Am i missing something, or is it still totally fucked? I experience serious stutter/freezes every few seconds / when turning.

Patch 1 & amd_catalyst_11.10_preview2_win7_vista.exe 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=25876581&postcount=972

this totally fixed it. 

It's -33% off at Steam for 8 more hours 

Rage (X360) is this week�s top debut, as it debuted at number three with sales of 405,000. The PlayStation 3 version debuted at number eight with sales of 244,000. The PC version debuted at number 15 with sales of 59,000. The game launched in all three regions worldwide.
How many of the not-sold pc copies do we account to the bugs? 

that just seems more indicative of the smaller size of the pc gaming market than bugs.

from what it looked like, most people didn't even know about the bugs until they got it. 

"'e's slaughterin' us 'ere!"

"There 'e is!"

"I'm facked!"

Awesome, Wasted are still my favourite for that alone. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsSacsUyyKU 

 

Well, at one hand it's true that PC gamers are the minority, but with this game, you can bet there were a lot of PC game/ID fans that really looked forward to Rage and I've seen very serious posts concerning the bugs, but not just that. This whole 'new amazing tech' non-sense is also getting transparent. 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. After watching gameplay videos I certainly feel no need to play it. 

It looks fucking awesome in the outside bits.

The gameplay is proper and very fun.

The atmosphere in some areas is pretty much perfect.

The bugs I got with the patch were: 0 

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.)