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 

Look, my post sounded a bit negative, and I'm sorry a bit for that. Let me clarify some things here:

I'm just tired of the hyping of a product when I know that the arguments for the hype are not justified. And people seem to be a bit brainwashed by this hyping process, which is of course exactly why it's done. Just like they market fast food, put a lot of MSG/E621 in it, which tells people's brain it tastes awesome while it's crap food, so they'll praise the food for being great while it's really not.

Don't forget that the megatexture was already used in 2007 when Quake Wars was released. I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned yet, as far as I know. So I really don't understand why this megatexture tech is presented as anything *new* or groundbreaking, because it just isn't. It's 4 years old. Even back in 2007 most people didn't care about it all that much. But sure, it has potential I suppose.

Old school gamers like myself, like older ID game's: not too much reading (I'll read a book if I wanna read) and not too many gimmicks and no fake conversations with obviously brainless game characters (NPC's) carrying out their dumb mantra/broken record chatter any time you approach them, 'cause it usually only amplifies the feeling I'm in a fake environment. Unless the environment itself isn't trying to seem realistic.

Besides the NPC's that inform you in a non-groundbreaking manner, Rage has the hostile zombie-people who, apparently, have more decency then most immigrants in my neighborhood: they actually speak or yell in the language of the country they're settled in. But it doesn't exactly improve the enemy-experience for me in a game, now does it. Even in Quake 4, they at least disguised it a little bit in the form of some Strogg gibberish with partial English coming through. Imagine a Q1 Ogre speaking English to you......'Oh there he is!!!'....
Seriously!!!! WTF would that do to a game like Quake? What does it add to Rage?

Now you could say that English is fine, cause the zombie folks were once just people. But I still prefer it like they did in 'The Thirteenth Warrior' movie. You got these bear-people who converted to something dark and used their own language:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe2EvcNDt1U&feature=related


So what has really improved since.... Half-Life 1 (1998)? Aside from the 3D engine? Especially when you consider the awesome A.I. in HL1? I vividly remember the encounter with the special forces or that female Assassin and how that bitch would jump away with all kinds of moves to dodge my bullets. Have we forgotten about that? So it's 2011 FFS and I see Tim Willits mentioning of how proud they are on the new bullet-dodging enemies... For ID, it may be a step forward, but in the world of gaming? Does it really matter to the gamer all that much that the enemies never fall down exactly the same way? I doubt it because they still look and sound like a bunch of dumb idiots that even a handicapped console gamer can shoot down.

But sure, I guess there's always people who don't care and just have fun. I guess that's the best way to go about it. I just can't do it anymore. 

The mutants don't speak in Rage. The bandits do, because they are humans. 

megalodon, are you the authority who decides what people may like or not?

You ain't making any sense anyways, first you say you wanted an oldschool game and then you bitch about the AI?

You don't like Rage. Ok. 

The version of megatexture used in Rage is actually quite different to that used in ETQW, which had various well-documented limits, such as a smaller texture size (32kx32k vs Rage's 128kx128k) and not being able to handle overhanging geometry.

Besides, one could easily extend the argument and say "megatexture isn't new, it was used in software Quake" too (what else do you think the surface cache is?)

Enforcers in Quake shouted at you in English, and most monsters in Quake II used English as well. I fail to see the complaint here. 

Bare in mind I haven't played the game yet, but based on vids I've seen and whatnot I think it comes down to the fact that in this engine the "new graphical feature" doesn't really add any gameplay value, but rather adds a ton of artistic value.

Whereas in previous id engines the new graphical features have enhanced the gameplay in some new way. For example the shadow technology in doom 3 affected the gameplay as you could craft scenario's with them or make monster ambushes more intense, etc. In Quake the addition of a fully 3d environment affected gameplay immensely.

In Rage the megatexture makes stuff look really pretty and unique, but as far as I can tell it doesn't affect gameplay in the slightest. I suppose you could argue that the wide open world parts wouldn't exist without the tech but from what I hear that might have been a good thing? :D

Theres also the fact that it runs at 60fps *nomatter what*. That is a big deal for me at least, I can't afford to have a dual-gfx setup a crazy hispec cpu and usually my graphics settings run fine on high until some crazy action starts happening (where you need the fps most :D).

Meh, getting side tracked. Well the game looks fun, but like I mentioned I cant comment on it directly as I haven't played. If you walk around areas and shoot dudes and it feels great, then id have succeeded in making a game I want to play :) 

most rage haters appear because they expected an RPG with open world and story (from id software!) but got a linear shooter with lack of story and pseudo-open world.

I expected a solid shooter with good graphics (I expected the lack of story also) and got it. Enjoyed it much and want more of that.
I think if Rage was announced as a linear shooter it would have got a higher score and more fans. 

Pretty much what I expected, good and bad.

The only bad thing I got that I didn't really expect was it being pretty easy.

The main good thing I got that I didn't fully expect was just how good the atmosphere and sounds and general style/theme was in some areas.

The only things I really wanted were: More of it, a better, deeper ending, and more combat in open areas. 

No I don't consider myself as some authority, but I think game designers can't please both oldschool- and newschool gamers. Just like Duke Nukem Forever is at one hand old school, according to Gearbox, and yet Duke can only carry 2 weapons at once and there's no co-op. So what's the point of releasing it. Well, some people liked it. But overall it wasn't a success.

Same with Quake Wars, which was too much like Battlefield, at least that was criticism I've read a lot.

In Rage you got the same situation: it's a bit of this and a bit of that. A bit old-school a bit new-school. But I doubt you can please both parties. As I understand, ammo is scarce, which isn't old-school, but having to save manually is old-school... but the new-school gamers don't like that. And none of them like running out of ammo.

With recent games, incl. Rage, ID isn't really doing anything unique, or groundbreaking, overall. It's no jaw-dropping technical achievement and it's not that special in gameplay aspect. I mean, either go oldschool or do something new-school/groundbreaking. Easier said then done, true. But I've read several reviews and, so many times, people mentioned it was a bit like a Fallout and Borderlands rippoff. So what does it add to the current game scene? Most reviews aren't that positive, just like with DNF. And consider how long the development took.

The key questions are probably:

- How good is ID in pleasing old school gamers
- How good is ID in pleasing new school gamers
- How good is ID in pleasing both

And the answer should decide what types of games to make, imo.

But again, if people here have fun with it, that's great I guess. I'm not gonna comment on it anymore, because I do realize I should play it first instead of just watching vids and reading reviews. 

Actually playing the game before crapping all over it may be a good idea! 

It's a lot easier to diss the game when you've actually played it and aren't factually incorrect about it.

Ammo - not sure how you understand that as you've never played it, but there is plenty of ammo and you can buy LOADS in the towns. Plus there are loads of weapons and many alternate fire modes so generally even if one fire mode of one weapon isn't hugely stocked on ammo, your overall stocks are massive.

Old skool vs new skool. Rage has old skool (-ish) gameplay and very new skool graphics / theme coherence. Simple as that.

What it adds to the overall game scene, apart from a good blend of those two elements I just mentioned, is a good fun FPS game. If you want to straight up shoot bandits mutants and monsters with a fuck load of different weapons in a post-apoc environment, then errrr, it's that sort of game.