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id: Rage too complex for modding
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 19th September 2008
id Software reckons that the complex megatextures used in Rage may make the game hard to mod for.
The problem it seems arises from the megatexture technology used in the game, a technique which involves using heavily compressed surface textures to ensure that no part of the terrain is repeated at the texture level. It's a fancy new technology developed by id, but the process requires textures of up to 128000x128000 pixels in size.
Not only does this mean that the megatexture technology is going to be prohibitively complex and detailed for many users, but the textures also take a staggering amount of processing power to create. Put simply, id doubts that any modders have the hardware available to them to even try and fiddle with the technology.
In the past id Software have always been very supportive of the modding community and have gone so far as to make all of their games and engines open-source once the next few titles have been released. Carmack and Co. have pledged that they will be doing the same with the id Tech 5 engine too eventually, but are unsure if anybody could yet process all the information - sounds like a challenge to us!
Naturally though, the issue does beg the question of why the engine requires megatextures and doesn't provide support for smaller, old-fashioned texture technologies.
Have you ever made a map or a mod? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (31)
That's probably what they meant to say :D
"We want you to buy the console versions. Mods may sway you into buying the evil PC version. So we kill mods".
Another question is do we really need megatextures? Sure they're great for landscapes but are they really using them on everything? Such as smaller objects like barrels/cars/guns/etc.?
I suppose they could have one megatexture with loads of barrel textures so no barrel looks the same. IIRC, stardock changed it so ships in GalCivII were all covered by one massive texture, eliminating the need to load several different textures.
Like I said. Everything is modded eventually. Just because the devs can't see it happening doesn't mean it won't ;)
Unless they're developing on the Roadrunner. Then they might be right >.>
my best guess is that if a modder really did want to give this a go they could write themselves a CUDA based app or get the one for the upcoming photoshop that allows the editing of very large textures. now i cant remember how big Nvidia quoted initially.
now after that you would need a CUDA based mapping tool (or a super computer, cluster) to build the levels on function in the amount of time needed to build these things and yes its too complicated
however that begs the question what are they building the levels using?
Computers from space. Mass effect is a true story, you see, but only ID have managed to get the alien tech, which is what they're using :B
I doubt this is actually the case. While it's not impossible, I find it unlikely that the engine will throw up an error if a modder tried to use tiling textures smaller than 128kx128k pixels.
Given the prowess of Carmack & Co. and their general eagerness to support modding, I think it's more likely that if the engine is passed a cut-down 'megatexture' in the region of 16k x 16k pixels (an easily manageable texture size on any modern PC running photoshop) it'll tile it across the map.
If the engine supports it and if the modder is inventive enough, they could use shader maps, multiple passes of texture-layers or even film-grain shaders and the like in real-time in-game on that cut-down modder's-megatexture to give an impression of higher-detail similar to the progressive-texturing system used in the older iterations of the Unreal engine (used most effectively in the original Deus Ex).
It'd never approach the same level of detail and uniqueness provided by a true Megatexture created at ID, but it'd probably suffice for most modders and satisfy most players.
Additionally, I can imagine someone writing a command-line tool for morphing, flipping & manipulating the existing ID megatextures or applying Photoshop filters without rendering the texture - for an automated kind of texture-mangling to create something 'new' from the existing ID megatextures but on typical gamer/enthusiast-grade hardware.
Isn't the next major iteration of Photoshop going to be accelerated with parallel-processing via CUDA or similar?
If so, I'd imagine megaxtures would be somewhat less of an issue for anyone equipped with a GPU capable of that.
And who's going to be seriously trying to play Rage (nevermind mod Tech5) with anything less than an 8-series or similar?
At a guess, this is referring to the conversion of a lossless-quality megaxture to a compressed-texture for use in-engine. If this is the case, it's only a matter of time before someone writes an alternate converter that converts faster but produces a lower-quality final megaxture, or spends less time on compression and creates a higher-quality, less-optimised final megatexture.
The above is conjecture on my part, but when it comes to modding: Where there's a will there's a way. That's what modding is about.
This paragraph alone suggests to me that most of the accusations of console-preference aimed at ID are unfounded, and that they're eager to support modders on the PC (looking for solutions and providing workarounds), but are just publicly acknowledging and addressing the issue that, because technology has moved on, modding Tech5 simply won't be as easy for the average modder as it was with Doom and the Quake games when they came out.
The above quote even suggests to me something along the lines of the plugin system used in Morrowind and Oblivion, and I think that could do the job nicely with Rage, but I'd hope also that the modders wouldn't be locked into using a dumbed-down SDK-Lite aimed at the average user (TESCS and the NWN editor spring to mind..)
If Rage is a quality game why worry about the mods, the main game should keep us occupied for years.
As for not being able to mod this, like other people have said, modders will find a way. It might not happen in the first month, or the first year, but eventually they will have the tools to do it.
Besides, just because terrain editing may be difficult due to the technology, what's stopping them from modding other parts of the game?
Carmack is a genius on the order that a field only sees once every century or so.
Enjoy
BTW, 8 series is min spec now for gamers, by the time that game comes out it will be useless.
S*D
Now I see why the footprint of the install is so massive. How much of that can the average LCD screen actually parse into individual pixels? I don't know the answer because I'm too lazy to do the research, but what is the visual difference to the end user?
The megatexture works by having a SINGLE texture that contains the visual images for the entire map. It doesn't mean it all gets loaded at once (duh), just that all the texture information is held in one single file. Takes ages to render, but takes less time to display when playing the game. It's a brilliant idea (naturally, this is id) and should do wonders for the game's look. But obviously, calculating the display map and shadow map for a texture that's 8 square miles would take an age, hence their comment. It's nothing to do with consoles, and it's everything to do with a better end experience for the player. Now stop your trolling all of you and calm down.
You're such an id Fanboy, Ben :p
That size is reasonably manageable. Its when you start editing it and the history states start filling up the memory, that you begin to get massive slowdowns with anything resembling a "normal" PC. Granted probably none of us have "normal" PC's. But given that no version of Photoshop is yet 64-bit, and can't really access more than 3-4GB then its kind of moot.
This is just an opinion, but I dont think that using Cuda to accelerate image processing tasks is going to amount to much. Wouldn't the GPU need a copy of the image in its local memory? I don't know, but if it does then copying a 128k x 128k image to the GPU memory isn't going to happen. Even a 16k x 16k is a 750+MB raw file in PS which couldn't fit into most GPU memories these days unless you've got a 1GB version. I suppose for simple image manipulation tasks that GPU acceleration could definitely help though. Its just when you get into editing instead of just changing hue or using canned filters, that the GPU make less of an impact.
you would feed it a section of the image, have it process it and then feed it the next section and so on ;)
I actually just meant the "Naturally though, the issue does beg the question of why the engine requires megatextures and doesn't provide support for smaller, old-fashioned texture technologies. " bit. It's the equivilent of creating the world's most powerful electric car, and then lementing the fact it doesn't use petrol. The point is that it doesn't use petrol, so why complain? Same situation here.
And yes, id fanboy and proud of it! Now where's my trusty chainsaw?
Not necessarilly. Much like the D3 engine was built with fully dynmaic lighting as the core feature of its design (and hence doesn't support the old-fashioned lightmaps method), id Tech 5 was built from the ground up to use of unique texturing (aka Megatexture) as its main feature. Shoe-horning in the old-fashioned tiled texture method is likely to be either a huge amount of extra work, or completely break the engine. I'm not saying this is a good thing and it is a massive shame, as some of the best mods ever were for id games, but don't you think that John Carmack, graphics engine super-nerd and massive supporter of the modding community, would have found a way to use tiling textures as well as unique texturing if it was possible?
As for John Carmack's motivations, I'm betting he's more concerned with pushing on to new things to worry about making the new stuff back-compatible, otherwise all of the id games would have been massively different.
I guess we're just not going to know until the game gets launched and someone pokes around in the engine. Although as I understand it they're using Unique Texturing on everything. The Megatexture only refers to the use of Unique Texturing on the landscape, and hence was present in the D3 engine as it was only a small part of the final product. id Tech 5 is using it for every bit of texturing in the level IIRC. So yes, whilst it does sound strange, I wouldn't at all be surprised if tiled-based texture rendering actually didn't exist in the engine at all.