Then I decided not to post it. But yeah - the shooter parts are very good, and have good replayability.

A also found the engine to be very fast. 60fps 100% of the time.

I think once they increase the texture resolution, future projects using the same tech will be stunning. 

once they increase the texture resolution
about that... like, i haven't played it, so i don't know how accurate i'm being here, but wouldn't they need stupid amounts of artists at that point?

i kind of always looked at higher and higher res textures as a way of offsetting how shitty tiled textures look. then bump mapping and spec highlights came along and went a long way towards getting rid of tiling, and now rage has basically removed it entirely.

i'd be absolutely fine with a game with just q3 levels of texture resolution (2 textures pixels to 1 game pixel... don't know how else to express that) if everything was unique. 

2 things about that:

1 - I'm guessing that it wouldn't really require that much more work. If you think about it, it's probably been slightly difficult to achieve some of the effects that they have achieved at a low resolution.

2 - ID software are a small team anyway, but if another, larger studio used the engine, it could be a different story.

3rd thing I just remembered - Didn't they say that Doom 4 would be a 30hz game which contained four times the detail of Rage, right back in like 2007 or something?

Also incidentally, Skyrim seems to contain textures with a higher resolution than FO3/FONV 

Just to play Loki's Advocate: any tile based game will teach you that unique environments aren't needed for a great game. 

sorry, tiled environments look shit.
the best textures are the ones that can obfuscate that tiling. this is the kind of thing that made or broke pixel art games. (well... unless the texture is MEANT to tile, of course.)
also, i never once mentioned the quality of the game-- this isn't about what makes a game great but what makes the environment look best. 

Hm? My comment wasn't directed at you personally, Necros. 

uh, i was the one who brought up the stuff about unique environments. 

But it's a negative thing at the end of the day.

I'm just responding to Megalodon's post really -
"What is all of the fuss about?"

Or to quote him directly:

I mean, I really don't see how this tech is more advanced/better then certain other recent games or how the game is better in a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g for that matter.

I'm just saying - the actual shooter parts of Rage are cool, IMO. Not ground breaking, but great fun nonetheless. The are reminiscent of Doom. Fast gameplay. First-person-shooter. The game as a whole is a bit awkward, but I'd be lying if I said I didnt enjoy the vehicular combat.

But the megatexture thing - well that is new, and it is ground-breaking.

Look at Metro 2033 for example - one of the prettiest games ever made. Loadsa shaders and parralax whatever, depth of field, volumetric lighting etc etc etc. Well if it had megatexture AS WELL, it would look even better. Crysis is another one. Give the artists the ability to REALLY make the levels look polished. Crysis has an awesome graphics engine. Crysis Very High settings has funky shaders on the textures that Rage doesn't. But Crysis has parts where one texture is poorly faded into another, and things like that. If it had Megatexture, it would look *slightly* better too. 

i remember there was an oblivion mod where someone went through all the terrain textures and created opacity maps out of the normals and used those to blend between textures (instead of the stock cross fading). looked very good.
but when there's stuff like rocks and cliff faces, they really benefit from unique textures. some of the shots i've seen remind me of cg films. 

Mega-texture improves the rendering of terrain and such but in a man made environment I'm not convinced. Adding mega-texture to Crysis would make the rocks and mountains look better perhaps but overall it wouldn't have much effect imo because of the huge degree of meshes and foliage.

Really that's the only place I think you'd made Crysis or Crysis 2 look more impressive with this tech. Unreal engine, kinda the same, that engine needs better lighting more imo, though it's piles of rock meshes to make a big cliff does kind of stick out a lot to me. 

Just look at the tiling on http://deadendthrills.com/2011/11/the-blades/ and dream how much better it could look with unique textures. 

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90559
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90378
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90347
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90356
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90640

(including man-made awesomeness ;) ) 

i think it can be just as relevant with 'man made'/inorganic stuff.

it's why i like the ikbase set so much. it has textures that fit on more than just squares. 2x1 rectangles, 4x1 rectangles, angles, etc...
it's not only trim. this is good, because it gives you some room to make different shapes.
if you were doing it with megatextures, you can imagine every possible brush shape would have it's matching metal panel texture that fit the shape exactly effectively giving you infinite shapes to play around with. 

Yeah for individual mappers that might be interesting but for a full AAA game where all the assets are custom made anyway I don't think the impact would be anything great. 

...can look fine, yes. And there are things you can do to counter the "obviously tiled" effect, but in reality the old tiled rendering paradigm hasn't had any new innovations since the introduction of programmable shaders. It's all just bigger, better versions of what went before, with more layers, more effects. Where are the new groundbreaking ideas?

Once you see unique texturing however, once you've immersed yourself in it for a few hours and get the full impact of it, it's actually quite difficult to go back and look at tiled textures again. I'm doing a Doom 3 run-through at the moment, and it honestly looks awful by comparison. You can see all the wall panels look the same, there's no variations in an expanse of floor, etc.

The lower resolution of Rage's textures is just a tradeoff owing to current hardware constraints right now, and I'm pretty certain that a future evolution of it could involve having variable texture resolutions. Say a lower resolution for rocks, soil, organic stuff where it wouldn't matter so much, with perhaps a detail layer added, and a higher resolution for manmade stuff. There's plenty of good stuff yet to evolve fom this.

(Interesting aside: software Quake's surface cache is perhaps a very early ancestor of megatexture.) 

Would there be a way to paint on the surfaces in-game and somehow save that cache to be loaded later? 

I remember when people said

"There is no point in Anti-Aliasing, because at such high screen resolution as we have today (like 1280x1024 back then) you can't tell the difference".

Another analogy:

My sister is a very fussy eater. My father recently watched something on the TV which made him decide that rather than buying bread from the shop, he would make his own bread, because shop-bought bread has like 30+ ingredients ('E' whatever, and other chemicals), whereas REAL bread has only 4 or 5 (flour, yeast, salt, water, maybe a touch of syrup, honey or sugar).
So anyway, he has been making his own bread for 3 or 4 months now, and has gotten quite good at it.
My sister comes to stay with my folks because she had a bad break-up with her BF, and she turn's her nose up at the (really nice) HAND MADE bread, and says "Ooooh, I don't like that bread, oooh, it's horrible, what a waste of time, yada-yada-yada", so now she gets a loaf of preservative ridden bread, with every slice all but identical and full of 'E' number. I mean WTF!?!? It's bread! 

is that related to anything, Ricky? 

The home made bread is hand-modeled terrain maybe?? 

seriously, wtf :P 

I just mean that megatexture is better than not megatexture. I'm just fanboiing on id. Thanks for releasing some new and awesome feature which allows mappers to hand paint over their own textures. Thanks for the ability to model rocks, and then hand-paint highlights onto the edges of those rocks in 3D. I know that it took id seven years to make QuakeLIVE and Rage, and not a sausage more, but they kinda cracked it for me. I mean did you see the video from about 1 or 2 years ago where they were showing the dev team working in the editor, all flying around in the 3D world, just painting the textures, adding 'stamps' or whatever they are called, and manipulating the mesh, just on a server, in real time, simultaneously? It was sooooooo cool. I just feel you aren't seeing the forest for all fo the trees.

Forgive me, I'm also totally wired from working a trade-show stand for work. I was literally stood trying to sell products to a bunch of farmers, who I have never met, in an environment full of businessmen and professionals twice my age. I mean I'm selling stuff to farmers, and I know nothing about farming really. I suppose I wasn't really 'selling' anything, I was just there to raise product and brand awareness. But bleh. MY brain is a bit hyper at the moment, but at the same time I feel drained. I had a long and stressful drive home, because I was already tired, I was on my own in the car, and there was a massive traffic jam on the way out of the city. So I'm sorry, grump over, peace :D 

...makes sense (in a way, it is Ricky we're talking about, after all!)

His sister is a gamer, break with preservatives is old-school textureing, and homemade bread is megatexture.

So the gamer is very very fussy about what she likes and doesn't like. Old-school texturing has all this nastiness wrapped up in it, so the game company makes megatexture. The gamer comes in, sees megatexture and turns her nose up at it saying "maybe I like the misery!", or words to that effect. 

 

Ricky ate his father's megatextured bread. 

oooh your sisters a gamer is she ricky? is she cute? :D