RAGE - New thread for the id game [Archive] - Page 5

RepoMan

10-03-2011, 10:13 PM

Ouch. Ars just weighed in
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/10/rage-is-the-gamiest-game-that-ever-gamed.ars

Whoosh!

So, just to sum up my nine plus hours with the game so far:

No story to speak of
No characters that make an impression
Linear
Broken save system
Dull mechanics
Tedious quests
Weak shooting
Stock weapons
Racing is fun
Minigames are enjoyable
Very pretty
We'll be testing on PC and playing multiplayer in the coming days, but I felt it was important to share what the game is versus what people expect it to be. This is a massive disappointment.
Verdict: Skip

Daaaamn. Wasn't expecting that much of a train wreck. And I trust Ars.

I think what we're seeing here is that id really doesn't have a sense of what "world-building" means. And they're up against titles (Deus Ex: HR, Skyrim, Arkham City) that totally get it -- that understand how to turn all those technical virtues towards the goal of making a place that feels rich and deep enough to pull you into its alternate reality. That's a skill set that id never really needed before, and it's a blind spot that's very hard to realize you have. The tough thing about blind spots is that you can't see them yourself....

Anyway, definitely glad I'm holding off a bit on this one, which makes me sad to say, because Carmack is my hero. ...but only technically, and that isn't necessarily enough anymore.

Tim James

10-03-2011, 10:15 PM

The artifacting gets much worse in the bandit hideout. Now enemies are popping in and out. I'm shelving it until there's a hotfix.

The final insult: field of view seems low too.

Regarding the Ars article: the world building is pretty irrelevant compared to the technical problems right now, at least on PC. For what it's worth, I didn't care about anything the Ars guy was talking about. It's all stuff I'd like to have, but I can live with a gorgeous looking game with acceptable shooting. Right now I can't even get the one thing I figured was a lock.

I predict the usual hurr durr about id's world building will be nothing compared to the shitstorm tomorrow morning when the PC hardcore fully grasps the technical issues.

mono

10-03-2011, 10:20 PM

mono what are you running?

i5 2500K, 8GB RAM, GTX 580, installed to an SSD.

I can't get a screenshot off fast enough to catch the pre-pop-in textures, since they load quickly. Maybe it's an Nvidia vs ATI thing?

Creole Ned

10-03-2011, 10:21 PM

I think it's probably an SSD thing for you.

Tim James

10-03-2011, 10:23 PM

i5 2500K, 8GB RAM, GTX 580, installed to an SSD.The artifacting must be limited to ATI. This generation has been terrible for me in terms of driver support. Or maybe it's because I'm playing all new games.

I can't get a screenshot off fast enough to catch the pre-pop-in textures, since they load quickly. Maybe it's an Nvidia vs ATI thing?It's hard to catch them indoors. It should be clearly visible outside. I'll go move it over to the SSD real quick.

Gendal

10-03-2011, 10:23 PM

3GB 580 GTX, latest stable then latest beta drivers. Anything not in view still has texture pop the moment you turn to it.

It's not like other games where you can do a single 360 to load everything, anything not in view is dumped from the card instantly. As soon as you turn head away and back it has to load again.

It's amazingly bad, typically texture pop has zero effect on me. 60fps though!

HighPlainsDrifter

10-03-2011, 10:23 PM

ATI driver update seems to have had no effect. Steam forums confirm.

It had a definite effect on my system! Now Rage won't launch at all!

edit:
Ran a quick test to see if everything was borked. Red Orchestra 2 loads and plays fine. Rage gets black screen and won't even play the annoying logo splash screens. Congratulations to Tripwire for having better quality control than Id.

malkav11

10-03-2011, 10:23 PM

I think next time I will skip preloading. I'm pretty sure I could download all 21 GB of this game faster than it's taking to decrypt the game files.

stusser

10-03-2011, 10:24 PM

I was just coming here to post about the weird flickering on my screen. I find it ENORMOUSLY distracting, although not as bad as the serious what the fuck id, what the fuck texture pop-in. I'm running the 11.10 AMD drivers, but I guess from the earlier post here it happens on nvidia too.

Also, why do the quests have a decline button? If you hit decline, you can't continue with the game. Did nobody consider that in the past what, 6 years of development?

And what's up with the mouse pointer in menus not resetting acceleration? It's nearly impossible to select anything on the screen. I have to use the arrow keys and enter, like, I dunno, a directional keypad on a x360 controller.

I just played through the first mission, and while the graphics were gorgeous (if you ignore the pop-in and flickering, which I cannot) the gameplay is straight-up gun and shoot. No hidden areas, no plot to speak of, not much going on. No boss at the end of the first mission. Nothing to pull me further into the game. Even wolf3d had hidden rooms and trophies to collect.

Speaking of picking crap up, why does rage have 1000 different types of garbage vendor loot? Just have the bad guys drop money, for chrissakes.

Technically, id's releases have always been near-perfect. On that basis Rage is id's worst release ever. I don't see them fixing the texture pop-in, since Carmack talked about it months ago-- someone actually played Rage and thought "yeah, that's OK to release, nobody will mind". I view that is fundamentally broken. What a piece of fucking shit.

I guess now we know why they aren't using "id tech 5" for skyrim. The reviews have, at best, been kind.

Tim James

10-03-2011, 10:24 PM

I think next time I will skip preloading. I'm pretty sure I could download all 21 GB of this game faster than it's taking to decrypt the game files.It was about 10 minutes for me, then a 360 MB download.

I was just coming here to post about the weird flickering on my screen. I find it ENORMOUSLY distracting, although not as bad as the serious what the fuck id, what the fuck texture pop-in. I'm running the 11.10 AMD drivers, but I guess from the earlier post here it happens on nvidia too.I haven't seen anyone complaining with Nvidia yet, other than the pop-in of course. I'll try 11.10 drivers. Do the enemies not flicker in and out for you?

malkav11

10-03-2011, 10:26 PM

It was about 10 minutes for me, then a 360 MB download.

It's at 30% for me after 20 minutes. I get about 10 GB an hour at top download rate, so I'm not actually exaggerating by much. :P

Tim James

10-03-2011, 10:29 PM

Reviews (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2154129) seem to be the typical 8s and shit. It should be a serviceable game at least once they resolve the technical issues on PC.

stusser

10-03-2011, 10:29 PM

I haven't seen anyone complaining with Nvidia yet, other than the pop-in of course. I'll try 11.10 drivers. Do the enemies not flicker in and out for you?
The 11.10 drivers show the flickering problem as well. I haven't noticed enemies flickering, since they tend to die fairly quickly since I'm still very early in the game, but I have noticed NPCs and objects flickering in John Goodman's gas station.

Rage truly is a debacle. I assume none of those reviews are of the PC version.

Jack Howitzer

10-03-2011, 10:33 PM

Example of the texture pop-in. Don't have the game myself but this looks pretty bad. Don't have the required post count to post links, just ad 3 dubya's

.youtube.com/watch?v=c5oEdfT4OWY

Woolen Horde

10-03-2011, 10:34 PM

Example of the texture pop-in. Don't have the game myself but this looks pretty bad. Don't have the required post count to post links, just ad 3 dubya's

.youtube.com/watch?v=c5oEdfT4OWY

Holy Crap. I've never seen a PC game with anywhere near that much texture pop-in. That is simply unacceptable. How the hell did this ship?

Blips

10-03-2011, 10:37 PM

Wow, I can't believe the game actually does look like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5oEdfT4OWY) on PCs...

edit: apparently beaten to the punch by Jack.

stusser

10-03-2011, 10:38 PM

Yeah. It's not like you could possibly miss it. It's completely obvious and terrible. If Carmack hadn't very carefully mentioned it in an interview, I would assume it was a buggy release and expect a day1 patch, but no-- they actually knowingly released the game like that.

Id software released a game under their own label with a shitty engine under Carmack's direct oversight. It's like the first time the kindly priest you've known for your whole life puts his hand down your spiderman underoos. Faith and innocence lost!

OK, a bit much. But I certainly won't ever buy an id game before reading the reviews again.

Tim James

10-03-2011, 10:39 PM

11.10 fixed the artifacting for me. I think I noticed one flicker in about 5 minutes. So I believe the game is playable now, but still runs painfully slow with vsync.

I don't notice too much difference on the SSD.

Technically, id's releases have always been near-perfect. On that basis Rage is id's worst release ever. I don't see them fixing the texture pop-in, since Carmack talked about it months ago-- someone actually played Rage and thought "yeah, that's OK to release, nobody will mind". I view that is fundamentally broken.It has to be fixable. It's "just" assets in memory, right? With more memory, that should be all you need to keep everything cached 360 degrees.

mono

10-03-2011, 10:42 PM

Adding the Rage executable to the Nvidia control panel program settings allowed me to force vsync, so that's good news.

I loaded up Fraps to show the speed of the texture load on my rig, but running Fraps totally tanks the performance.

stusser

10-03-2011, 10:43 PM

Beats me man, I'm not a genius coder, and I doubt anyone on this forum who is would lambast Carmack. He had his day, like Garriot.

Pogo

10-03-2011, 10:43 PM

Maybe there will be a "Target FPS" slider in video settings offered as DLC.

TurinTur

10-03-2011, 10:43 PM

So, reviews

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/119/1197972p1.html - 8.5
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-04-rage-review - 8.0
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/rage/5315 - 9.0
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/rage/review.html?tag=topslot;read;2 + 8.0
http://www.g4tv.com/games/xbox-360/46600/rage/review/ - 8.0

Will read later.

stusser

10-03-2011, 10:44 PM

So, reviews
Apparently the press couldn't play the PC version until 2 hours ago either, so all those reviews are of the console releases, which they actually bothered to QA.

Also, has anyone else noticed that there's no way to exit the game? When you go to quit, it takes you to the consoletastic "press enter" screen. You have to use ALT-F4.

Becoming

10-03-2011, 10:48 PM

Wow, I can't believe the game actually does look like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5oEdfT4OWY) PCs...

edit: apparently beaten to the punch by Jack.

Holy shit..just removed from my day one pedestal. Glad I didn't preorder now. Guess I'll be picking up Dark Souls tomorrow instead.

TurinTur

10-03-2011, 10:49 PM

stusser

10-03-2011, 10:51 PM

Check out these 2 screenshots from the steam forums, of the LoD totally fucking up with a 5 degree turn. The "dyna-jolt" text disappears, as you're looking at it. The textures on the booth disappears too. This isn't a feature of the engine, it's just plain broken and should not have been released. If id's "megatexture" implementation required this much pop-in and LoD failure, it should have been scrapped for a more traditional method. This simply does not work.

sitting still - http://i.imgur.com/sBcL4.jpg
after turning - http://i.imgur.com/Lq6kA.jpg

TurinTur

10-03-2011, 10:52 PM

http://www.egmnow.com/articles/egm-review-rage/ - 9.5
http://reviews.teamxbox.com/xbox-360/1938/Rage/p1/ - 9.5
http://www.ripten.com/2011/10/03/ripten-review-rage-xbox-360/ -9.5 http://www.computerandvideogames.com/321060/rage-review/ - 8.9

http://www.gamefront.com/rage-console-review/ -7.5
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/video-game-reviews/8804398/Rage-review.html - 7.0
http://www.strategyinformer.com/xbox360/rage/1663/review.html -6.5
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/10/rage-is-the-gamiest-game-that-ever-gamed.ars - Skip

Tim James

10-03-2011, 10:52 PM

Naeblis I linked the reviews earlier. We've got bigger problems on PC right now.

I spoke too soon on 11.10. I still get a little flickering. It's playable though.

Also, has anyone else noticed that there's no way to exit the game? When you go to quit, it takes you to the consoletastic "press enter" screen. You have to use ALT-F4.Press enter, then click exit.

Adding the Rage executable to the Nvidia control panel program settings allowed me to force vsync, so that's good news.Does the framerate get cut in half at certain points with vsync enabled? It clearly seems to be a symptom of double buffering, from my limited understanding.

stusser

10-03-2011, 10:55 PM

Yeah the new rage-specific drivers definitely still flicker and don't address the pop-in or LoD at all.

You're right, hitting enter then exit game works. My bad. I got too caught up in my frothing at the mouth. I just hate it when game companies steal my sixty bucks. I hold grudges.

TurinTur

10-03-2011, 10:55 PM

Oh, I didn't see your post. And yes, we have bigger problems in pc.

But mono said he see the game ok, did he?

Tim James

10-03-2011, 11:07 PM

What's going on here? I don't seem to have the framerate halving problem anymore. I swear I saw it the previous time I ran the game with the 11.10 drivers. Maybe the game adjusted something, or maybe it's intermittent?

I'm starting to think I might even survive the texture pop-in under normal use, when I'm not trying to spin 180 degrees. Since this is a modern console FPS, I doubt there will be much spinning around anyway. The SSD loads textures much faster than that YouTube video.

Humanity may just survive this apocalypse. I'm going into cryo sleep for now though.

Rock8man

10-03-2011, 11:07 PM

Joystiq review (http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/04/rage-review/) 3/5. A good read. It sounds like a decent rental or bargain bin title, but it's a shame that the game doesn't live up to the promise. What they describe as the main story setup sounds like a really cool idea.

HighPlainsDrifter

10-03-2011, 11:09 PM

I buy lots of games on PC, both old and new. I literally cannot remember the last time I had a game which would not run. And to think that when it happened again, it came from Id.

Tim James

10-03-2011, 11:10 PM

I buy lots of games on PC, both old and new. I literally cannot remember the last time I had a game which would not run. And to think that when it happened again, it came from Id.Did you try 11.10 beta or just that RAGE specific driver I linked earlier?

Haha, I guess he's heard what's happening: http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/121098421460406273

Everyone, make sure you have latest Nvidia/Ati drivers to play Rage!
28 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone

Okay going to bed for real now.

Jason Cross

10-03-2011, 11:20 PM

Dear Bethesda:

Please, please, do a better job with the QA of the PC version than you did with this. Please?

I'm really sick of buying buggy-as-hell Bethesda games. C'mon you guys. You know you have problem with it. YOU KNOW IT.

HighPlainsDrifter

10-03-2011, 11:24 PM

Did you try 11.10 beta or just that RAGE specific driver I linked earlier?

Both. Then I tried the normal 11.9, then rolled back to 11.8 which I had been running before. Same behavior each time: a window briefly pops up saying it's installing VC Redist package for the first time, then Rage tries to start, then black screen.

Since it talks about the VC redist every time I figured it needed to install. So I found the installer in the filesystem, ran it, and it's older than what's already installed.

mrcjhicks

10-03-2011, 11:25 PM

So, the interface screens (inventory, vendor, etc) have mouse acceleration. I've only played the first mission, and my hand is already killing me. Hopefully someone figures out how to turn it off soon so I can continue playing.

rei

10-03-2011, 11:32 PM

TurinTur

10-03-2011, 11:38 PM

There is a nice icon from another forum i visit for this whole situation:

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y247/Turin_Tur/andememeto.gif

TurinTur

10-03-2011, 11:40 PM

That was an amazing interview. Basically nonsense backpedal answers and marketing fluff to every single point/concern he made about RAGE being a generic linear shooter.

Now, if we only had interviews like that for Skyrim (generic fantasy rpg!) and Battlefield 3 (generic modern shooter!) and so many other games....

mrcjhicks

10-03-2011, 11:47 PM

Both. Then I tried the normal 11.9, then rolled back to 11.8 which I had been running before. Same behavior each time: a window briefly pops up saying it's installing VC Redist package for the first time, then Rage tries to start, then black screen.

Since it talks about the VC redist every time I figured it needed to install. So I found the installer in the filesystem, ran it, and it's older than what's already installed.

I grabbed the latest 11.9 after playing through the first mission with whatever driver version I already had alreadt. I get the same error with the 11.9 driver installer and Rage no longer runs (I get a couple white screen flashes then it crashes.)

I will say, I did enjoy the shootering when I played. I need to remember not to try and play games until they get patched, though.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:00 AM

They said it looks like no other game, meanwhile it looks like at least 2. Call of Battlefield 304035 didn't claim that it doesn't look like any other game. The id guys said a bunch of half-nonsense answers and he stuck to his line of questioning. Also it's id, why shouldn't they answer (moderately) difficult questions about their games? Why shouldn't any game developer?

Oh, but it looks like no other game. Well, more or less.

Of course, that doesn't mean it looks entirely like no other game. It's does have brown dirt, blue skies, white clouds, grey concrete, people walking on streets, sewers, military bases, etc etc.

But once we look deeper on the game, it does have a particular artistic style, almost baroque in detail, thanks to the variety of MT, that have a unique look. But i would say it's something subtle. It also uses a weird "kind of realistic with a pinch of comic book look art style" in stuff like characters.

So, does it looks like no other game? Not that much, but it does have a slightly unique thing going for it.

Being honest, it's a bit weird the amount of people that says the game looks generic because it looks like Fallout 3 or Borderlands.
Most games looks like a dozen of previous games, this game *only* looks like two previous game (F3, Borderlands). Relatively speaking, post apocalyptic settings are still somehow novel. There are other settings much more used up.
And even then, F3 have a very limited color palette, and Rage is more colorful, and Borderlands have the full-on cartoon style with bold silhouette lines, so the three are still different.

The interview itself, it was pretty bad. Bad for the interviewer... but also bad for the id guys, they didn't give good clear answers to the questions. Bad job selling on the game.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:11 AM

Example of the texture pop-in. Don't have the game myself but this looks pretty bad. Don't have the required post count to post links, just ad 3 dubya's

.youtube.com/watch?v=c5oEdfT4OWY

AGhh.... that's horrible. I hope for a patch or driver in one day that somehow fix it.

Ok, i think this problem is caused by this:
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/576683685691174416/BA8E6C6BEC0F4FDF3B8388D508E5FB2485EC830E/
line 24: 0MB video memory

LOL, so the auto detect setting fail. Point won by the "auto detect settings sucks" camp.

EDIT: Disregard this post. It seems that line refers to the video memory reported by the motherboard. In other words, only if you have a integrated graphic card.

DennyA

10-04-2011, 12:29 AM

Bummer on the PC version issues. :(

FWIW, I've played a bit over seven hours of the Xbox 360 version and I freaking love this game. Maybe it's because I avoided the hype, and id exceeded my expectations. A story? Actual choices? In an id game? I've gotten bored quickly with everything they released after GLQuake, but I'm totally gamelocked on Rage, and can't wait to get back to it.

Haven't seen any pop-up on the 360 version, and I have to say as far as textures, objects, etc., combined with a silky smooth fast frame rate, it's one of the best-looking games I've seen on the 360. (Despite the almost-trademark-id brown palette; hey, at least it's tan here.)

I can understand some of the design criticisms, but IMHO a lot of them are criticizing the game for not being a different game. As a fast-action, essentially linear shooter with a little bit of choice thrown in, I think it succeeds admirably.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:30 AM

Guy playing the pc version
http://www.twitch.tv/bwana

It looks perfectly fine, the problems have to be with some specific cards. Mostly Amd?
Sigh, next time i will return back to nvidia camp....

Blips

10-04-2011, 12:31 AM

LOL, so the auto detect setting fail. Point won by the "auto detect settings sucks" camp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJDc8R2zB2g

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:46 AM

Great graphics!
http://i.imgur.com/ld3Mg.jpg

id Software, i am disappointed.
Lots of people are having problems with the texture loading, texture flickering, weird shadows, bad framerate, and crashes. Crashes! The last time a id software game crashed for me was Doom 2, and only because it reached the 4MB ram limit on very specific levels and moments.

Paul_cze

10-04-2011, 12:58 AM

Also, has anyone else noticed that there's no way to exit the game? When you go to quit, it takes you to the consoletastic "press enter" screen. You have to use ALT-F4.

Holy shit.

Example of the texture pop-in. Don't have the game myself but this looks pretty bad. Don't have the required post count to post links, just ad 3 dubya's
.youtube.com/watch?v=c5oEdfT4OWY

Holy shit!

So, the interface screens (inventory, vendor, etc) have mouse acceleration. I've only played the first mission, and my hand is already killing me. Hopefully someone figures out how to turn it off soon so I can continue playing.

Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!

Check out these 2 screenshots from the steam forums, of the LoD totally fucking up with a 5 degree turn. The "dyna-jolt" text disappears, as you're looking at it...

sitting still - http://i.imgur.com/sBcL4.jpg
after turning - http://i.imgur.com/Lq6kA.jpg

You have got to be kidding me.

I...am at loss for words. WTF, id? From most hardcore PC developer, mother and father of PC FPS genre, to worst console port making developer ?

When I read about texture pop-in impression of people on neogaf, I though "that is ok, on my kickass PC I will have 60fps, best graphics and no pop-in".

Sigh.

Sarkus

10-04-2011, 01:10 AM

wjb11

10-04-2011, 01:14 AM

Hunty

10-04-2011, 01:24 AM

R(AG)EPORTED

dermot

10-04-2011, 01:25 AM

REPORTED

Bah, Hunty got there first.

MattKeil

10-04-2011, 01:30 AM

Oh, but it looks like no other game. Well, more or less.

Much, much less, if we're being honest. There's nothing much about Rage's art direction and aesthetic that hasn't been done a dozen times before. It's just the best this particular trope has ever looked. Aside from the tech, the game has always looked pretty generic visually.

But once we look deeper on the game, it does have a particular artistic style, almost baroque in detail, thanks to the variety of MT, that have a unique look. But i would say it's something subtle. It also uses a weird "kind of realistic with a pinch of comic book look art style" in stuff like characters.

The characters look like Doom 3 with the plastic sheen removed. There's very little in Rage that doesn't come straight out of another game or movie. Even the Bash TV guy is basically Mojo from the X-Men running Thunderdome.

Being honest, it's a bit weird the amount of people that says the game looks generic because it looks like Fallout 3 or Borderlands.
Most games looks like a dozen of previous games, this game *only* looks like two previous game (F3, Borderlands). Relatively speaking, post apocalyptic settings are still somehow novel. There are other settings much more used up.

I'm not sure why you're limiting it to that. It also looks like the entire Mad Max series and Escape From New York, along with any number of post-apocalyptic sci-fi films. Really I don't even understand why anyone is bothering to defend what is a very obviously uninspired setting and collection of art direction decisions. The point is the gameplay and the enemy behaviors, which is exactly where the game excels beyond just about anything else I've played in recent memory.

I can understand some of the design criticisms, but IMHO a lot of them are criticizing the game for not being a different game. As a fast-action, essentially linear shooter with a little bit of choice thrown in, I think it succeeds admirably.

Well, I'd say there's zero choice in the game, it's just a linear shooter with a borrowed method of presenting objectives. Which is fine, and I think I prefer it to straight up "go here, now go here, now go here." But this is a shooter with a light dusting of action RPG elements. Anyone expecting an RPG with shooter elements (a la Fallout 3) is in for a major surprise.

I would argue that there has been something of a lack of clarity on this matter when it comes to this game, which is odd because there's really no reason to hide Rage under a "hey it's kinda like an RPG!" blanket. It succeeds brilliantly as a straight up shooter. The "dungeons" (for lack of a better term) are all extremely well crafted, and the AI is varied and surprising enough that even playing through the same area three times (which I ended up having to do for a variety of reasons) absolutely does not feel the same in terms of the shooting gameplay. I consider this a very impressive achievement.

I...am at loss for words. WTF, id? From most hardcore PC developer, mother and father of PC FPS genre, to worst console port making developer ?

Not to go all Foxstab on people, but I believe I called this in some regard back when I took note of an article that had devs (possibly Carmack himself?) commenting on how they were testing the game on the 360 as their primary platform. Granted, I wasn't expecting anything on the level of what we're seeing in the links here and on GAF. I said "damn."

Chris Nahr

10-04-2011, 01:35 AM

Just thought I'd check in and note I'm having many of the same issues: artifacts, texture pop-in, and some sort of flicker/tear thing going on. I updated to AMD 11.10 drivers, but see no improvement.

I'm confused how this happens when the console versions are by most accounts graphically in good shape.

Carmack talked about this at length in the pre-release interviews -- the new megatexture engine relies on fast direct hardware access to the video card (because it's constantly updating individual pixels from main memory or something like that), and runs like shit on PCs where the driver stack adds a lot of overhead to each GPU access. He had said both Nvidia and AMD were working on new driver functionality to make Rage work acceptably on PCs but apparently only Nvidia came through so far.

glimjack

10-04-2011, 01:39 AM

I have played for about 2 hours... I am not seeing the tearing or artifacting. There is a bit of texture pop, initially it was bad... but after ~2 minutes, the popping became very minimal and only on the periphery of the screen. I am running on a NVIDIA GT 430 (1GB dedicated mem, 1 GB shared mem), with the latest released drivers (not the beta drivers). I am getting a silky smooth frame rate.

The graphics are excellent -- more like what people I borderlands or fallout3 looking like, then what those games actually did. There are lots of tiny details: rust, graffiti, tattoos... the areas feel cluttered and lived in. The cliffs and rock details are also amazing.

I just made it to to the first major town and am calling it a night.

Sarkus

10-04-2011, 01:57 AM

While it appears that Nvidia folks are having fewer issues, they are reporting improvements when they force stuff on the game through the software. I tried it a bit with ATI's CCC settings and did manage to improve things a bit by turning stuff on and forcing it regardless of "application" settings. Anyone else tried this?

belgerog

10-04-2011, 02:28 AM

The point is the gameplay and the enemy behaviors, which is exactly where the game excels beyond just about anything else I've played in recent memory.

That's great, it's all I really wanted and expected from the game.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 03:03 AM

I like the game Rage. It is neat. Shooting things is cool. Id Software (tm) really knows how to make a contemporary shooter with good graphics that is very visceral and has online multiplayer support. In summation, Rage is a very good value and a masterpiece of the art form.

edited by qt3admin

Tom, stop avoiding the forums, come here and write what you think about the game! :)
It's being polemic, in several areas.

HRose

10-04-2011, 03:59 AM

mono

10-04-2011, 05:03 AM

AGhh.... that's horrible. I hope for a patch or driver in one day that somehow fix it.

FWIW, I'm not getting anything even close to being as egregious as that video. Granted I have a pretty good rig with the highest end Nvidia card, but my pop in is super fast to the point of not being worth mention. It's akin to almost catching something out of the corner of your eye but never getting a good look.

Keep in mind that Fraps puts a big hit on performance, especially to your hard drive, so it'll make the texture pop-in appear far worse than you get when not actually recording videos.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 05:37 AM

Yes mono, that's why i am hoping it's a ati only issue. Because if it's an issue from a video card company, it means the problem is surely in the driver of that company, which should be fixable.

HRose

10-04-2011, 05:42 AM

I'm actually surprised that people say it runs smooth. Usually when a game has that absurd texture swapping in and out constantly the outcome is memory leaks/memory fragmentation of humongous proportions.

The fact it runs without crapping the memory is an amazing feat.

Teiman

10-04-2011, 05:42 AM

Holy shit.

I hope is a driver problem, or a driver solution can come soon.

Good thing I have a nvidia ( I am not smart enough to understand the ati version names ).

I have see theres a console. Maybe is possible to change resolution/fov and other basic features with that console?

I'm actually surprised that people say it runs smooth. Usually when a game has that absurd texture swapping in and out constantly the outcome is leaking memory leaks/memory fragmentation of humongous proportions.

The fact it runs without crapping the memory is an amazing feat.

That bad is windows memory management?

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 05:48 AM

What a fucking joke.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 05:50 AM

I played a few minutes this morning before work. I just had my first lockup trying to reload a save.

The framerate doesn't get cut in half so I still don't know what that was all about. Maybe it was the drivers.

But I hate how the framerate changes: every time you move around significantly, it causes a brief dip in frames per second. (I suppose it's loading textures.) Then when you stand still you're back at 60. It's rarely constant or locked. In other games you might have certain sections that chug but you can adjust to it temporarily. You trade that off here for quicker but very frequent framerate dips.

It almost seems like it goes counter to PC architecture. The PC might be slower than consoles at streaming memory but it has more of it once it's there. Instead we need to take a momentary hit to framerate every time we spin around and look at something we've seen before. So it's worse than just watching the textures pop in.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 05:51 AM

intruder

10-04-2011, 05:52 AM

I'm also reading a report of someone entering some building and getting a pop-up about purchasing some DLC. Can really this game represent EVERYTHING that is bad in gaming nowadays?

In one of the demos they showed to the press a DLC message popped up when a journalist tried to open a manhole.
Back then however it was speculated that this will not happen in the final version.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 05:52 AM

That's right, this game has the worst save system I've seen in years. The save points are few and far between, and they seem to be placed randomly. I've started a new mission and gotten halfway through it, only to die and be sent to the last autosave, which was the end of the last mission. You're forced to save manually repeatedly unless you want to lose huge chunks of progress, and going into the menu and waiting for the save to write to memory is a clunky process that takes you out of the action.

That's an odd complaint. There is a quicksave.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 05:54 AM

In one of the demos they showed to the press a DLC message popped up when a journalist tried to open a manhole.
Back then however it was speculated that this will not happen in the final version.

That sewer DLC popup only happens if you didn't actually buy the damn game at this point since it is associated with first owners. I doubt the person that happened to bought a used copy already.

Fugazie

10-04-2011, 05:59 AM

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 05:59 AM

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:02 AM

It almost seems like it goes counter to PC architecture. The PC might be slower than consoles at streaming memory but it has more of it once it's there. Instead we need to take a momentary hit to framerate every time we spin around and look at something we've seen before. So it's worse than just watching the textures pop in.

Being honest, i am fearing this, that the own MT technology was designed from the beginning with the strong points of the consoles (direct faster access to memory, less overhead for each operation as you have less drivers and middleware in between) so by the nature of the beast it won't as it should in computers. PC have other stronger points, of course (just look at The Witcher 2 and BF3), but if they didn't exploited it...

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:03 AM

There's another with specs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLuOtGwLnzQ

I'm also reading a report of someone entering some building and getting a pop-up about purchasing some DLC. Can really this game represent EVERYTHING that is bad in gaming nowadays?

The dlc code is included with the game. It's anti-second hand measure, not future dlc. edit: oh, someone answered it already.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:05 AM

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 06:08 AM

Remember, all the reviews were from the console version.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that could be annoying on the console.

10-04-2011, 06:11 AM

The streaming is really noticeable. If you turn your head any faster than casually, you will see a blurry mess for a second. It's weird. The environments are fucking stunning though. My screen shot key is going to break before I'm done.

Is this also true on a console, where the turning speed is lower?

I'm really getting the impression that this is a technical hurdle they were unable to overcome on the PC. Maybe they should've made it a console exclusive.

Fugazie

10-04-2011, 06:12 AM

I've only had a chance to fire the game up very quickly and have not played it yet (stupid work) but I do have an option I have never seen before in the graphics options:
"GPU Transcoding"

Anyone tried that option? Any idea what it does?

Found an answer to my own question on the Steam forums:
It has nothing to do with multi-card setups. Transcoding is the act of converting a media format into another. The megatextures have to be transcoded on the fly in order to be useable by your GPU. If you do not have a CUDA enabled GPU you will not see this option.

This may help with the pop-in.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:13 AM

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that could be annoying on the console.

Given the problems with the pc version, maybe the average score would be even lower in the pc version reviewed :P

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:15 AM

Rage 1.2GB video (in 360), 720p @ 60fps. (http://www.gamersyde.com/stream_rage_the_first_10_minutes_part_2-23997_en.html)

Because normal flash video can't show the smoothness of 60 fps.

Zylon

10-04-2011, 06:19 AM

Is this also true on a console, where the turning speed is lower?
Issue also exists on the PS3 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-5Sik87qhQ).

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 06:19 AM

Just decoded and started the game. Runs very well on my rig. Screen tearing sucks, but the texture pop-in isn't bad at all. Nothing like the youtube videos for me. Still, it's not ideal.

Correct on no way to cleanly exit. Choosing quit just takes you back to the "Press Enter" title screen.

Way to go id! Masterful trolling of fans.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:21 AM

10-04-2011, 06:26 AM

Issue also exists on the PS3 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-5Sik87qhQ).

Argh. What a let-down.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:31 AM

Some screenshots from the pc version

http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/10/Rage-review-1.jpg
http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/10/Rage-review-6.jpg
http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/10/Rage-review-4.jpg
http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/10/Rage-review-3.jpg
http://www.iocaster.com/screenshots/rage2.png
http://www.iocaster.com/screenshots/rage3.png
http://www.iocaster.com/screenshots/rage5.png
http://www.iocaster.com/screenshots/rage6.png

10-04-2011, 06:33 AM

You're beginning to worry me, Naeblis :)

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 06:36 AM

Correct on no way to cleanly exit. Choosing quit just takes you back to the "Press Enter" title screen.

Way to go id! Masterful trolling of fans.
Yeah, I noticed that. I actually let out an audible "Really?!" when it did that. Good god, I have to "Press Enter" to get back into the game menu just to quit? Damn.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 06:40 AM

You're beginning to worry me, Naeblis :)

Actually, i still haven't said any kind of final opinion of the game, nor positive nor negative, i will reserve that when i finally play the damn game. ;)

Two Sheds

10-04-2011, 06:43 AM

Yikes. I was fully expecting to check in here this morning and see rave reviews. What the hell?

stusser

10-04-2011, 06:50 AM

"Don't spend my sixty bucks all in one place now" neatly encapsulates my feelings about this dogshit title as well. I have no plans to continue playing after the very first mission. The pop-in and flickering drives me insane.

Do NOT buy rage on PC.

lordkosc

10-04-2011, 07:00 AM

Wow this video.... So many graphical issues D:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xudg6D6yl10

User said it was a ATI Radeon HD 5850

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:03 AM

RPS weighs in (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/04/raging-about-rage-pc/)

Tim James

10-04-2011, 07:09 AM

Choosing quit just takes you back to the "Press Enter" title screen.That's not true. Press enter, then click exit. You're out of the game.

So, the interface screens (inventory, vendor, etc) have mouse acceleration. I've only played the first mission, and my hand is already killing me. Hopefully someone figures out how to turn it off soon so I can continue playing.That's odd. I haven't noticed any mouse acceleration in the game but all the interface screens I've seen so far (a few quests and notification boxes) have much higher sensitivity than I'd expect given my turn rate within the game.

Rage 1.2GB video (in 360), 720p @ 60fps. (http://www.gamersyde.com/stream_rage_the_first_10_minutes_part_2-23997_en.html)

Because normal flash video can't show the smoothness of 60 fps.This is the unreal soap opera smoothness I'm looking for. Again, it's not just the visual noise of pop-in but the slight framerate dip that annoys me. I guess I'll pin my hopes on driver optimizations.

The game is "playable" now. Then once ATI fixes the flickering problem I'll be able to accept the game for what it is and play through it. But I bought it at launch to enjoy great graphics on my new PC. Right now it's not a pleasing experience to the eye.

The outdoor environments do look amazing like I said. Unfortunately the textures are low resolution up close as expected. I know nothing stands up to close inspection but I thought we'd moved beyond blurry text on signs.

RPS weighs in (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/04/raging-about-rage-pc/)He's clearly experiencing the same issues other ATI owners have, along with general problems like pop-in. Nothing new here.

Oh, and that driver he links is the one I posted last night. It doesn't have any effect. The beta 11.10 made the game playable for me with vsync (although that might've been coincidence) but it may cause instability.

stusser

10-04-2011, 07:12 AM

The engine is a huge distracting mess on PC and the gameplay isn't sufficient to make me ignore that. If it was Bioshock, maybe. But Rage is just a mediocre corridor shooter with technical issues. If I purchased at retail I'd try to return it. As is, I'll leave it installed for a couple weeks in hope of a patch and then just uninstall.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 07:15 AM

Rig specs?

Quad Core i5-2400
4GB RAM (Yeah, it's low.)
SATA HDD
ATI 6870 1GB
Win 7

Here's an example of the pop-in: http://steamcommunity.com/id/telefrog/screenshot/576683685695057411

I had to take that shot 8 times before I caught it. The pop-in is very fast on my PC and I have to turn my view at least 45 degrees before it happens. By fast, I mean like a fraction of a second fast.

I don't like it, but it's playable. If I saw the kind of pop-in delay that some people are experiencing, I'd be angry.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 07:16 AM

That's not true. Press enter, then click exit. You're out of the game.

So I have to hit QUIT, then press ENTER, then EXIT to actually quit?

mono

10-04-2011, 07:16 AM

Hope they clear up the issues w/ ATI cards, because as a linear shooter, it's pretty great.

stusser

10-04-2011, 07:16 AM

So I have to hit QUIT, then press ENTER, then EXIT to actually quit?
Pretty much.

And remember, don't turn off your computer while it's saving content!

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:18 AM

Oh nice Telefrog, you have an ATI card and it runs fine for you.

Yes, the pop-in you have is the normal pop-in present in the three versions. With the game installed in the hard drive (pc, 360 in hdd) it should be like you say "fraction of a second". You can notice it, it's still "there", but it's no the big problem some people are having with two seconds load to put the detailed textures.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 07:18 AM

So I have to hit QUIT, then press ENTER, then EXIT to actually quit?Oh I see what you mean. Yes, while you're playing there's a "quit game" option. Think of that like a "return to title screen" or "end mission" option that other games have. Usually they include a separate way to exit the application entirely, but that's not available here. No big deal either way.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 07:20 AM

Oh I see what you mean. Yes, while you're playing there's a "quit game" option. Think of that like a "return to title screen" or "end mission" option that other games have. Usually they include a separate way to exit the application entirely, but that's not available here. No big deal either way.
No, it's not a big deal. It's just stupid.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:25 AM

stusser

10-04-2011, 07:26 AM

Yes, it's a stupid console port holdover.

I'm so frickin' far past caring about stuff like that, though, when the actual game is unplayable due to major tech issues.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 07:27 AM

Yeah, quit then enter then exit is dumb.

Oh nice Telefrog, you have an ATI card and it runs fine for you.

I lucked out. I don't even have the latest and greatest drivers. I think I'm still on 10.x something. Honestly, I thought my RAM would be an issue since I only have 4GB, but I guess not.

I'm excited to get home after work to play this, but I'm really disappointed with id. This is a terrible PC launch for many people.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 07:28 AM

lol:
http://i.imgur.com/GfScB.jpg

Oh, wow. That's bad.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 07:28 AM

No, it's not a big deal. It's just stupid.I save my mocking scorn for games that are at least competent, like Crysis 2 for example. I'm scared enough about RAGE (even after driver updates) that it's hard to be a casual bully about it.

The positive comments from Nvidia players give me hope. That assumes we're equally sensitive to certain graphics engine flaws though. One person's "hey, it's just fine!" might be distracting to me.

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 07:30 AM

Yeah, quit then enter then exit is dumb.

I lucked out. I don't even have the latest and greatest drivers. I think I'm still on 10.x something. Honestly, I thought my RAM would be an issue since I only have 4GB, but I guess not.

I'm excited to get home after work to play this, but I'm really disappointed with id. This is a terrible PC launch for many people.

I've read in a few places that it runs better on 11.8 (current release is 11.9), so the fact that you're running older drivers may actually be benefiting you.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:33 AM

Edge review - 7 (http://www.next-gen.biz/reviews/rage-review-0)

Edit: Game Informer review - 9.0

10-04-2011, 07:35 AM

Edge review - 7 (http://www.next-gen.biz/reviews/rage-review-0)

where Fallout’s execution is shonky, Rage is technically flawless; and where Fallout is abstract and statistical, Rage is upfront and personal.

And, visually, id’s game blows Bethesda’s in-house title out of the water – and not just because it’s running at an unbroken 60fps or packing id’s much-vaunted MegaTexture tech.

hehehe

stusser

10-04-2011, 07:39 AM

Yep. Nobody got to review the PC version pre-release. Hmm, I wonder why?

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:39 AM

and where Fallout is abstract and statistical, Rage is upfront and personal.

Edge loves his flowery wordy style. They could just say that one is a RPG and the other is your typical id FPS. Not exactly a surprise that there is a big difference between the two.

About the other quote: console review :( :(

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 07:39 AM

hehehe

As long as you're playing the 360 version, all that seems to be true.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 07:39 AM

Aside from PC technical problems, that Edge paragraph is exactly my first impression when you compare the titles. Outdoor environments in other games are like a flat drab soft hilly textured mess compared to the detailed craggy cliffs that seem natural here.

HRose

10-04-2011, 07:41 AM

Yes, the pop-in you have is the normal pop-in present in the three versions. With the game installed in the hard drive (pc, 360 in hdd) it should be like you say "fraction of a second".

How can it be related to the HD?

There must be some sort of caching. The game just CAN'T load all textures from the HD every time you turn 45 degrees (and then drop them when you turn back), it would be fucking insane. One thing is having texture pop-in when you are blazing at fast speed through the world, another is having that pop-in while TURNING without even moving one step. Loading textures dynamically while turning sounds awfully counterproductive for performance.

The only time I've seen that kind of problem on my computer was the beta of Warhammer Online. I'd really hope that ID was more technical proficient than that.

RobotPants

10-04-2011, 07:42 AM

I was seriously worried after reading all of the posts in this thread about the performance issues on the PC, but I played the game briefly before heading to work this morning and it runs really well for me. I see the pop-in, but it's very quick and only at the very edge of the screen. It's nowhere near as bad as what all the screenshots and YouTube videos being posted here are showing, luckily. It's annoying, but tolerable given how stunning the game looks. The framerate is very solid, too.

I'm on a few years old quad core system with 4GB RAM and an nVidia GTX470. My hdd thrashes like crazy the whole time so hopefully the game doesn't kill it, but I'm super happy so far. I agree that the whole exit, then hit enter, then quit thing is idiotic, though. Why the fuck would I want to exit to the title screen for any reason?

stusser

10-04-2011, 07:42 AM

It's supposed to be much better on nvidia hardware, yeah. On ATI it's basically unplayable.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 07:43 AM

I think everyone with Nvidia is safe to enjoy the game. As long as you can personally accept the pop-in, you're good to go. No surprise necessary.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:44 AM

How can it be related to the HD?

Well, i refer to the fact that the texture streaming is slower in the ps3 version (it does have to read in part from the bluray while you are playing) and the non-installed version of 360.

There is some caching system, yes, but as you advance it's still taking from the files read in the hdd. MT is so big you can't load up everything in the initial load.

John Carmack said in his twitter some time ago:

Rage pc > 360 installed in HDD > ps3 version (partial install) > 360 from dvd

Of course right now is "360 version in HDD > pc" :(

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 07:45 AM

I'm on ATI and I'm only seeing the blurryness as an issue, luckily. It's playable for this ATI user at least!

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 07:46 AM

On ATI it's basically unplayable.

Not for me. I see the pop-in, but it's super-fast like NVIDIA or 360 owners. 6870 1GB.

Apparently, I'm the outlier for ATI owners on Rage. Most ATI people are seeing horrendous tech issues.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:48 AM

I'm on ATI and I'm only seeing the blurryness as an issue, luckily. It's playable for this ATI user at least!

Maybe you are in the Telefrog camp, and ATI user which can play fine (present but fast texture pop-in). From what I am reading in other forums, lots of other ATI users have much more problems, including white flicker, textures marked with black borders divided in squares, very slow texture loading, even crashes.

edit: I am beginning to wonder: how many posts do i have in this thread? Pity we don't have thread stats here, LOL

Tim James

10-04-2011, 07:51 AM

I'm on ATI and I'm only seeing the blurryness as an issue, luckily. It's playable for this ATI user at least!What driver version?

I am beginning to wonder: how many posts do i have in this thread?In the games subforum, click on the link under "Replies."

P.S. It's pretty bad. Hehe.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 07:51 AM

Some of the screenshots from ATI owners are awful. Seriously, how did id screw this up that badly?

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 07:51 AM

edit: I am beginning to wonder: how many posts do i have in this thread? Pity we don't have thread stats here, LOL

Oh, but we do. You have 220. WarrenM is second with 60.

(Click on the number of posts in the Replies column when viewing the subforum.)

Tim James

10-04-2011, 07:54 AM

Also, the guys who say it's running "well": please enable the Fraps fps counter and watch the framerate as you move around quickly or spin the view. Does it stay locked at 60 or dip to 50 for a second?

Some of the screenshots from ATI owners are awful. Seriously, how did id screw this up that badly?For what it's worth, I don't have any of those extreme problems either running 11.10. Just the artifacting / white flashes and one crash with beta drivers.

It might also be safe to start yelling at ATI now. Their driver team has been terrible this year. I would definitely buy Nvidia if I had to make a choice tomorrow.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:55 AM

Oh, but we do. You have 220. WarrenM is second with 60.

(Click on the number of posts in the Replies column when viewing the subforum.)

Oh cool. Do you know what i am going to do know?

Look up the number of posts in the arma 2 thread! :D

edit:

Naeblis 540
Tim James 144
datter 129
Stridergg 99

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 07:59 AM

Last review i link to, The Guardian 4/5 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/oct/04/rage-game-review-xbox-ps3-pc)

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 08:02 AM

It might also be safe to start yelling at ATI now. Their driver team has been terrible this year. I would definitely buy Nvidia if I had to make a choice tomorrow.

I just bought a 6950. Definitely a little irritated about it at the moment, though I've otherwise been very happy with it. It does seem like Nvidia is less prone to these types of problems, though.

Rachel Brown

10-04-2011, 08:04 AM

The streaming is really noticeable. If you turn your head any faster than casually, you will see a blurry mess for a second. It's weird. The environments are fucking stunning though. My screen shot key is going to break before I'm done.

I'm only skimming the thread as I have no interest in this game, but don't you mean your screenshot button? X or Y or the "paddle", etc..? You're a consoler, right? Are you playing this on PC?

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 08:06 AM

Well, i remember he was the first one in preloading the game, that indicates Steam, so i suppose he bought it for pc.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 08:10 AM

Yes, playing on PC using the Steam screenshot feature.

pyjamarama

10-04-2011, 08:12 AM

Yep. Nobody got to review the PC version pre-release. Hmm, I wonder why?

PC Gamer did (http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/04/rage-review/)

But is was made on the review event with a ID provided PC (http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/04/rage-pc-players-experiencing-laggy-textures-and-low-framerates/)

The texture pop in is a limitation of the engine Carmack himself told that a way to break the engine is to spin around really fast in same place, but it should go unnoticed during normal gameplay if you don't try to break it on purpose. Of course on the PC there are bugs that make it obvious on normal gameplay, and I would guess that on console anyone running the games from disc will also notice it more.

James Johnson

10-04-2011, 08:14 AM

Sounds like absolute garbage, which is sad but unsurprising. Absolutely no coverage of a big name game means it will suck in this day and age.

Teiman

10-04-2011, 08:18 AM

The texture pop in is a limitation of the engine Carmack himself told that a way to break the engine is to spin around really fast in same place, but it should go unnoticed during normal gameplay if you don't try to break it on purpose. Of course on the PC there are bugs that make it obvious on normal gameplay, and I would guess that on console anyone running the games from disc will also notice it more.

I wonder what will do the engine if you change the FOV to see 360º degrees on the screen. Forcing the game to load all the textures that a player with fish eyes can see. Then take a section from that 360 view, and use it to render on the screen. Efectivelly rendering more than it needs, but completelly solving the problem of texture popup based on player direction.

Can anyone here make a experiment? run the game and add a new cvar in console g_fov 290 or something. Make a screenshot.

Games like this one need a Demo, so people can see if the game runs on his hardware.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 08:19 AM

Sounds like absolute garbage, which is sad but unsurprising. Absolutely no coverage of a big name game means it will suck in this day and age.

Oh, but they gave tons of coverage, previews and videos.

It's the pc version which didn't have coverage.

The problem is, in this age of multi-platform videogames, most of sites doesn't make any distinctions. I have seen bad or inaccurate previews/reviews in good sites like Eurogamer, for example using one common review for the three versions, even if they truly played one (ignoring then how some problems of the console version doesn't exist in the pc version, or in this case the other way around).

Tim James

10-04-2011, 08:31 AM

The texture pop in is a limitation of the engine Carmack himself told that a way to break the engine is to spin around really fast in same place, but it should go unnoticed during normal gameplay if you don't try to break it on purpose. Of course on the PC there are bugs that make it obvious on normal gameplay, and I would guess that on console anyone running the games from disc will also notice it more.I think it's more than just "bugs" on PC. My working theory is the people who say "it's fine" still notice it but it's acceptable to them personally. I'm actually close to that point with the latest ATI drivers, especially indoors. However I believe this statement is too strong: "it should go unnoticed during normal gameplay if you don't try to break it on purpose."

Can anyone here make a experiment? run the game and add a new cvar in console g_fov 290 or something.No one has figured out how to change FOV at this time.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 08:31 AM

By the way, here is what you need to set as the launch property in Steam to get the console.

+set com_allowConsole 1

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 08:32 AM

FOV tweak: (http://segmentnext.com/2011/10/04/rage-crashes-textures-fix-fov-fps-freezes-errors-and-graphics-fixes/) ;)

3# How To Change FOV in Rage
You can either change FOV to your liking through developer console or by editing your default CFG or you can add the command in your launch options. If you choose to do so through dev console, it will disable achievements. Using developer console disables achievements so use it in absolute necessity.

If you want to change the FOV through console, bring it up in-game, and use cvaradd command to change the g_fov variable. You can add or subtract fov values from the default 80. For example, cvaradd g_fov 15 will result in g_fov 95 since you added 15. Similarly, cvaradd g_fov -15 will subtract 15 from default 80 value and the resulting g_fov will be 65. I hope you got the point.

If you don’t want to mess up your achievements, you can add these values in your default config file, which is located here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\rage\base Or you can add these values in your launch options.

From Steam forums, it's more clear imo:

Right, I figured out how to adjust the FOV.

First you'll need to enable the console by adding +set com_allowconsole 1 to your launch options

Then, inside the game, bring down the console, and use the cvaradd command to modify the g_fov variable.

Example: (g_fov defaults to 80, we are going to modify this)

cvaradd g_fov 15 (this results in 80 + 15 = g_fov 95)

example 2:

cvaradd g_fov -15 (this results in 80 - 15 = g_fov 65)

Zylon

10-04-2011, 08:34 AM

Whenever a developer goes on about how their special snowflake game requires the latest bleeding-edge drivers to run correctly, I always wonder how they managed to develop it in the first place.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 08:34 AM

That's good news about the FOV. When I last checked, people said the g_fov cvar didn't work.

stusser

10-04-2011, 08:35 AM

Note that if you enable the console even one time you lose achievements for that entire savegame. So if you care about that sort of thing, finish the single-player first.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 08:35 AM

That's good news about the FOV. When I last checked, people said the g_fov cvar didn't work.

It would make sense, because that would explain why the current method is using the "cvaradd" to modify it.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 08:55 AM

http://www.rage3d.com/index.php?cat=75#newsid33982297

@CatalystCreator: All - don't use the current Rage performance driver - package includes very old OGL files, that's why you're seeing corruption etc.

@CatalystCreator: New Rage driver with proper OGL component will be posted later today

Lol, releasing a specific driver for a new OpenGL game and they botch up the Opengl part??
Basic testing before releasing stuff to the public, HOW DOES IT WORKS?

Tim James

10-04-2011, 08:59 AM

This is OpenGL? I didn't think so at first due to the double buffering problem. ATI lets you force triple buffering for OpenGL games and I have that enabled. The problem went away eventually so I guess that makes sense. I'm just not sure what caused the sudden transition. Probably some 1:30 AM delirium.

I'm looking forward to the new version.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 09:00 AM

That kind of driver jackassery is why I never update until I absolutely have to.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 09:01 AM

OpenGL, confirmed by John Carmack time ago. ;)

But being serious, this level of unprofessionalism will make me focus a bit more on the nvidia side next time i check out video cards. The hardware is good in the dollar/fps ratio, but if in the end that hardware is used by a irregular driver team...

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 09:03 AM

Are you sure? XBox isn't OpenGL and when I started it up on my PC, it went through the DirectX installation routine.

pyjamarama

10-04-2011, 09:03 AM

I wonder what will do the engine if you change the FOV to see 360º degrees on the screen. Forcing the game to load all the textures that a player with fish eyes can see. Then take a section from that 360 view, and use it to render on the screen. Efectivelly rendering more than it needs, but completelly solving the problem of texture popup based on player direction.

I wonder if they are taking full advantage of available memory, there should be no need of setting the FOV to 360º, the memory cashing should do automatically. Also do people that are playing on a SSD notice the popin?

Tim James

10-04-2011, 09:05 AM

Also do people that are playing on a SSD notice the popin?Yes. It's kinda sorta "acceptable" most of the time though.

Paul_cze

10-04-2011, 09:05 AM

Whenever a developer goes on about how their special snowflake game requires the latest bleeding-edge drivers to run correctly, I always wonder how they managed to develop it in the first place.

Exactly! How is that possible? I mean we have seen really polished looking gameplay in engine stuff what, four years ago? How is it possible that game gets released after 6 years of development, and STILL NEEDS NEW SPECIAL MADE CUSTOM TAILORED DRIVERS?!?! (and even those do not work correctly!!)

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 09:05 AM

Some reviews have complained about the lack of mouse look while riding in vehicles and it annoyed me too ... with this texture streaming horror show going on, I think I now realize why you can't do that.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 09:10 AM

Exactly! How is that possible? I mean we have seen really polished looking gameplay in engine stuff what, four years ago? How is it possible that game gets released after 6 years of development, and STILL NEEDS NEW SPECIAL MADE CUSTOM TAILORED DRIVERS?!?! (and even those do not work correctly!!)Here is the answer:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/11/id-softwares-john-carmack-picks-a-side-in-the-nvidiaamd-gpu-war/

John Carmack: Let me caution this by saying that this is not necessarily a benchmarked result. We’ve had closer relationships with Nvidia over the years, and my systems have had Nvidia cards in them for generations. We have more personal ties with Nvidia. As I understand it, ATI/AMD cards are winning a lot of the benchmarks right now for when you straight-out make synthetic benchmarks for things like that, but our games do get more hands-on polish time on the Nvidia side of things.

Nvidia does have a stronger dev-relations team. I can always drop an email for an obscure question. So its more of a socio-cultural decision there rather than a raw “Which hardware is better.” Although that does feed back into it, when you’ve got the dev-relation team that is deeply intertwined with the development studio. That tends to make your hardware, in some cases, come out better than what it truly is, because it’s got more of the software side behind it.

My guess is older versions of Catalyst work "okay" but don't have the performance improvements ATI wanted to release day one. By that I mean the 10-15% improvement you always see within a month or two of release. The problem is they accidentally put some old libraries in there that cause glitches. This is present in the 11.9 full release drivers that supposedly went through QA, so it was probably human error dating back a few months. That's why some ATI users can play it reasonably well with old drivers.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 09:10 AM

Are you sure? XBox isn't OpenGL and when I started it up on my PC, it went through the DirectX installation routine.

I am sure.

Xbox 360 uses direct3d, true, ps3 uses OpenGl (or some kind of subset or trunk version).

Because of that, i also had interest in knowing what of the two apis would use the pc version, as you say the game could use direct3d like in the 360. But he confirmed they are still using OpenGL.

Every game uses DirectX, for things like Direct Input, Direct Audio, etc, it's more than the graphics part.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 09:12 AM

OK. Yeah, I figured it was for something else then ... input or what-have-you.

cliffski

10-04-2011, 09:24 AM

Whenever a developer goes on about how their special snowflake game requires the latest bleeding-edge drivers to run correctly, I always wonder how they managed to develop it in the first place.

quoted for extreme truthiness.

Plus, what planet are they on? I have several games installed. I don't want to reinstall drivers every time I decide to play a different game. Get a grip!

It's like making a car that doesn't run well on tarmac, and blaming the guys building the roads. The public drivers are the public drivers. Deal with it.
RANT RANT!

Teiman

10-04-2011, 09:29 AM

I like to read game engines code***, so I have some idea about this point.

A ~5% of a game engine seems OS dependant. Input things, some I/O stuff (including networks), but nothing mayor.

A 90% of a game engine do managerial stuff, like loading textures and levels from disc, preparing the next frame, mantaining a server status and updating the client status, ... this include a lot of render stuff.

Another ~5% of a game engine is dependant on the API and the hardware. The code dependant on the hardware can be very small, but I have see things like renderStuffNVidia() and renderStuffATI(); with blocks of code like this:

if (isNvidia->value) {
renderStuffNVidia();
} else {
renderStuffATI();
}

...different codepaths, depending on what graphic card family the user have.

You can have a bug in renderStuffNVidia(); and the code on renderStuffATI(); be bug free.

What I normally see is something like this:

if (isNvidia->value) {
renderStuffNVidia();
} else {
//CURSES!!, hope these ATI dudes die in a fire. glCopyTexImage2D is broken in ATI drivers
renderStuffATI();
}

And thats why I have a nvidia card. Game programmers seems to find problems with ATI drivers, really HEAVY stuff like simple and important API functions that don't work at all.

*** Don't look at me like that!, other people read worse things.

**** YMMV. Depending on the game engine, probably that 5/90/5 is different. I can imagine game engines made for windows may have DirectX calls everywhere, so maybe is more 5/30/65. Also ATI could get better, and nVidia worse. Bugs can be a indication how are bugs just now "ATI users may suffer glitch X, Y and Z" can be a indication at the moment ATI is bad.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 09:29 AM

Tim James

10-04-2011, 09:32 AM

Blame Carmack only for regurgitating the common refrain to update your drivers. Here (I'm still guessing) it was a trap because of the broken libraries.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 09:40 AM

From Gaf:

-Ahh another GAF thread about a new game consisting of almost no impressions/gameplay discussion, with 90% of the posts about tweaking PC settings/complaining about the PC version!
-It's an FPS with some minigames, what kind of discussion are you expecting?

I am going to use this point to discuss something i wanted to talk from some time ago. I hate hate hate this kind of attitude. "It's a FPS, you go killing people with a weapon in a corner, what's left to discuss?"

Well, let's think what to discuss in a FPS: Weapon variety, enemy variety, gameplay variations on different levels, AI type and quality, weapon feeling and sounds, animations, interactivity with the scenario, pace, quantity of combat in contrast with more peaceful or (tense but without combat) moments, exploration aspect, items or power usage (grenades, health items, gadgets), difficulty (both how difficult it is and how it scales), health system, allied AI if exists, other stuff (puzzles? secrets? annoying escort missions?)

In lots of reviews about fps games i find the same attitude, the actual details of how it's the action itself is incredibly lacking, they may write a line praising or condemning the AI, the may say one generic line saying the guns feel right, and that's it. The action moments can be the 90% of the length of the reviewed game, and they write three lines about it.

Foxstab

10-04-2011, 09:42 AM

No one held back when they deliberated how bad DNF was as a shooter.

stusser

10-04-2011, 09:46 AM

For me, 90% of the length of RAGE has been bitching about it on these forums here.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 09:50 AM

Naeblis, that's what bothered me about the Ars Technica article. He talked about the game in terms of how he thinks a modern game should be made, with interactive characters and an open world. But I don't care if I need to keep pressing E to continue a conversation. I do care about the graphics and shooting. Instead all he said were empty statements like "the graphics are awesome" and "the weapons feel weak."

Granted it wasn't a full review. For a good one, see the Edge article.

farfrael

10-04-2011, 09:53 AM

1) total bullshit or 2) somebody did a terrible job on the engine or 3) both.

Yes, John Carmack is known for both of those things so I think you're on to something here...

http://thenextbarstool.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/wtf.jpg

Hey WarrenM ... looks like this was a brilliant decision after all. Or, you know, maybe your Saviour missed a step here.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 09:55 AM

@Tim
Oh, i don't like Ars reviews (though i love the science content) since two or three years ago. I can't remember what games were, but the reviewer had an opinion diametrically opposite of mine in two game reviews. "Nice" to see me and the reviewer are still at odds, i suppose!

And a weird fix, here (http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1236544-texture-cache-folder-fix/), there is a couple of people that say it improved their framerate.

Teiman

10-04-2011, 09:57 AM

In lots of reviews about fps games i find the same attitude, the actual details of how it's the action itself is incredibly lacking, they may write a line praising or condemning the AI, the may say one generic line saying the guns feel right, and that's it. The action moments can be the 90% of the length of the reviewed game, and they write three lines about it.

FPS games are about angry people with a magic wand. Aiming this magic want to evildoers and pressing a button remove that evil people.

The subtext is that people want to remove evil from the world, but more important: want to do it withouth any personal effort.

Next time you want to read a fun review, add the word "subtext" to a google search. As in "Gears of War 3 review subtext". I guarantee you will find funny reviews. Any review with the word "subtext" is going to get you, and move you around a crazy idea world before returning you back to reality (or start one way ride to the infinite).

Jason Becker

10-04-2011, 09:57 AM

Well, id writes bleeding edge graphics code. It doesn't seem too far a stretch to think they might be working closely with the major card manufacturers to tune the drivers to their tech. Hell, id has been doing this since the original GLQuake!

No, it because Carmack still is latched onto frickin OpenGL. Seriously Direct3D has won. It won out years ago. Are there any major releases that still use OpenGl besides id? Give it up Carmack and just switch already.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 10:00 AM

I think John Carmack maybe went a bit too much into a esoteric technological solution. No other videogame uses up anything like MT, small or big, and they do mostly fine.

Foxstab

10-04-2011, 10:00 AM

FPS games are about angry people with a magic wand. Aiming this magic want to evildoers and pressing a button remove that evil people.

Man, that game was so awesome.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2009/05/gam_heretic_580.jpg

Teiman

10-04-2011, 10:14 AM

No, it because Carmack still is latched onto frickin OpenGL. Seriously Direct3D has won. It won out years ago. Are there any major releases that still use OpenGl besides id? Give it up Carmack and just switch already.

OpenGL have win the medal for the winner graphic standard, and Direct3D have win the medal for the favorite API to make games in Windows. These are two different races. OpenGL and Direct3D can't directly compete, because are apples and oranges.
OpenGL is a standard, and Direct3D are a bunch of dll files that microsoft host in http://207.46.131.43 or something.

stusser

10-04-2011, 10:19 AM

OpenGL have win the medal for the winner graphic standard, and Direct3D have win the medal for the favorite API to make games in Windows. These are two different races. OpenGL and Direct3D can't directly compete, because are apples and oranges.
OpenGL is a standard, and Direct3D are a bunch of dll files that microsoft host in http://207.46.131.43 or something.
The lyrics are great, but I really have to hear the melody to fully appreciate your work. Could you put something together and drop it on youtube? I'm thinking a minor key, light strings accompaniment, maybe a harpsichord.

Sarkus

10-04-2011, 10:26 AM

Oh, and that driver he links is the one I posted last night. It doesn't have any effect. The beta 11.10 made the game playable for me with vsync (although that might've been coincidence) but it may cause instability.

So I assume that means you forced VSync through the CCC. What setting did you use? What other things are you forcing, or is everything else at the discretion of the game? I asked about this late last night but got not response. My experience was I saw some imrovement messing with forcing stuff through CCC after updating to 11.10, but I also had a crash.

Not for me. I see the pop-in, but it's super-fast like NVIDIA or 360 owners. 6870 1GB.

Apparently, I'm the outlier for ATI owners on Rage. Most ATI people are seeing horrendous tech issues.

What driver are you using and what are you forcing, if anything, through the CCC?

I wouldn't call the game playable for me right now. Some tearing, some artifacting, and even some lighting issues (most of the textures go black when I walk from outside into the garage in the first base and it takes a few seconds for the textures to update.) I'd rather get that stuff out of the way first and then see about the texture pop up later.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 10:27 AM

Hey WarrenM ... looks like this was a brilliant decision after all. Or, you know, maybe your Saviour missed a step here.
Fair enough. I had too much faith, apparently. Sorry for being rude before, it appears that Carmack did indeed screw the pooch on this one.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 10:29 AM

What driver are you using and what are you forcing, if anything, through the CCC?

I'll have to check the driver version when I get home. I know it's an older one. 10.x at least.

I force nothing through the CCC.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 10:30 AM

What driver are you using and what are you forcing, if anything, through the CCC?

In other forum i have read a comment saying the 11.9 was bad, the 11.10 beta from yesterday was bad, but the 11.8 (past month?) version was good for the game.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 10:30 AM

So I assume that means you forced VSync through the CCC. What setting did you use? What other things are you forcing, or is everything else at the discretion of the game? I asked about this late last night but got not response. My experience was I saw some imrovement messing with forcing stuff through CCC after updating to 11.10, but I also had a crash.I force vsync to always on and OpenGL triple buffering. I think I have textures to max quality because there's no default option. Everything else is application preference.

At this point, just wait for the new build today.

Sarkus

10-04-2011, 10:40 AM

In other forum i have read a comment saying the 11.9 was bad, the 11.10 beta from yesterday was bad, but the 11.8 (past month?) version was good for the game.

I started with 11.8 last night but updated because the texture pop in was so noticeable. I've been running 11.10 since, but it may have made things worse - hard to say. Artifacts certainly seem worse.

I'm interested about the forced stuff through CCC since I generally leave that to the applications discretion. But since Rage doesn't let you play with those details its hard to see what impacts what as far as AA and so on.

Zylon

10-04-2011, 10:51 AM

Naeblis, that's what bothered me about the Ars Technica article. He talked about the game in terms of how he thinks a modern game should be made, with interactive characters and an open world. But I don't care if I need to keep pressing E to continue a conversation.
The vibe I got from that interview was that Rage has a lot of technical hooks in it that could have supported a much deeper game than what Id ended up making-- An open world that closes up behind you. Poorly presented but thou must (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButThouMust) quests. Interactive conversations where the only thing you can say is "...".

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 10:56 AM

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 10:57 AM

The vibe I got from that interview was that Rage has a lot of technical hooks in it that could have supported a much deeper game than what Id ended up making-- An open world that closes up behind you. Poorly presented but thou must (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButThouMust) quests. Interactive conversations where the only thing you can say is "...".

Well, every engine support "deeper games", you can make a very deep game with a 10 years old engine. That's more a design issue, the chose to make straightforward action games.

HRose

10-04-2011, 11:01 AM

I think John Carmack maybe went a bit too much into a esoteric technological solution. No other videogame uses up anything like MT, small or big, and they do mostly fine.

See, the point is. He used to open paths, now he mostly explores dead ends.

But the difference between a new path and a dead end is not in itself. It is in the fact that Carmack's stuff used to impose itself out of its own power.

Nowadays it just fails to impress.

MattKeil

10-04-2011, 11:01 AM

That's an odd complaint. There is a quicksave.

Not in consoles. And even more, in consoles they are very accustomed to use checkpoints systems, that's why the fact they have to enter in the menu and choose "save" (which imo is nothing important) is being a negative point in lots of reviews.

Remember, all the reviews were from the console version.

And the console version has an autosave checkpoint feature. The autosave updates every time you enter a new location. Between that and the manual save saving your exact location (that is, it doesn't just dump you at the location entrance with saved stats when you load a save), I have no idea what the complaints about the saving on the console version are about. It's fine.

Chris Nahr

10-04-2011, 11:01 AM

As I read the critical reviews the thing is that Rage is not actually streamlined at all -- it encumbers the players with mandatory dialog and quests and inventory management but does nothing interesting with it. But I don't have the game, so I'm just interpreting those reviews.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 11:06 AM

See, the point is. He used to open paths, now he mostly explores dead ends.

But the difference between a new path and a dead end is not in itself. It is in the fact that Carmack's stuff used to impose itself out of its own power.

Nowadays it just fails to impress.

I think it's the other way around. He is going too forward with his engines.

They are deep technical reasons that explain why the MT method is a very good idea, it actually solves in a elegant manner some pesky problems in rendering. But maybe it's an idea a bit too futuristic, an idea suited more in the hardware we will have in some years, with faster and bigger storage systems and ram memory.

Doom 3 was the same, real unified lightning system is a very good idea (tm), but he went a bit too early to use it. Pc hardware from that time couldn't cope with it, so in the end they use very few light sources in the game to have a decent framerate. That's why (at least, in part) it was so dark.

HCode

10-04-2011, 11:10 AM

This is present in the 11.9 full release drivers that supposedly went through QA, so it was probably human error dating back a few months.

That. ATI/AMD have seriously dropped the ball here. id games used to be the single reason why people even bought new gfx cards and ATI have not managed to create a good enough relationship with them so that a catastrophe like this one doesn't happen? Have ATI given up or something?

Teiman

10-04-2011, 11:11 AM

Doom 3 was the same, real unified lightning system is a very good idea (tm), but he went a bit too early to use it. Pc hardware from that time couldn't cope with it, so in the end they use very few light sources in the game to have a decent framerate. That's why (at least, in part) it was so dark.

He could have used a higer ambient light. There was not need to turn Doom3 into a tech demo of the technology. Anyway I like Doom3, It was fun to me (Except parts of the end that where a bit samey).

stusser

10-04-2011, 11:24 AM

DOOM3 had much higher resolution close-up textures than "megatexture" RAGE with its broke-ass LoD. Half-life2 blows it away too. You can read the signs.

My cellphone could probably play HL2.

Royal Fool

10-04-2011, 11:25 AM

I think John Carmack maybe went a bit too much into a esoteric technological solution. No other videogame uses up anything like MT, small or big, and they do mostly fine.

It was a big gamble - the engine was designed in anticipation of future technology. They spent a lot of time making the tools user-friendly and presenting it to/courting potential licensees, and then Bethesda bought the company and announced that the engine would never, ever be available for licensing.

I wonder if the critical response will make Bethesda rethink their position. How long until Unreal Engine 4 arrives? They've talked about having a competitive edge with this tech, but don't they want in on some of the money that Epic is making?

Foxstab

10-04-2011, 11:25 AM

So, I have to ask, why are ID even making games?
Their design-brains left long ago, it was quite obvious in the uninspired chain of games they released last.
If Carmack wants/needs to brandish his engine, he should just create an amazing tech demo, like the old demosceners did, and that's it.
Afterall, ID lives off of selling engine license (does anyone buy, BTW? seems Unreal is the common-spread one) not out of selling games.

It was a big gamble - the engine was designed in anticipation of future technology. They spent a lot of time making the tools user-friendly and presenting it to/courting potential licensees, and then Bethesda bought the company and announced that the engine would never, ever be available for licensing.

So much for the Id principle of marketing off engine licenses or making the engine available as open source.

In an interview with Kotaku, id co-founder John Carmack, id CEO Todd Hollenshead and ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman said the purchase will change none of the principles or principals of id and Bethesda but will allow id to grow like it never has before.
Oh, well, you know, we're CEOs, it's all talk and jokes! We never actually mean any of it.

IkeVandergraaf

10-04-2011, 11:26 AM

So... Anyone get it on the 360? How's the, you know, game?

MattKeil

10-04-2011, 11:36 AM

So... Anyone get it on the 360? How's the, you know, game?

- Shooting and enemy behavior is astoundingly good. Beyond just about anything else I've played. Repeating sections doesn't feel like repetition due to the variety in enemy tactics. Surprises me fairly regularly. I'm playing on Hard and it feels just about right.

- Driving is smooth and not annoying. Races are pretty easy, with a nice feeling of Mario Kart to them. Once you upgrade your car, some impressive maneuvers are possible.

- The 360 version is like silk. Also, if you have motion smoothing on your TV, turn it on and it will look even better. First game I've played that works well in conjunction with that normally useless feature.

- The RPG elements are pretty much non-existent. The quest giving routine is just a way to break up the objectives in a fairly linear shooter.

- Lots of location re-use. Not too big a deal given how good the shooting is, but all the same, expect to go to each "dungeon" area at least twice.

- The game just stops at the end. Seriously, might be the worst ending in modern games. No boss fight, no story resolution, no nothing. Just stops. In fact, the final 30% is pretty sketchy overall, and doesn't feel as fleshed out and full-featured as the first half of the game.

- The world makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. People scrounge for food and medical supplies but apparently petroleum products are quite plentiful given the constant driving and demolition derbies. Running water is a constant struggle but one guy can run a TV station (with no visible source of revenue, yet he's rolling in cash to give away) and you can hand-build self-guiding projectiles with built-in CPUs. Basically no logical thought was put into the setting at all, and it's just a collection of "oh, this would be cool" without any attempt to make it come together coherently.

Basically, go in wanting and expecting amazing shooting mechanics with some amusing minigames and a moderately enjoyable driving engine, and you'll be good. Go in expecting Fallout as an action game and you're not going to be getting what you're after.

HCode

10-04-2011, 11:36 AM

Afterall, ID lives off of selling engine license (does anyone buy, BTW? seems Unreal is the common-spread one) not out of selling games.

They have mostly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_4#List) given up selling the engine to anyone except their closely associated developer-friends (who then create somewhat shabby Wolfenstein or Quake derivative products). Not really a surprise, as developing Rage took almost as long as the 360/PS3 exist.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 11:37 AM

So... Anyone get it on the 360? How's the, you know, game?

The game?? We don't talk about the damn games around these parts, pal! :P

Sarkus

10-04-2011, 11:41 AM

So... Anyone get it on the 360? How's the, you know, game?

Hey, this is the "bitch about the PC version" thread! ;-)

Actually, someone did post about it several pages ago and seemed pretty happy with the game. As long as you understand its a pretty linear shooter, anyway, you should be happy.

lordkosc

10-04-2011, 11:43 AM

The real question is , how does the game look on 360, streaming directly from the disk.

:p

Tim James

10-04-2011, 11:48 AM

Paul_cze

10-04-2011, 11:48 AM

25 minutes of the pc version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7QiCWPYXJg&feature=player_embedded

I can barely see any texture streaming, i suppose it's more noticeable playing it in your computer. I wonder what are his specs?

Watching this (not all, I skipped intro etc) made me realize for 23rd time (roughly) how much I HATE silent protagonist. Dammit.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 11:52 AM

I skipped the intro too until I loaded the game up. It's good. I agree the game won't even get close to the emotional impact, just like Dead Island as mentioned before. But isn't this the first post-apocalyspe game to actually address the event in a meaningful way? It seems like other games waste that opportunity.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 12:00 PM

Sarkus

10-04-2011, 12:04 PM

No one's mentioned the Anarchy Edition DLC yet. The double barrel shotgun appears magically in your inventory at the start, but you might not notice it until you run out of pistol ammo. Pre-order DLC, ladies and gentlemen! Anyway, it's bound to some stupid key like 9 or 0, so use your scroll wheel. It doesn't quite capture the magic of the Doom 2 version but whatever.

I'm not sure about the other junk yet.

Someone said that it actually doesn't show up until you get the pistol from Hagar. Along with the shotgun your gloves automatically upgrade to having spikes on them at the same time, which is another preorder item. Not sure where you get the armor.

I rolled back to 11.8 drivers and all the issues I had went away except the texture pop-in, so at least its playable now. No more screen tearing, no more artifacts, nothing. I do have CCC set to force triple buffering and VSynic, though.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:06 PM

Another preorder bonus is a special suit, you can choose it when you can pick up between three suits, each one with a special bonus (barter better price, better engineering items, better armor) later in the game. It seems it's a kind of "cheat-y" preorder item, like the 10.000 extra money in Deus Ex, because it gives you the three bonus at the same time.

lordkosc

10-04-2011, 12:07 PM

Is it possible to remap keys ?

HCode

10-04-2011, 12:12 PM

http://i.imgur.com/gJavW.jpg

D0med.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:13 PM

Another World!

Tim James

10-04-2011, 12:18 PM

For those playing along at home, the PC version looks awesome standing still unless you're dealing with a driver bug. I don't think anyone here has that problem.

The real comparison we need is someone using a 360 controller to spin around in both the X360 and PC versions. If they look the same, then the engine was only designed to handle the maximum turn rate of a controller without distracting texture pop-in.

farfrael

10-04-2011, 12:20 PM

Fair enough. I had too much faith, apparently. Sorry for being rude before, it appears that Carmack did indeed screw the pooch on this one.

To be fair, it does appear to work just fine on consoles (which is quite a technical achievement) and the problems do appear to be mainly related to PC.

Which does beg the question of whether id should have just decided not to release on PC (since the engine is by design optimised to work with consoles).

I was planning to buy the game on release on Friday (UK release) for PC but our US cousins kindly beta tested it and I think I'll just pass for now.

Teiman

10-04-2011, 12:24 PM

25 minutes of the pc version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7QiCWPYXJg&feature=player_embedded

I can barely see any texture streaming, i suppose it's more noticeable playing it in your computer. I wonder what are his specs?

W. T. F.

F2 to select grenades, then Q to launch.

:-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

DennyA

10-04-2011, 12:31 PM

- Shooting and enemy behavior is astoundingly good. Beyond just about anything else I've played. Repeating sections doesn't feel like repetition due to the variety in enemy tactics. Surprises me fairly regularly. I'm playing on Hard and it feels just about right.

- Driving is smooth and not annoying. Races are pretty easy, with a nice feeling of Mario Kart to them. Once you upgrade your car, some impressive maneuvers are possible.

- The 360 version is like silk. Also, if you have motion smoothing on your TV, turn it on and it will look even better. First game I've played that works well in conjunction with that normally useless feature.

- The RPG elements are pretty much non-existent. The quest giving routine is just a way to break up the objectives in a fairly linear shooter.

- Lots of location re-use. Not too big a deal given how good the shooting is, but all the same, expect to go to each "dungeon" area at least twice.

- The game just stops at the end. Seriously, might be the worst ending in modern games. No boss fight, no story resolution, no nothing. Just stops. In fact, the final 30% is pretty sketchy overall, and doesn't feel as fleshed out and full-featured as the first half of the game.

- The world makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. People scrounge for food and medical supplies but apparently petroleum products are quite plentiful given the constant driving and demolition derbies. Running water is a constant struggle but one guy can run a TV station (with no visible source of revenue, yet he's rolling in cash to give away) and you can hand-build self-guiding projectiles with built-in CPUs. Basically no logical thought was put into the setting at all, and it's just a collection of "oh, this would be cool" without any attempt to make it come together coherently.

Basically, go in wanting and expecting amazing shooting mechanics with some amusing minigames and a moderately enjoyable driving engine, and you'll be good. Go in expecting Fallout as an action game and you're not going to be getting what you're after.

Matt nails it. (Well, I haven't finished yet, so I haven't seen the disappointing ending.)

I'll also add, though, that the engine is the best-looking I've seen on a console. It's a shame about the desert palette, because as far as texture and object detail, visual variety, and consistent frame rate, it sets new standards for a 360 game. It'd be interesting to see how the engine would hold up up in a more verdant environment.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:38 PM

- The RPG elements are pretty much non-existent. The quest giving routine is just a way to break up the objectives in a fairly linear shooter.

I think the bigger RPG element here is you taking loot in the fps levels, selling it, and with the money buying new weapons, new upgrades, new car parts, new ammo, engineering items (and building a few yourself), etc. In other words, just a good ol' id fps with a buying/selling mechanic.

RepoMan

10-04-2011, 12:46 PM

Afterall, ID lives off of selling engine license (does anyone buy, BTW? seems Unreal is the common-spread one) not out of selling games.

Once again Foxstab, you win the Yipping Underinformed Pomeranian (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=2875254#post2875254) forum award.

id has not lived off of licensing since they were bought by Bethesda over a year ago (and probably a while before that). Now, id does indeed now live solely off of selling games.

Try to keep up, man.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 12:48 PM

Once again Foxstab, you win the Yipping Underinformed Pomeranian (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=2875254#post2875254) forum award.

id has not lived off of licensing since they were bought by Bethesda over a year ago (and probably a while before that). Now, id does indeed now live solely off of selling games.

Try to keep up, man.

Really, they never lived off from their engines, it's just a myth from people that don't like their games.
From their last 5 engines (from doom to doom 3), only one was licensed a good amount: the quake 3 engine.

Fugazie

10-04-2011, 12:49 PM

-

- The game just stops at the end. Seriously, might be the worst ending in modern games. No boss fight, no story resolution, no nothing. Just stops.

Sounds like how Hard Reset ends.

cliffski

10-04-2011, 12:50 PM

For those playing along at home, the PC version looks awesome standing still

SOLD!!!!!

Teiman

10-04-2011, 12:50 PM

Once again Foxstab, you win the Yipping Underinformed Pomeranian (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=2875254#post2875254) forum award.

I have need to google what is "yipping pomeranian", and I have found this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6bmx30CqRQ

Zylon

10-04-2011, 12:52 PM

What I don't get is why the engine seems to be deliberately not caching anything except what's currently on the screen. Modern PC have gigs of RAM... why isn't Rage using it?

Okay, I also don't get why there are 50s-style soda machines when the big rock hit Earth in the 2020s. I suppose the artists could be forgiven for forgetting which game they were working on.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 12:59 PM

It's a shame about the desert palette...Is this actually true, or are you just being a hipster? Because even though I've never been, I've heard the desert is beautiful. I wasn't kidding when I said the brown rocks in the side of the cliff look better, more interesting, and more distinctive than anything in a lot of modern games right now.

I haven't played much yet though. Maybe I'll get sick of it.

madkevin

10-04-2011, 01:20 PM

I wasn't kidding when I said the brown rocks in the side of the cliff look better, more interesting, and more distinctive than anything in a lot of modern games right now.

Somewhere, Dave Long sheds a single tear.

peacedog

10-04-2011, 01:22 PM

What I don't get is why the engine seems to be deliberately not caching anything except what's currently on the screen. Modern PC have gigs of RAM... why isn't Rage using it?

Is it because console's *don't* have gigs of RAM? I honestly don't know.

RobotPants

10-04-2011, 01:32 PM

I thought the reasoning behind it was that the textures that are being displayed on screen are so much larger than normal.

KevinC

10-04-2011, 01:33 PM

Is this actually true, or are you just being a hipster? Because even though I've never been, I've heard the desert is beautiful. I wasn't kidding when I said the brown rocks in the side of the cliff look better, more interesting, and more distinctive than anything in a lot of modern games right now.

I haven't played much yet though. Maybe I'll get sick of it.

Speaking as a desert rat, they certainly are. A lot of games don't do them particularly well but maybe it's just hard to capture it in a video game.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 02:09 PM

ATI/AMD users, link to the new drivers, people say it works!
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=351811

"Went from low framerate, flickering hud elements, and unplayable levels of pop-in to rock-solid framerate, no flickering, and entirely pleasant levels of pop-in.

Post driver-update, the pop-in is comparable to what we saw in that giantbomb quicklook, so slight blurriness at the edge of vision when rotating. "

JoshV

10-04-2011, 02:23 PM

I skimmed the 25 minute playthrough, but the world seemed very static and non interactive. I expected to see more results from bullet impacts, like small items moving about, etc. Is it just because he's only shooting the pistol, what are the impressions from people who've gotten a chance to play it?

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 02:29 PM

ATI/AMD users, link to the new drivers, people say it works!

Just to minimize confusion since there was a bad driver release, here is a link directly to ATI's page with the absolute latest RAGE driver, posted only a few minutes ago as I type this:

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU121AMDCatRagePerfDriver.aspx

Tim James

10-04-2011, 02:32 PM

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 02:40 PM

The new driver definitely yielded a huge performance increase for me.

TurinTur

10-04-2011, 02:44 PM

Just to minimize confusion since there was a bad driver release, here is a link directly to ATI's page with the absolute latest RAGE driver, posted only a few minutes ago as I type this:

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU121AMDCatRagePerfDriver.aspx

Well, both pages link to the same url:
http://www2.ati.com/Drivers/hotfix/amd_catalyst_rage_performance_driver.exe ;)

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 02:55 PM

Ahh, so they do.

After playing for about 20 minutes, I'm a super happy camper now. It runs and looks great.

RepoMan

10-04-2011, 02:57 PM

Yay we can take Carmack off the whipping post now!

Tim James

10-04-2011, 02:57 PM

Awesome. I'm too impatient to find out for myself, so I have to ask: are you forcing vsync or not? Seems to me if it's running fast enough it shouldn't need it.

Ninyu

10-04-2011, 03:05 PM

The newest ATI driver made things worse for me. *sigh*

I get 5-10 second freezes every few seconds that I can actually move.

rhinohelix

10-04-2011, 03:08 PM

Ahh, so they do.

After playing for about 20 minutes, I'm a super happy camper now. It runs and looks great.

Wait, what? I went from scratching it off my list to scratching my head.

The newest ATI driver made things worse for me. *sigh*

I get 5-10 second freezes every few seconds that I can actually move.

Ah, sweet normality. I will be over here talking to myself in my neck brace until someone decides whether this is terrible or not, Matt's great review not withstanding.

LesJarvis

10-04-2011, 03:11 PM

Awesome. I'm too impatient to find out for myself, so I have to ask: are you forcing vsync or not? Seems to me if it's running fast enough it shouldn't need it.

I had to force it, I was getting terrible screen tearing without it on.

peacedog

10-04-2011, 04:06 PM

Yay we can take Carmack off the whipping post now!

Why? This is a shockingly bad release and relying on new drivers from both graphics card manufacturers so the game runs on one of the major platforms it was developed for is absurd. Id deserve a lot of flak for this.

I'll try the new ATI drivers later. Dropped my resolution down and the game is still unplayable to the point of hilarity.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 04:23 PM

Dammit! Why did I download the hotfix? Now, the game just crashes as soon as the intro movie is over!

FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUCK!

Tim James

10-04-2011, 04:30 PM

60 fps solid.

You can still break the streaming if you whip around, but I'm having trouble detecting it during normal play now. I'll keep an eye out. For now I think I'll take 60 fps and run.

Time to play!

BTW the driver update didn't work at first. It may have detected that my drivers were "up to date" since I had the 11.10 beta in there. I had to uninstall and reinstall drivers.

RepoMan

10-04-2011, 04:35 PM

Why? This is a shockingly bad release and relying on new drivers from both graphics card manufacturers so the game runs on one of the major platforms it was developed for is absurd. Id deserve a lot of flak for this.

Sorry, disagree. Anyone who DID NOT expect new drivers for an id game has forgotten history. id games always need the absolute latest drivers to run well, especially on ATI. Carmack pushes the envelope -- that's part of why people were excited for the fucking game in the first place.

The main issue is just that id and ATI fucked up making sure that the "latest driver" on release day really was the latest driver. I blame ATI for that somewhat more than id, though both are culpable. But fixing it one day later is not unreasonable in my book.

Pogo

10-04-2011, 04:38 PM

I blame people for pre-ordering PC games when it's completely fucking unnecessary... especially a Bethesda release.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 04:39 PM

Those new ATI drivers are GOLD for me. Not a blurry texture in sight and the game runs smooth as silk. Carmack is out of the dog house again. :P

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 04:42 PM

Fuck me. I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers and I'm still crashing as soon as the game gets out of the intro movie.

Any ideas?

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 04:44 PM

Telefrog

I don't know but I have seen that listed on various bug lists. One said to add this to your command line launch. Maybe try that?

"+set com_skipIntroVideo 1"

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 04:52 PM

Nope. Can't get past that intro. Can't load my savegame from this morning. FUCK.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 04:56 PM

Not a blurry texture in sightThe environment textures still look terrible up close. It's like they came from before the days of bump mapping or tessellation or whatever. Everything is very flat.

Unless something is broken on my end, I think it's best to enjoy the graphics and visual variety from medium distance. That looks pretty crisp most of the time.

WarrenM

10-04-2011, 04:58 PM

The environment textures still look terrible up close. It's like they came from before the days of bump mapping or tessellation or whatever. Everything is very flat.

Unless something is broken on my end, I think it's best to enjoy the graphics and visual variety from medium distance.
Sure. However, my issue was not being able to turn my head and not see a huge blurry mess in front of my face. That's fixed so I'm happy!

Megatexture isn't about up close detail like it is in Gears or other modern titles. It's about a cohesive whole. Looking up and taking in the scene as a whole is really where MT shines ... for me, anyway. My jaw keeps dropping the more areas I explore in this game.

Tim James

10-04-2011, 05:00 PM

Okay just checking. And yes, it's better to not even try looking up close. Keep your head up and out. I think this is where higher FOV might help, to take in more of the scene. I'll try some tweaks later.

Falcon554

10-04-2011, 05:06 PM

So glad I did not order this

Tim James

10-04-2011, 05:35 PM

So glad I did not order thisYou're 20 hours behind the curve.

The FOV change didn't work for me in the config file.

I wonder how you're supposed to tell how much anti-aliasing your PC can handle with the automatic graphics adjustment. If it stays at 60 fps, how do you know if you're missing something else instead? I can't tell a difference between 0x and 4x (other than reduced aliasing of course). When I changed it to 8x the game crashed.

Telefrog

10-04-2011, 05:37 PM

Got it to work for about 30 minutes after a system reboot. Then, crash.

RAGE

Normann

10-04-2011, 05:46 PM

On an nvidia 275GTX card I had zero crashes. My system is definitely throttled back because some textures are very plain. Especially the ones that are in semi open levels. Other than that this game is freaking awesome. I can't stop playing it. And it is getting better. I am about 9h into it now. I guess I am alone with this view but this is a very good game in my opinion.

mono

10-04-2011, 05:55 PM

That manually entered FOV console variable workked as advertised. Also, I realized I hadn't flipped on GPU transcoding. Now the texture pop-in, which was marginally noticeable at worst, is now pretty much non-existent. At least on Nvidia this game is pretty rock solid. Hopefully we can get a permanent FOV fix soon so as to avoid typing it in manually each time you launch.

malkav11

10-04-2011, 06:15 PM

Finally home and done decrypting and all that and got to play it for 45 minutes or so before the splitting headache I've been nursing for the past few hours sapped my will to continue. With 4X antialiasing and GPU transcoding on, it's gorgeous (except for the occasional peculiarly low-res textures up close) and while I occasionally notice a bit of pop-in, it's not too bad. Exploring the bandit-infested hotel ruin was pretty neat, and I was very impressed by how lively the enemies were, with the melee ones incredibly agile, flipping around the environment, handily evading my shots, and using ziplines and similar for fast traversal. And while the pistol-wielding ones were much more sedate and tended to stick to more basic cover-hugging, I was impressed to note that they had a variety of animations and scripts for various levels of injury. Not infrequently I'd shoot someone a couple of times from range and they'd drop, so I'd assume they were dead, and then they'd drag themselves out on their side just far enough to start shooting at me again. Grenades are lovely and gib-intensive, if a little unintuitive to use. And the double-barrelled shotgun packed the expected wallop at close range, although while you get it at the same time as the pistol, you only get a little bit of ammo for it and no more has been forthcoming from any source. Maybe that won't be available until the regular shotgun.

PS: I have an nVidia card (I don't think ATI ones can even do GPU transcoding, at least not in Rage). And I'm playing on normal.