Author Topic: rage sucks!  (Read 2632 times)

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Offline Nuke

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i was gonna post this in whiyl but it got to long so il start a new thread.

i just beat rage. dare i say i was rather disappointed. the textures seem like someone decided to rape em at the last minute so the game would run on some other platform. i could see the telltale marks of dxt* compression everywhere. the texture resolution was so low that a 16 pixel dxt1 block filled up a lot more pixels on the screen. i could understand this being done in the wasteland, you're driving around and dont have time to inspect the textures. but during the corridor missions i would have liked to see fewer artifacts in the textures. model quality hasn't really changed much since normal maps came into existence so at least the modeling was on par. some of the normal maps looked kinda flat though. anywhere where you had a pile of garbage that had a can sticking out, you couldnt help but revel in the lameness of the normal map. its as if the normal map was rendered for a low res model, and then that model got poplychopped and the map was just used anyway. distance shots looked good, but as soon as you got close to anything (which fps games tend to do), the graphics looked like ****. the collection of stock parts were of low quality with poor texture detail.

the missions were kinda the same. go in, destroy thing x, retrieve item y. missions involving vehicles were non existent, except for races of course. at least the cars handle well, most fpses with vehicles have the vehicles made out of styrafoam so that they are hard to keep on the ground. this game they were kinda made out of lead, and just stuck to the ground. the way the game uses the wasteland as kind of a cheap way to get from mission to mission and serves no other purpose. there were no real missions out in it, you didnt have to escort convoys or defend things. it was jsut kinda there, and if you got luckey you would find something to shoot at. mission design has you run a tight gauntlet. any place that kinda looks cool or has intresting stuff, youre not allowed to walk there. you run the maze and youre done. interaction with the world is non existant. you could not destroy doodads, if you found a window you couldnt just shoot it out. there were so many places that looked passable that were just blocked because they didnt want you to explore over there. there werent any shortcuts you just just kinda had to walk a straight line and you were done. i admit maze shooters are like that but they kinda wend out of their way to control where you went. the last mission was way to easy, and no ****ing boss. only a few mutants with armor. i had saved up all my bfg ammo too just to fight a boss that never showed up. what a ****ing waste.

and the thing i despised the most: the controls. specifically the car controls. every idtech engine 4 and lower supported pc joysticks. i admit these features were seldom used, you had to know the console commands, how to write and exec a cfg, but you could use your joystick. oh but the game would recognize an xbox360 game pad. the fact that a game for the pc cannot use a pc controller, but can use an xbox360 controller is absurd. as a result i couldn't drive with my ch stick (this applies to many other games as well, and is entirely microsoft suckdickery to do with their games for windows abomination that aims to bring down our pc gaming master race). code to use joysticks on the system is very simple. i could write it, any cs student halfway through their courses could do it. it might take a half hour for a professional coder. its not beyond the capabilities of any game company. ms wants to sell more gamepads is all. its ironic that ms once made some of the best joysticks ever. they made gamepads, wheels, force feedback sticks, regular sticks you name it. so why are they now force feeding the same old controller to everyone? as if to say: "no! conform! submit! you have no choice! your opinion does not matter!" may ms headquarters go suck a nuke!

i would have expected to see some other cool new features in idtech5. megatexturing wasnt new, idtech4 had it on later games. earlier idtech4 games which didnt use megatexturing actually looked better. there was no revolutionary new feature. not the colored lighting in q2 or the curved surfaces in quake3, or the epic shadowing of doom 3. all of which were cool at the time, if not totally original (for example the achievements of quake 2 and quake 3 were done in frontier back in '93). i could not identify one thing that made it a different engine at all. doom 3 looked better than this, and thats ****ing sad. carmack used to be able to deliver top notch game engines, but no more. carmack has been dethroned. he has been absorbed by the industry. hes just tapping you for money so he can play with his rockets.

**** the games industry! **** them all! they destroy every idea they touch. and your typical gamer is too ****ing stupid to figure it out.

tldr: see title
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

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Offline Mikes

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ID is not a PC studio anymore. Accept that fact and get the launch codes ;) lol

Although with Rage they produced suckiness all around, no matter on what platform. So I guess they just suck now.
(Except,... haven t tried the Ipad version (and never will), yes there is one LOL.)

 

Offline Ransom

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nah it's all right

 

Offline Nuke

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id has really been more or less in the game engine market. ever since quake 2 their philosophy has been make a good game engine, and an ok game to market it to other companies who also want to make games, but without needing a top notch coder to write the engine. this worked well for all the idtech 3 and 4 games. doom 3 might not have been as awesome as it should have been but you get awesome **** like quake 4 (thank you raven for not sucking so hard), and prey. this game really didnt do anything to market the engine. it didnt push any boundries, in fact its way below par. game studios will select other engines that perform better than this, and id wont sell any game engines. if you were going to lease a game engine for your fps project, and you had to choose between crytek2 (or was it 3?) or idtech5, which would you pick? its not that i expected the best game ever, its that i expected what they would deliver to actually feel like a finished product. instead it feels rushed and half ass.

the golden age of gaming is dead and gone. no more performance geeks overclocking their rigs to play the latest games, no more getting any say in what kind of controls you use, no more unobtrusive drm, its gone. all thats left is mega publishers riding their studios right up the poo chute to make games that conform to existing best sellers, in the same way the music industry turns slutty looking girls who cant sing into superstars. same old corporate drivel. give us your money and bend over.
« Last Edit: December 27, 2011, 05:55:10 am by Nuke »
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

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Offline starbug

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My tutor for games design got rage for PC, PS3 and Xbox, to see what the differences were and to show us the texture work and how much detail was in the models in game, He and us were not impressed, lots of slow downs and the textures constantly have to re-render. For example you look at a building is nice clean and sharp textures, you look away then look back at the same building and all the textures were a blur, it would take about 30 seconds for them to go back to high quality. Even on a very high spec PC it still did it. I know know why the game has come down in price so quickly in the UK. So i don't think i will be buying this. I just hope these things are fixed for Doom 4
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Offline CP5670

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I haven't played Rage. The graphics in the screenshots look nice enough but nothing special. It's funny that the textures often look so poor, considering that the texturing system was the supposed to be the main selling point of that engine.

Quote
id has really been more or less in the game engine market.

The idtech 4 engine had all kinds of timing problems and messed up otherwise good games in my book. I especially liked Doom 3 and would play it again if it wasn't for that engine. It has a fixed 60fps physics rate and if you run it at anything other than 60hz and constant 60fps, it skips frames and is a complete eyesore. You can disable the physics rate cap, but that makes the game flip between double or half speed depending on whether the framerate is above or below 60. I actually played Doom 3 and Quake 4 like this, as it was still better than the alternative and gave a cool bullet time effect during heavy fights, but on modern cards it would just go at the higher speed all the time. :p idtech 5 is supposed to have the same issues.

 

Offline AtomicClucker

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They did liberate the IdTech4 code finally, so we can see some mods or at least opimization in a while for Doom3.

I want my 64-bit demon shootin.
Blame Blue Planet for my Freespace2 addiction.

 

Offline Shivan Hunter

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the golden age of gaming is dead and gone. no more performance geeks overclocking their rigs to play the latest games, no more getting any say in what kind of controls you use, no more unobtrusive drm, its gone. all thats left is mega publishers riding their studios right up the poo chute to make games that conform to existing best sellers, in the same way the music industry turns slutty looking girls who cant sing into superstars. same old corporate drivel. give us your money and bend over.

 :lol:

Publishers are ****ing us over because they're losing their already-tenuous grip on the gaming industry and ****ting their pants over it. The last few games I've played- Minecraft, Amnesia, the Binding of Isaac (some disturbing **** btw), SMB; these were all produced by independent developers, some without a giant publisher- or any publisher at all- anywhere along the line. Sure, if you only play the **** cranked out by scores of monkeys on typewriters Visual Studio, there'll be very few genuinely good ones and you'll have to crack them to get rid of DRM. But stop pretending they're the only games in existence. They're not.

I may be a hipster, but that's because hipsters are a hyper-evolved life form leaving everyone else behind (like that weird alien thingy from TNG s3e25).

 

Offline Spoon

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Would you like some more brown with your bloom?
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline Nuke

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the golden age of gaming is dead and gone. no more performance geeks overclocking their rigs to play the latest games, no more getting any say in what kind of controls you use, no more unobtrusive drm, its gone. all thats left is mega publishers riding their studios right up the poo chute to make games that conform to existing best sellers, in the same way the music industry turns slutty looking girls who cant sing into superstars. same old corporate drivel. give us your money and bend over.

 :lol:

Publishers are ****ing us over because they're losing their already-tenuous grip on the gaming industry and ****ting their pants over it. The last few games I've played- Minecraft, Amnesia, the Binding of Isaac (some disturbing **** btw), SMB; these were all produced by independent developers, some without a giant publisher- or any publisher at all- anywhere along the line. Sure, if you only play the **** cranked out by scores of monkeys on typewriters Visual Studio, there'll be very few genuinely good ones and you'll have to crack them to get rid of DRM. But stop pretending they're the only games in existence. They're not.

I may be a hipster, but that's because hipsters are a hyper-evolved life form leaving everyone else behind (like that weird alien thingy from TNG s3e25).

i admit lots of good things come from indie devs. but when john ****ing carmack fails to deliver it is a sad day for gaming. not that i know what a hipster is. i always imagined a half geek with a liberal agenda. you know who else thought they were hyper evolved? the nazis! yep, im bringing them into it!
« Last Edit: December 27, 2011, 06:48:37 pm by Nuke »
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

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Offline Nuke

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Would you like some more brown with your bloom?

damn right.

as much flak as quake gets for being really really brown, the game will run under dos and on a 486 with a coprocessor. it did have the same palette restrictions that doom had they just didnt pick a very good color set. however they managed to come up with the mostly brown palette is beyond me. a standard rgb 332 format would have looked better. when it comes right down to it they probably took all their 24-bit working texture set, ran em through a palette generator to come up with the best palette for the entire set, and then used that palette to generate the final bitmaps. i think quake 2 was confined to a single 8-bit pallette for the entire game in software mode, but i think hardware mode allowed for each texture to have its own palette (though im not 100% sure about that). in its day quake 2 looked rather 1337. its the game i played the most between descent 2 and the freespace eras.
« Last Edit: December 27, 2011, 07:12:35 pm by Nuke »
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

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Offline Ransom

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For example you look at a building is nice clean and sharp textures, you look away then look back at the same building and all the textures were a blur, it would take about 30 seconds for them to go back to high quality. Even on a very high spec PC it still did it.

This only happened for certain systems, I'm pretty sure, and was patched within days. I never experienced it.

 

Offline Nuke

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distance graphics looked ok to me, but anything up close was loaded with so many artifacts. megatexturing might work well for big outdoor areas, but for corridor shooter parts of the game, it just does not look good at all.
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Nuke's Scripting SVN

 

Offline Ransom

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It worked fine. There's a difference between technically impressive and aesthetically impressive. Rage's visuals aren't the former, but they are the latter.

Texture resolution isn't half as important as artistry. Pretty much everywhere you look, even in the game's indoor segments, serious thought has been invested into composition and colour on a level very few other games have cared to attempt. I do question its lack of some kind of detail texture solution, and the art style isn't great, but the game has a level of visual consistency and an attention to detail that deserves a lot more praise than it's gotten.

 

Offline Nuke

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its not like i got as close to the wall as possible to try and find the lines between the texture blocks. i can understand that this happens with compression technology, i can go on for hours about how that works. i think whats going on here is that the texture formats are being transcoded from one lossy format to another. a lot of these newer games use a storage format, and convert them in real time to whatever texture formats are supported by the video card, and the most optimal formats are used. this might work good for the wasteland. most everything is far away, youre usually driving and the view point is usually far from the textures.

this kind of texturing technology is not well suited for your typical corridor shooter. i dont mind seeing repeating textures if they are totally awesome looking. you can still maintain an artistic look using a set of smaller textures, which would, for the most part use the same storage format as internal format (dxt*). these textures could be converted to the final format with a high quality non-realtime compression algorithm to reduce the visibility of block edges, resulting in cleaner texture compression. doing a transcode from a storage format prevents this process because it must be done at load time and must be fast, reducing the quality. i would argue that, for a corridor shooter, the set of small textures provides the artist a superior canvas, and for the large outdoor areas the megatexture is the optimal canvas.

there are really no restrictions that prevent you from doing both techniques simultaneously. when you enter a room with an open viewport to the outside, page in a lower mip level of the megatexture, when you enter a closed area, those can be paged out and free up room for the higher mip levels of the interior textures. same kind of texture juggling tehcniques fpses have been using for years. using megatextures hinders the process, say you have a distant building in the view, and the textures for that object are a tiny fraction of the entire megatexture, you need to load a lot of unused texture data, just to get the texture information for that building. you could say perhaps the technology was new and the artists didnt understand how to get the most out of it, but id hate to bash the artists for an engine design limitation. the art design in the game was pretty good, but id has done better in previous games.
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

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Offline Ransom

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I don't think id has done better. This is the first game they've made that's pretty not because of some new feature like Doom 3's unified lighting but because it's just extremely well put-together visually. Obviously this is all just to show off megatexturing, but unlike fancy shadows you can't show off megatexturing without some very solid art backing it up.

That said, I agree that megatexturing has questionable utility in a corridor shooter. But you're talking about technical issues; I'm saying that's neither here nor there. Despite all the question marks around Rage's implementation, that game has the most beautiful corridors I've seen in an FPS. It doesn't matter that the textures tend to lack fine detail - or, at least, it matters far less - when they're so nicely composed.

 

Offline TwentyPercentCooler

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the golden age of gaming is dead and gone. no more performance geeks overclocking their rigs to play the latest games, no more getting any say in what kind of controls you use, no more unobtrusive drm, its gone. all thats left is mega publishers riding their studios right up the poo chute to make games that conform to existing best sellers, in the same way the music industry turns slutty looking girls who cant sing into superstars. same old corporate drivel. give us your money and bend over.

 :lol:

Publishers are ****ing us over because they're losing their already-tenuous grip on the gaming industry and ****ting their pants over it. The last few games I've played- Minecraft, Amnesia, the Binding of Isaac (some disturbing **** btw), SMB; these were all produced by independent developers, some without a giant publisher- or any publisher at all- anywhere along the line. Sure, if you only play the **** cranked out by scores of monkeys on typewriters Visual Studio, there'll be very few genuinely good ones and you'll have to crack them to get rid of DRM. But stop pretending they're the only games in existence. They're not.

I may be a hipster, but that's because hipsters are a hyper-evolved life form leaving everyone else behind (like that weird alien thingy from TNG s3e25).

Indie devs are making some really awesome stuff nowadays. Bastion was definitely my favorite game of the year.

OT: I played Rage, wasn't impressed. For a pedigree like that, I feel like it should have been way better, and I noticed the crappy texture work, too. Are the AAA studios even trying anymore?

 

Offline Klaustrophobia

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even crytek put out a stripped-down consolized port in crysis 2.  albeit a much better port than any other, given that they ARE still crytek, but still, that was pretty much the fat lady singing for PC gaming as far as i was concerned.
I like to stare at the sun.

  

Offline Mikes

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even crytek put out a stripped-down consolized port in crysis 2.  albeit a much better port than any other, given that they ARE still crytek, but still, that was pretty much the fat lady singing for PC gaming as far as i was concerned.

... and every now and then then a PC only game( like the Witcher 2 for example) comes out and shows just how much console graphics are lagging behind now ;)