Carmack: RAGE won’t work too well on 3 DVD’s, Doom 4 will

So what’s he saying, then? That the 360 version will be gimped? That you’ll require a hard drive so that some bits can be ‘installed’? Or that there won’t be a 360 version at all?

Any way you look at it, he’s not exactly creating great PR for the Xbox version here.

He said ages ago that the design of RAGE was changed because of the 360, so they’ll all have the same game except the 360 version will involve disk swapping. The Doom 4 comments are basically the same, it’s just going to be disk swapping fun.

Just install all 3 discs innit. Job done.

Wont work like that, as even if you installed all 3 disks, you still need to swap disks for the authentication

That’s the sort of thing they could change fairly easily though. Just require the first disk in the drive.

They’d have to do the second two discs like DLC – you install them first as ‘add ons’ for the main game, then always start the game from the first disc.

Bit of a pain in the tits though, and it screws over the ‘arcade’ guys so they’re not likely to go that route.

It just sounds to me like the 360 is going to be the tard version, PC ftw.

If anyone actually gave a shit about Rage it would be cause for outrage! And possibly internet petitions!

I give a shit! It looks chuffing ace!

It’ll sell 3 million easy.

Plus, you can’t argue with a guy like Carmack, it’s useless, he is 100% correct 100% of the time.

It must be a PC-gamer thing. Or possibly the fact that I haven’t liked an id game since Doom 2.

Have you even liked a shooter since then?

Only one problem with this story: RAGE is on two DVDs and has been for a long time, hence the line about two wastelands. The cut-down in assets is actually reflected on both PS3 and Xbox 360. Both had to be compromised and a “one size fits all” set of compromises was made to the game to accommodate the deficiencies of both platforms. It’ll be interesting to see what the “raw theoretical” extra on PS3 actually translates to in terms of the final game because the last thing I heard, both were locked at 60fps.

I liked Half Life 2, Hunam!

Carmack, for all his ability as a developer, is a total smacktard when it comes to talking to journalists. He comes across like an idiot by saying that he can’t fit a game on a 9gig disc.

If Valve can fit Half Life 2, episode 1, episode 2, portal and team fortress on one disc, then Carmack can do the same for one game.

People always bang on about how shit-hot he is at coding, so why is he finding it so hard to shoehorn a fucking shooter with ‘racing elements’ onto a 9gig DVD!?

@Doc Robotnik : have a read around about the game – one of the biggest talking points is the vast size of textures in use. Textures account for filesize too y’know

edited for typos

@DocRobo

Wouldn’t ‘vast textures’ have to be completely scaled back for console versions due to the lack of memory, though?

normally yep but as I’d read they’ve come up with some pretty serious streaming tech…

I’m no expert on this, this is just what I remember being covered over the past couple years on this

The benefit of megatexture is it allows vast textures to be used at a fraction of the memory cost however the burden shifts from RAM to storage as a result (the source data for megatexture takes up lots of space) hence the splitting up of data over DVD’s.

“one of the biggest talking points is the vast size of textures in use”

I don’t care how big the textures are, they’re all going to be the same dull (Doom) shade of red-brown.

It looks generifiction in every way.

Whichever way you cut it in this case DVD format is a limiter – simple as that.

Doom 4 structured levels with a linear progression confirmed, not that it was likely to be anything else I guess.

@ Doc Robotnik: fair enough, to be honest I’m not all that excited about it either but its kinda cool technology

“People always bang on about how shit-hot he is at coding, so why is he finding it so hard to shoehorn a fucking shooter with ‘racing elements’ onto a 9gig DVD!?”

Resistance 2 is a fucking shooter without “racing elements”, and it comes on a 50 gig Blu-ray disc. Quit your vacuous bitching.

@elronathon

It wasn’t a personal attack – I appreciate the impressive tech. My emo was aimed at Carmack and his inability to not be a twat.

“Resistance 2 is a fucking shooter without “racing elements”, and it comes on a 50 gig Blu-ray disc. Quit your vacuous bitching.”

I’m sorry, but I call bullshit.

Look at any multiformat game for 360 and ps3, and EVERY one will use a ton more space on the PS3 – why? Because they can. It makes development easier, and if the space is there, why not use it to your advantage. Not that it helps – multiformat titles almost always run better on the xbox.

But I digress…

Don’t tell me for a second that you actually think Resistance 2 needs over 5 times the storage space than ANY 360 FPS?

“Don’t tell me for a second that you actually think Resistance 2 needs over 5 times the storage space than ANY 360 FPS?”

Do you have any real evidence to the effect that it doesn’t? From the quite staggering level of technical insight displayed in your first post, I’d say probably not

It can be useful for PS3 games to feature multiple instances of the same data on a Blu-ray to reduce seek times, so if a developer claims to have filled the disc up they’re probably telling the truth, it just isn’t all unique content.

I’m not sure why people are trying to ‘call out’ Carmack’s comments. I’d hazard a guess that he knows a tinsy bit more about developing his games — or any game, most likely — than you, and he’s hardly a clueless PR person throwing around technical terms they don’t understand.

Oh god dirigiblebill, do your own research.

Should be interesting to hear how this plays out with regards to releasing the game multiplatform.

Hopefully, we will see the game in good shape on the 360. If not, thats quite a score for the PS3, to have an ID title all to yourself. His talk of slightly more performance is interesting, if he can pull it off where the game looks better on the PS3, that would give something Sony could shout about.

edit: One thing I thought of. His technology is using that megatexture stuff, which means he has one super huge file that the textures are stored on. Thats probably why it might not work well being cut among three disks.
It sounds like it will require an install, or be gimped, or not released at all.

Megatextures aren’t just one file for the whole thing fearmonkey.

@psycho, It’s for static textures, mostly for terrain, which would be the bulk of the game.

I know it’s Wikipedia, so should be viewed with the usual dose of scepticism, but the page for MegaTexture says that Rage will be using textures up to 128000×128000.

There’s a link to a video in which they say the demo level environment is using one mega texture at 64000×64000. http://uk.gamespot.com/mac/action/mysteryidgame/video/6176261/id-tech-5-stage-demo-part-1

So although there are obviously other features of the game that will use up space on the disc, it seems that the MegaTexture files will be taking up the majority of the space on the disc.

So fearmonkey may be right in saying that’s one of the reasons that it’s hard to split the game across discs.

On a side note, I never really paid much notice to the technology when it was announced, but it sounds pretty cool. Anything that lets artists have a bit more freedom and not have to worry about texture size is pretty cool.

That’s right fearmonkey, but it’s not exactly one file, it’s more like a big jigsaw, and you only put down the bits you’re currently looking at. The huge texture that they talk about will be broken up into blocks and streamed in as required.

They know what you will and wont see depending on what part of the game you’re at so they could easily create different megatextures as appropriate… they just need a way to split the world / progress (which you can assume they’ve already done because they mentioned altering the game to fit the problem).

That’s all as I understand it anyway. It’s a while since I’ve looked at the tech. Thinking about it, there’s not many machines that could load a 128000 x 128000 texture into memory and display it… certainly not a console.

There’s an interesting read on it here: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/95/1

The technology has moved on a bit since then, but the implementation is very similar.

Well let’s be honest, who didn’t see this coming?

There’s always the chance they could release it on Live though, or something like that, if they lift the size limit. But this is a huge score for the PS3 and the PC because it’s actually impossible for the 360 given the architecture.

You heard the man, those textures are so big they actually couldn’t split it into 3 DVDs, annd… installing? Sorry, no, it can’t work that way. The authentication is actually the least of their worries there. It’s mostly because the install isn’t an install at all, MS should just label it for what it really is in the NXE: Disc rip.

If you don’t believe me, look it up. It rips the disc to an ISO and loads the ISO into a virtual drive setup, what this means is that they’re still three discs, three virtual discs, but three nonetheless. It’s not like the PS3 install, which actually is an install and can contain scripted elements and decompression, it’s just a rip. There’d be no way to join the three ISOs into one, three ISOs is all you get, that’s yer lot.

The PC doesn’t have Bluray, you say? No problem! The PC can just grab highly compressed files off a couple of DVDs, then it can decompress those and join the textures together, because PCs can do that, you know? As can the PS3 because it’s a very computerish console.

And imagine when companies start licensing the engine used for Rage because of its incredible graphics! That’ll be lots of exclusives for the PS3 and the PC, wont it?

Microsoft better take their lazy hats off, pull their socks up and code a proper installation system (the like of which XBoxers lol’d at and considered useless) so that these games won’t be quite so exclusive, hadn’t they?

*smug as hell.*

Umm… Rage is a two DVD game Esha. You just typed all that for nothing. Doom 4 is a three DVD game. I can only assume that you didn’t read the news post.

“And imagine when companies start licensing the engine used for Rage because of its incredible graphics! That’ll be lots of exclusives for the PS3 and the PC, wont it?”

It’s designed from the ground up as a multiplatform engine. You think id forgot to make it work on the 360?

Nowhere in the article do I see them saying Rage is a two DVD game PT….looks like three DVD’s is what’s actually discussed unless you’re assuming “two large wastelands” equals 2 DVDs which I would certainly not assume.

“We would love to set the thing up where it filled one Blu-ray disc versus three DVDs, which is about the right mix, but the game just…we can’t cut it into a third like that,” he said

“We can cut it into two pieces.”

Besides the fact that it’s been two dvds since the day it was announced:
http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/driving/idtech5/news.html?sid=6176210&tag=topslot;action;1

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/48289

However many discs it’s on I just hope it’s a damn sight better than Doom 3.

You are all going to the darkest corner of hell for daring to question Carmack.

Oh, ok got it.

Mark Rain and Epic then Crytek and now Carmack and id?! Who the fuck will develop new technologies. The gaming is doomed without a company that want to push the limits. And pushing the limit can be achieved only the PC. So now when every PC developer(except Blizz and Valve) are on the cosole side which will make the progress. This is so sad.

FYI Valve is on the console side….

And they go to console side because the obvious reason more money on that side.

looks up in gametrailers carmacks interview, he explain about rage and other kind of stuff, he knows his way with words, he is just probably tired of explaining over and over about this.
He said microsoft wont let them have the game as installation so they have to work out a way to make it fit in multiples dvds