Via Shacknews, we see some new shots of Rage from SIGGRAPH 2009, where a talk given by id Software senior programmer J.M.P. van Waveren included a whole bunch of stuff about the “virtual texturing” in the new engine. There’s a handful of environment shots on there, and they look incredimentary. This could well be the next game you build a new PC for. The full PDF is here.
Oh, and in case you’ve not seen it, there’s a big old Rage teaser site here.
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that picture reminds me of the game full throttle, when you go down into the cave… off the highway
game should be fun as long as they try to make it like their own games instead of like games that a different audience likes (half life 2, fallout 3, call of duty 4, etc.)
those other studios are much better at making games with bad shooting elements that cater to a huge mass of gamers. id should let id do shooting. they are the kings there.
@Radiant
“/Another/ shooty huge world rpg?”
It’s not an RPG.
“Even without the rpg-ness is the shooty and drivey going to be as fun and varied as say…Far Cry 2?”
Nearly every id game has shown technical advances allow for the implementation of new gameplay ideas, and unless Rage’s environment is a non-interactive skybox to a ratio that even Epic would blush at, it’s going to be considerably better realised than Far Cry 2’s. Not meaning that it’ll just look prettier (although atmosphere and variety will no doubt be greatly enhanced over games that use repeating textures*), but also allowing a more seamless, organic, richer sandbox. We’ve seen nothing to inform either way of the game structure, shooting or driving. However it works, rest assured a vocal minority will complain that it’s not enough like HL2 or Halo, or both. If it has a Doom-grade shotgun and lets you blast mutants to chunky bits, that will be a good start at least.
*With the possible exception of Stalker, which used sheer brute force.
I’m a complete sucker for open world games, so this looks intriguing. Here’s hoping it’s at least as entertaining as Far Cry 2.
Regarding howard’s initial question: search for a document by hugh hoppe (I think) about clipmaps, it’s another virtual texture variant very close to carmack’s megatexture.
But basically it’s really an abstraction for texture addressing. Instead of the engine considering all the textures and materials as being in various files or produced by various algorithms it considers it all as a gigantic texture, and meshes simply store coordinates to this texture, and file loaders and texture generators are instructed to write to this texture.
The trick is, you never need to have a gigantic texture in memory, you’ll never see it whole because your resolution never is as high as the texture’s. when you’re far from it you’ll only see the coarser mipmaps, when you’re close you’ll only see tiny bits of the gigantically detailed mipmaps. So for each level of detail you only keep what you need in memory, and it turns out it’s more reasonably-sized.
Oblivion was awesome? Are you people on acid?
About PC gaming being dead. Good riddance, I say. The part dying right now is the part I couldn’t care less about. Who cares if we stop getting the GoW-ports or whatever other shoddy games-for-kids that are out there. I’m not interested. If I want to play something while not using my brain I’ll fire up a 2D fighter, on my console; or I’ll play a racing game — yes, on my console. But gaming can be so much more, and it continues to be, in other forms. Let the braindead kids have the consoles, and let the rest of us revel in the new golden age of adventures. In the increasingly awesome indie movement. Generally, in games worth playing.
Fuck consoles, I say. Fuck them right in the ass. PC gaming is dead, long live PC gaming!