Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You might just recollect my rantings about my favourite Quake III map, Q3WCP9, back in the mists of time. I had sort of resigned myself to the idea that it would never appear on Quake Live. Until now! The Quake Live Christmas premium update has it! Depressingly this means that the maps were only available to free players for a week, a week which ends today. I am sad. It is, however, just enough to push me into taking out a premium account for the hols. Man, I hope I can get some decent CP9 games. I’ll report back.

Do you know, it was probably to me that John Carmack first revealed he was intending to release the Doom 3 source code. I’m pretty sure. During an interview for PC Gamer in late 2008, I asked him if he’d be continuing his practice of making previous code available once the next big engine was out, and he explained that with Bethesda now owning id he didn’t know if it would be more difficult, but he was “almost certain we will wind up releasing the entire Doom 3 code base once Rage ships.”

So, with Rage safely released, it’s finally happened, and published under the GPL. Not before an emergency recoding of the shadow tech, after BethSoft lawyers got the squits over a possible patent issue.

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So on the ball is RPS that the first post even slightly related to spooky goings-on we’ve run this week comes a full day after Hallowe’en. That’s just our shtick – spurning pagan festivals is what we do, as is being too lazy/non-cynical to compile ‘TOP TEN SCARIEST NOSES IN VIDEOGAMES’ posts to farm traffic.

Spooky this really isn’t, but it does concern aged, ultra-darkened, infamous manshoot Doom 3, the long-awaited source code release for which is finally near. “DOOM 3 source is packaged and tested, we are waiting on final lawyer clearance for release,” claimed id tech guru and lover of non-existent drivers John Carmack on the Twitters yesterday. So, in theory, an enormous amount of unfettered access to the still-power id Tech 4 could arrive in modders’ and developers’ hands any day now. I reckon some quite amazing indie/amateur stuff could be created off the back of it.

Happy update: Bethesda’s Pete Hines says this rumour is “complete bollocks.” Hooray! Plus, additional denial.

This is pure rumour, but the Big K are reporting that a source inside Bethesda told them the company has made the decision to “indefinitely postpone” development of Doom 4. This move, made at a recent meeting in Dallas, apparently comes as a response to general disappointment with Rage, which was buggy on release and earned review scores of a less than 8/10 average (gasp!)

The story says that the issues surrounding Rage’s launch have resulted in “a serious lack of confidence in the project management at id”. This might be nonsense, of course, but it’s believable nonsense. That said, I am not sure why the company would deny id Doom 4, which seems like a game that would sell no matter how it was managed. Also, Rage seems to be doing okay in the charts, and we all know that it’s money, not review scores, that talk.

Question to the floor: how’s everyone doing with Rage at the moment? There seem to be mixed reports as to the efficacy of the recent patch – for some it did the trick, for others (especially on ATI cards – our own John Walker claims the game is still more or less unplayable on his 5850) it didn’t help the glitching and texture pop-in, and others still have claimed it made things even worse. Carmack claimed on Twitter yesterday that id are still monitoring forum reports, and suggested those experiencing difficulties browse said forum for help. They’re worth a check, even though it’s massively tiresome to have to do so for a game you paid good money for, as there are a raft of fixes and tweaks doing the rounds – most of which at least involve only the relatively simple act of downloading a replacement config file.
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id’s legendary robo-brain John Carmack has broken the developer’s rather inadvisable silence about the mucky state of Rage at launch on PC last week. Apology? Nah? Accepting blame? Nah. It’s all ATI’s fault that id released a game designed for future rather than existent drivers, he says. Oh, and the reason the game, once working, is still not as super-shiny as we might have hoped is because “We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games.” Here we go again.

In happier news, the first Rage patch is out, and thank the god of textures, it introduces a much-needed graphics settings menu to the game.
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Alec and myself are busy playing Rage, and rather enjoying it, actually. That said, we had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the damned thing working ok. We both used the fix detailed here in combination with enabling the GPU transcoding thing, while also updating drivers (particularly important for ATi cards). This seems to address most of the texture pop-in issues, and apparently ups the texture res, too. You’ll ideally need a card with 1.5gb VRAM to get a step up in texture quality, and if you have 3gb or more it’s reportedly possible to go higher still, although this article on the Geforce site said they found no immediate differences. Anyone with enorm-VRAM able to confirm?

Bethesda echo these and other fixes here.

Why, that’s the most boring headline I’ve ever written here. Still, it’s late, I’m tired, I’ve spent half the day unsuccessfully trying to track down an NVIDIA card so I can play Rage without feeling nauseous, but now I don’t have to because ATI have put out a fix for the unhappy state of the game on Radeons. Unlike the first supposed fix, this makes things better rather than worse.
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Good news! Rage is now on my PC, and I have begun to play it. I am excited to be doing so, based on what I’ve played of the game previously.

Bad news! I’m seeing quite a few technical problems on my PC. To the point where I’m not sure I can keep playing. Sounds like I’m not alone either.
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Yeah, all this malarky about pre-order bonuses leaves me a bit uninterested, and I tend to gloss over such news. This one, however, had me say “Aw.” And also “C’mon.” You know in that imploring, almost disbelieving way? The double barrel shotgun in Rage is only (so far) available if you pre-order, and therefore get the Anarchy edition. So a post-apocalypse game, by Id, where the sawn off double-barrel shotgun is only available as a bonus item.

Really? C’mon. There’s a bunch of other pre-order items, if you care, and they’re illustrated in the video below. (Worth noting: Bethesda tell us that we won’t be getting any early access to the PC version of the game, so we can’t review it before it comes out, so we can’t tell you whether or not to pre-order! Ha.)
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