@AshxMFxKetchum: I laughed.

And if I understood something I read on Rage a while back, the entire level is textured with one texture, the artists just paint one giant texture and it is wrapped around the entire level's geometry...

hammerhand

haha...sounds like he's almost challenging the mod community.

TheIrishNinja

Pretty sure this is just id's way of saying the game will be "too awesome".

[ZTF]

Procedural Textures > *

balls187 upside yo head

@Rexter: PLEASE don't talk of things you know nothing about.

PATSCRU

So this game will be the best looking when it comes out?

Has there been gameplay vids yet?

DustySword

NOTHING is too complicated for modders....give us the source and we'll give you a lego map with wavy penis guns IN NO TIME.

PATSCRU

Thats retarded, if a developer can make this game work then the community can make it better. UT3 was out for awhile till they got things down and then it exploded. No matter the claim theres always exceptions and really the harder you make something more determined the hardcore become.

I can't stress enough how dumb this statement is.

Gantz: Your Trusted Friend in Science.

@cobrax25:

I don't know...but compared to HL...Hl2 modding isn't as grand.

I dunno..maybe I was just more excited about mods in the 90s-early 2000s...

Vecha

This game better be the shit!...THE SHIT!

Or at least fun. Marginally fun.

Vecha

@cobrax25:
Exactly. I can't believe id doubted their loyal fanbase like that. Believe me, there are plenty of people out there whose computer rigs would blow the mind of half the game development industry.

Lazlo

@Rexter:

The PC modding community is perfectly fine....

anyway, I guarantee that the game will still be modded eventually...there really isnt anything "too complex" for modders.

cobrax25

@Clarke:

I think he was referring to when Desert Combat came out for bf1942, afterwards everyone thought they could mod and there were mods popping up left and right.

But only 10% saw a first decent alpha release.

Diesel_Power

@Rexter: Dead? Hey guys you heard that? We're dead apparently.

Clarke

"Sure, cancer might not get cured as quick but, c'mon - MegaTextures!"

I really doubt anybody laughed at this. Just saying.

AshxMFxKetchum

couldn't you just cut up the textures into smaller pieces?

idk. I'm not a modder xD

Kreepman

@Clamchop: Not even that complicated - I am sure that Rage auto-assembles the textures up to a "quilt" of that size. This is just a technobabble snow job if you ask me.

wild_world_girl

Are textures going to be the new "penis" size for upcoming games? I'll jump on the bandwagon now. Screw polygons!

MonkeyBiz

How does having a giant texture make modding any less achievable? I'm assuming that not every texture in the game is that large and that the giant texture actually handles the texturing of multiple models. If that's the case what would be the problem in just stitching the textures together into one in photoshop? Most computers will chug on a picture that big but it doesn't seem like it would be totally impossible.

And if every model is textured with a map that large then... well that's just ridiculous.

Clamchop

To complex for mods? Damn... As if the pc modding community in general wasnt dead enough as it is.

Rexter

It was inevitable that modding would die or simplify given the increasing time necessary to create high res textures and shaders...

PC modding dies, and console modding gets Halo's 'Forge'

outofreach

NOW WITH MORE MEGA TEXTURES!

Now.. could Kotaku use another picture on Rage related news? I'm getting tired of that guy..

CockroachMan

@Sathias: Probably a considerably expensive, rather specialized computer system designed specifically for this task.

A computer that wouldn't be cost/effective for the average consumer, or even the powergamer.

Then again, if it works the way it seems to me it does, something like the Cell processor in the PS3 would be a reasonable option.

Grive

That sounds like a challenge to me.

Dalren

@Sathias:
A renderfarm like it says in the article?

abbe

@AshxMFxKetchum: You're wrong. I'm the proof.

Nothing for me to say on topic though, sorry!

mfwahwah

So what are id using for development then? I'd be interested to know.

Sathias

@AshxMFxKetchum: I did

Bunn

@Clamchop: Apparently it's not that simple as having a "quilt" of textures. If they claim a lot of preprocessing is needed, then chances are a couple of consumer-grade PCs will have a really, really hard time doing the work needed to correctly prep a picture.

Especially if iD doesn't give the community a program designed to do it.

It wouldn't surprise me. Anyone remember the Quake 3 source? I didn't delve deep into it (never really got into Quake 3), but as far as I recall, it was a mess for modders to get into. Efficient, yes, but kinda obfuscate.

... yet the modding community didn't have much of a problem once the initial hurdles were passed, and Q3 was modded to hell and back.

All in all, I think I'll keep my hopes up. The modding community always ends up doing awesome things even with games that seem to be designed to hinder mods.

@PATSCRU: You owe me a new keyboard.

Either that, or I should stop drinking beer at the same time I read posts.

Grive

Hm, after reading the article itself i would translate the meaning "impossible" to: ""impossible" to create wastelands the same size and quality as found in Rage". Meaning that it will just take too much bloody time to render it for the game to use.

Then we can also paste in the final part of the interview here:

"Willits envisioned modders developing modular chunks of gameplay that can be slotted into the extant Rage world, rather than full mods, as a potential solution. While the game's large central wasteland is a streaming hub world, its levels are instance-based.

The megatexture issue aside, Willits said other aspects of the game will actually be easier to work with than the company's prior titles. "The description languages and the tools are a lot easier to use than the things we've done in the past," he explained."

So, impossible to create huge, but not impossible to create smaller.

abbe

I'm pretty sure id weren't belittling the resourcefulness of the PC modding community, rather acknowledging that not many PC owners have systems which could work with high resolution 128000 x 128000 textures while maintaining a decent computer speed.

kable

Didn't id put out videos dedicated to how pc users will be able to just bring down the console and type in 'editor' and the same editor they're using to create the world launches up and you can edit everything?.... you know like.. this video [www.gametrailers.com]

el0d1980

That is one insanely huge texture!
Key here *up to* 128000 x 128000

Uncompressed size of 128000 x 128000 in 24-bits should be 49,152,000,000 bytes. That's 50GB uncompressed!!!

In the end it shouldn't matter though. =)

Once you have the template and know how it's created, you can always write a program that partially patches it in.

So I don't see a problem.

Just annoying way of doing it.

neo177117

Megatextures.... my college education will be worthless by the time I graduate. :(

sylvester6680

Well, it's not "impossible," just incredibly limiting. There were concerns over the very same thing when Quake Wars came out, but users have been able to create user maps. Of course, the size of the maps in Rage is what is so daunting. If a team of modders were to get together and one of them had a badass enough computer to compile everything, they could do something up to scale. However, to expect modders (especially the lone ones out there) to be able to create such vast and refined content as an entire studio is just asinine. It only makes sense for Rage modders to do small areas. That's what many of the Oblivion modders did.

Actually, all of this brings up an interesting point. Games are getting to the point, especially graphically, where huge teams are required to create these little gems that we whittle our time away on. For those of use that enjoy creating more and augmenting the existing content, these raised standards are requiring more and more time. I remember being able to whip up a fairly decent Doom level within a day or two, 12-14 hours. (I was 14 then, give me a break) Don't even get me started on how easy Wolf3d was to mod. People made entire 30 mission campaigns with custom textures and the works within a few weeks.

It's like what I said about NWN2 on the BioWare boards, these games are more complex and have larger teams. We, as amateur gamem makers (really, mods are just little trinkets to change the HUD and stuff. building levels, scripting events, etc. is game making), are going to have to either realistically limit our ambitions to the workload of one person or we are going to have to work together more often in multiple-member teams. It's not a bad thing, but teamwork is easier said than done. The good thing, working on a team is much more realistic to an actual work environ. So that when these modders of today become the game designers of tomorrow, the transition will be nearly seamless.

stupid_mcgee

Talk about MEGATEXTURES all that you want id... But first fix the face of the guy in the pic, its pretty disgusting IMO.

FP Belias

@Bunn: Me too!

No one's asking the real question though... Can Id finally make a game better than Duke 3D?

I'm betting no.

Pwnieboy

It's still not impossible to mod but as someone said earlier - they need a better character design. That looks like Bizarro James Remar post: MK: Annihilation.

Comments 'rnt Us (usually)

@Vecha:

Google "Black Mesa Mod"

A friend of mine is working on it. I watching him working on some of the levels. It's going to be awesome, not a small insignificant mod.

MonkeyBiz

Tch, I'm sure by the time id Tech 5 is open sourced (years from now) everyone will have a computer quite capable of doing whatever needs to be done. It's called Moore's Law. Will anyone still care? Probably not, but it will eventually be doable.

ca$h

Three questions...

So are they saying its going to be a little harder than making levels for umm doom 2?

128000 x 128000 textures do we really need nose hairs in that much detail?

and you say it will run on a 486?

Zatoichi666

"Rage Too Complicated For User Mods"

That's not what he's saying, he's saying one specific part of modding - compiling a megatexture the size open world area/wasteland requires a huge amount of processing time. They're using renderfarm type setups and it's still taking a long time.
The editing of the megatexture is easyish, the compile tools do the final stitching, it's just the final stitching that takes such a long time.

All the other areas of moding are still possible, smaller levels, new monsters weapons or gameplay types are possible, and in fact some are easier than previous id engines.

NotTheGuy

Its ironic that Carmack complains about the complexity of programming a console such as the PS3 and then turns around and creates a technology for textures that probably is a non-starter for most other developers.

kasplat

Seems very stupid to me to design a PC shooter these days that's difficult to mod. Moddability is the single best way to ensure longevity, and hence lack of second hand sales. id of all people should realise that.

cdammers

Man, I can't stand that screenshot.

Bernard McGraw

dsmx: The data transfer between different machines for a cloud computing system to work with these textures would be enormous.

There's most likely a lot of different things happening to prepare the MegaTexture than just tiling alot of small images together. Pyramidal filtering, LOD, and other algorithms are time consuming on average size files, I would imagine it's something that's run on a large size render farm.

I think his point is that if it takes there thousand node farm several hours (just guessing here) then it would take your typical machine weeks and weeks to finsih.

acidream

Seems to me that this game is based way far beyond gameplay anymore. We'll be lucky to get a mediocre shooter; but wait....at least we will have amazing graphics. Since, you know, graphics are everything these days. *rolls eyes*

macr0planet

Couldn't mod teams just use cloud computing to generate those texture maps?

dsmx

Wow, how sad.

Games are getting more and more self-contained. It's not that unusual for a singleplayer game to not be moddable, but hey - this is id! They invented modding as we know it.

A comment on the hardware requirements, though:

Half-Life 1 took up to eight hours of render-time for finishing lighting/radiosity data on a custom-built map - and it didn't exactly hold people back from making maps.

This sounds kinda similar.

lumpi

A texture that size would most likely require a 64-bit operating system and a 64-bit image editing program to work on. A 32-bit operating system would not be able to map it to memory.

Nalin

I am not going to lie, those are some VERY huge textures. I can't even imagine making something like that. Artists have one hell of a job.

Quicksilver4648

"up to 128000x128000 pixels" does this mean I need a bigger monitor?

spaz33

@ca$h: I second that remark! One the one hand, I am utterly shocked that id Software would ignore Moore's Law when they say regular users won't be able to create mods for their new game, several months before the game is released.

That said, I want piracy of PC games to factor into this story somehow. It makes no sense, I know. There is no logical way it could happen. I guess I just think it would be funny if Kotaku quoted id Software tomorrow saying, "Well, I guess if people started pirating high-tech PC hardware as much as they pirate PC game software... then, MAYBE there would be a healthy modding scene for our game."

BtownDesignGuy

spaz@ No, you only see a little bit at a time

Rendon

Well let's hope id Tech 5 isn't too complicated for your average developer...

stevesan

@Rexter: Lolz, we're dead. I guess that meas we're all zombies.

@spaz33: And no, no. You serious?

artofwar420

I bet you could get graphics as good without the giant textures.

Crowbot

Oh sweet, no one told me Don Knotts was in this game.

Orionsaint

Fools.

By 2020 when id tech 5's source code is released our computers will be able to chew the shit out of this engine.

Megatextures?

MegaBullshit.

NintendoFanBoy64

theres no reason to have a texture that size. The only thing youd use that texture for is maybe if you wanted an ungodly non-repeating texture on the ground. Or for some reason all of the characters were all one one map, which is dumb cause its not gonna be one person working on all the textures, so thats alot of whoring around one .psd for a few years. Id is trying to pull the same point kojima did in saying he could barely fit the game on one disc. Its just a ploy to get people to talk about the game.

Naaloq

@lumpi:

Ahh ZHLT, those were the days. Never could get a map with complex lighting to compile cleanly or run smoothly.

brokenscope

Imao Carmack will eventually think of something, that will able people to mod tech 5.
This technology is unfinished and that's probably the true reason.
As for resources, I think these requirements are that high due to compression process.

stopierwszy

They shouldn't underestimate the mod community.

Anaralia

Looks like i got flamed for my statement, but that wasnt unexpected.
I should have elaborated more precisely. My statement was only the way i see it, and i mean no its not "dead" like there's no mods anymore. But its only for a handfull of games there's still mods for. If your go back a few years, 4 or more, there was mods for almost EVERY SINGLE GAME! You could get gazillion of mods for whatever you wanted, hacks tweaks, mods, TC's etc.
Now? BAH! Dont tell me there is a "thriving" modding community because there isnt! Only a handfull of big games have a thriving modding community and thats it!
I havent even seen a single nude mod for UT3, and thats saying something! Because that usually the first that gets modded for almost any game.
PC game modding is 90% dead.

Rexter

scaleability FAIL.

Lombax

maybe a significant poriton of the modding communit is working on machines designed to work with huge texture maps because that's what their day jobs are? had that occured to you mr. condescending programmer?

tetracycloide

Is that Mr. Furley in that pic?

Freetime000

A 128000x128000 texture requires 64gb of ram.
Simple as that.

Naaloq

wanna bet the whole map is one texture and that the texture contains more then just pretty color information?

Zentac

@MonkeyBiz:

I haven't seen anything new since december 2007. I'm looking forward to it..but will it be released before HL3?

Vecha