be left out. 

It all depends how good the actual game is. If it hits enough of a critical mass, I'm sure Snapmap will take off. No it won't have everything exposed for us nerds to tinker with, but might cater to a wider audience who will be happy to able to put together levels with minimal learning curve. I mean, why should level design be gated by tons and tons of obscure and odd knowledge?

I doubt it will hit that critical mass, and it's sad the tools aren't going to be that powerful/extensible for us, but I think Snapmap is a good step toward the sort of thing that makes Minecraft so great: any player can easily get in and build. If nothing else, I'm excited to see how it pans out. 

Sure, but Minecraft gives you pixels. This looks to give you entire wall pieces. Have to see it in action I guess. 

Not necessarily a dev tool, and a whole world (and 20 years) away from a BSP1 brush pushing editor.

If you compare it to modern editor suites that are published to the general public, it looks pretty much the same.

Who knows, maybe it will even be open ended enough for genuine dev - maybe the team are even using it for the game itself.

I haven't been following the news much to know. 

All SnapMap needs is an "import custom mesh" option, and you can make what you want in it, surely. 

i bet a beer it won't have a "import custom textures" option 

i bet a beer it won't have a "import custom textures" option

The custom textures will be part of the custom mesh I imagine. 

Can we use the Doom2 Palette!? 

Snapmap modules aren't just static meshes though, they're small prefab level pieces that are compiled into some format I haven't investigated. They come ready scripted, lit and with effects and various layers of gameplay that can be toggled on and off by the snapmap designer.
The best you can hope for is that they manage to output some new modules now and then, I'm fairly sure you won't be able to make new ones yourself. 

does look restrictive, but I think that's kind of the point since it's very difficult to make content for the latest idtech. Maybe they will update somewhat frequently with prefabs?

I think what they're doing is good, I think people would be a little happier if it had something in it that was a bit more like the Portal Puzzle creator? I think that would be a nice trade-off. 

The tool will be useless if you can't make your own prefabs.

Is that functionality stated officially somewhere? 

portal puzzle creator only works because of the extreme simplicity of the levels. if someone made something like that in quake, we'd call it a box map.

doom4 is going to have an expected level of complexity to its geometry so box rooms are not an option. 

I'm not saying that it would be easy to develop for a modern engine and achieve the same kind of graphic fidelity. Especially not for a single person. However, the above is all based on Rage. This is Id-Tech 6. There are loads of things that have changed and perhaps making it more modable is one of them. Who knows really? 

More likely it's id Tech 5.1 with marketing on top. 

Yeah, remember that Carmack left after Rage. I'm not saying the coding team is not great, but ... you know, no more Carmack. 

https://twitter.com/idSoftwareTiago/status/611952196578467840 

You have no idea what's been done engine wise in the last 4 years. Nor do I for that matter. Plus, they brought in Tiago Sousa from Crytek (Lead Graphic Engineer for the CryEngine). Also, MachineGames and Tango both worked with the Rage engine and made modifications. I honestly don't believe we'll be getting a simple 5.1. Not in that much time. If I remember correctly, Carmack stated that he wrote the engine in such a way that it would be easier to replace certain components (such as the new renderer that Tiago was talking about). 

Only SnapMap, no mods tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgUB8aH9eZI&feature=youtu.be&t=11m5s 

Right ... NEXT! 

"Could you make Doom 4 through snapmap?"

"Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhh....."

Lol. 

well, that's a shame.

Granted, a very small percentage of people would ever make use of true dev tools. Still, why not make them available for those who would use them?

I think doing that could benefit the snap-map community as people could use the dev tools to make prefab sets for the snap-map crowd.

So far, this doom reboot is pretty 'meh' all around. 

It's because, as I keep harping on, I don't think they understand what made Doom work. They see the demons and the gore and the graphics ... they don't realize that was just the window dressing.