Rage Linux Port Is Not Likely Until 2012

[V!NCENT]

Other games didn't seem to have a problem. Crysis fits on a single DVD.

Yet in Crysis, there is not a single piece of texture that isn't repeated. The point of Rage's texture tiling streaming is that every part of the world looks unique.

The textures might not be all that extremely good, but it's better than having a single HD-textured tree appearing ever two meters again and again and again.

Once again with id Tech games, it pushes the boundaries of hardware. In this case: Storage capacity and I/O streaming.

Carmack said that maybe in the future, a 150GB uncompressed texture patch will get uploaded. I personally doubt that.

[whizse]

The Wikipedia entry for the game mentions 4.2, but no reference is given... The last time Carmack mentioned OpenGL versions was sometime around 2009 and it was still 2.1 back then.

As others has mentioned, it would be fun if somebody could try it out with Mesa, see exactly what extensions are checked for and maybe do some preliminary bug filing, just in case there is a native version coming.

(Answering myself here) It seems like the game is using OpenGL 3.2. Mesa is aming for 3.0 for the next release, but quite a lot of 3.1 and 3.2 is already implemented. It looks like the biggest gotcha would be if Rage uses GLSL 1.40 or 1.50. Support for that will probably take a while...

[RealNC]

Yet in Crysis, there is not a single piece of texture that isn't repeated. The point of Rage's texture tiling streaming is that every part of the world looks unique.

The textures might not be all that extremely good, but it's better than having a single HD-textured tree appearing ever two meters again and again and again.

I disagree. Repeated textures are not a bad thing. I prefer them over blurrier, non-repeated ones. The 3D model design is much more important than non-repeated textures in order to make the game world look unique.

When graphics cards with 2GB RAM, disks that can read data with over 300MB/s, and games that are shipped on BluRay discs and occupy 50GB on installation become the standard at some point, this tech will make sense. Right now, it doesn't. They should have saved that for id 6 and postpone the thinking about the long term ray tracing and voxel concepts for id 7.

[mirv]

I disagree. Repeated textures are not a bad thing. I prefer them over blurrier, non-repeated ones. The 3D model design is much more important than non-repeated textures in order to make the game world look unique.

When graphics cards with 2GB RAM, disks that can read data with over 300MB/s, and games that are shipped on BluRay discs and occupy 50GB on installation become the standard at some point, this tech will make sense. Right now, it doesn't. They should have saved that for id 6 and postpone the thinking about the long term ray tracing and voxel concepts for id 7.

You can have non-blurry, non-repeated textures, and also blurry, repeated textures. The thing that Carmack pushed with it wasn't that it would sharper, or even that there weren't other techniques to bring an impressive looking environment about, it was that it lets the artists have more freedom.
Also, think about a 32k*32k terrain texture that you can modify on the fly. It does open up new avenues for gameplay mechanics, looks just as sharp as anything else, and can actually be faster than some other techniques (no hardware alpha blending between layers).

[jcgeny]

the textures that display badly should come from the buffer that is too small : i played all and game never used more than 1 Go of ram .
while i have 12 ....
like with Mafia2 , there is one missing thing that seems unbelievable : the wheels drivers .
this game only likes xbox360 gamepad....
while both games make driving something very important in the gameplay .
i use x360ce to use mine : http://code.google.com/p/x360ce/

[V!NCENT]

the textures that display badly should come from the buffer that is too small : i played all and game never used more than 1 Go of ram .

The problem isn't you RAM, the problem is making sure everything comes on the screen in 2ms.

Aside from that failure to understand that (do you know how many layers you need to go through on a PC versus a console to make this happen?), the other problem with this technology was the storage capacity of the discs that it ships on.

If a DVD could contain 160GB of data, Rage would have looked a whole lot better. That was the biggest graphical point of this game: No matter how far you zoom in; you'll always get detailed textures.

Sadly that didn't happen. Sadly most people 'game' *cough*play interactive movie experience*cough* on consoles.

[jcgeny]

The problem isn't you RAM, the problem is making sure everything comes on the screen in 2ms.

Aside from that failure to understand that (do you know how many layers you need to go through on a PC versus a console to make this happen?), the other problem with this technology was the storage capacity of the discs that it ships on.

If a DVD could contain 160GB of data, Rage would have looked a whole lot better. That was the biggest graphical point of this game: No matter how far you zoom in; you'll always get detailed textures.

Sadly that didn't happen. Sadly most people 'game' *cough*play interactive movie experience*cough* on consoles.

so if the file or at least a lot of Go of it in ram then it is sure that " everything comes on the screen in 2ms."

i posted a topic about GrmL4D , this is a server that can be copied all in ram if pc has 4 Go of it .
then no read from hd or dvd , it is to make sure that " everything comes on to the clients/players in less than 2ms." ;']
i joke a bit but no server can be faster and have better bots than this one ;'] just because all is in ram
like what i said with rage .
by the way that should be an interesting benchmark if someone with 64 Go of ram , using half of it to create a ramdisk where all rage files were copied , tell us textures are doing their blurry thingy ;']

[V!NCENT]

so if the file or at least a lot of Go of it in ram then it is sure that " everything comes on the screen in 2ms."

No you still don't get it. Textures in Rage aren't just being slammed on the screen.

Rage uses ray casting, like wolfenstein did, to perform this dynamic level of texture detail. The problem is (texture popping is solved with large texture cache anyway), is that for every fscking pixel on the screen, the driver needs to access the entire tile and then it can draw a single pixel. It can't say "point to that pixel" and be done with it, since all these abstraction layers screw with the theoretical speed of the GPU.

Now more cache is not needed, because the texture data per, whatever unit they use in the world, is low because of the 20GB limit.

[Hephasteus]

(Answering myself here) It seems like the game is using OpenGL 3.2. Mesa is aming for 3.0 for the next release, but quite a lot of 3.1 and 3.2 is already implemented. It looks like the biggest gotcha would be if Rage uses GLSL 1.40 or 1.50. Support for that will probably take a while...

Just remember windows is way advanced over linux as long as you don't try to use it.

And to the other poster. You had better have repeated textures or you just don't encapsulate something. Nobody builds buildings out of 20 kinds of materials. And dungeons had better have a repeatable texture theme or it doesn't look right.

[pingufunkybeat]

(Answering myself here) It seems like the game is using OpenGL 3.2. Mesa is aming for 3.0 for the next release, but quite a lot of 3.1 and 3.2 is already implemented. It looks like the biggest gotcha would be if Rage uses GLSL 1.40 or 1.50. Support for that will probably take a while...

Do you have a source for that? I'm curious.