RAGE's Quake Room

[scar3crow]

So I located the secret remake of the first half of start.bsp in RAGE, and I took a few screenshots which you can see here. Any shots from October 6th. You can see the graffiti marking the path, a pack of Qayola qrayons, the slipgate (which you can hear with the correct sound on the surrounding floors) and the shots inside the level including the shambler plush. Quake looks better in Quake than it does in RAGE though, and they didn't get the sky working correctly, it scrolls, but doesn't display the upper layer. Only the spawn pad works, the difficulty select slipgates don't respond to you, but they do warp their texture nicely. The zombies are missing, and the lava is just a surface, but it does do a lot of damage - and if you use your defibrillator it will revive you to the same spot, still stuck in that burning lava. Good times.

Also you may be interested in the one screenshot from October 5th, where I spotted an NPC reading a copy of the Doom comic, on the infamous Rip n' Tear page. The game is quietly littered with these touches, including the beer being Hooper Lite, a play on Matt Hooper I'd imagine.

[leileilol]

it's sad that more development time is spent on self-homages (probably by young employees overstoked from working at id) than.... quality assurance.

[goldenboy]

Meh, they could easily have put at least the entire shareware episode in there. How big is that? A few megabytes? And almost no details.

Lousy way to try and make an extra buck.

[hondobondo]

i think its awesome. LONG LIVE QUAKE

[Electro]

goldenboy: it's Rage, not Quake. I think it's cool the fact that they bothered to put any quake into it.

I like it.

[frag.machine]

Yeah. Also, there's similar homages to Doom and Wolf3D.

[r00k]

Wow those shAdows are ALL WRONG! they aren't like that in DarkPlaces!!

[mankrip]

Now I wonder how long it'll be until we see those flame effects in Quake engines.

Also, the water in that room is opaque, the stained glass in the left corridor doesn't mirror, and the torches are also missing.

Is there a noclip cheat in Rage? It would be fun to fully explore that room.

[scar3crow]

mankrip - the liquids are solid, the only one you can reach is the lava which has a damage trigger on it. I personally don't play with mirroring stained glass so that didn't really impact me.

r00k - I'm not sure if you're attempting a troll or not... idTech5 emphasizes megatexturing, Carmack has said in interviews the shadow system is very much behind what a game that needs a good lighting solution would want. This is part of why he advised Bethesda to not pursue it for Skyrim or future projects, as their dungeons demand more robust lighting.

Electro and hondobondo - Thank you, I was just trying to share what I thought was a nice gesture =)

goldenboy - No extra buck to it. And it should be noted that there is no loading between this area and how you get there - it is a chunk of the game map, which suggests it shares the megatexture space as well.

leilei - Unless the development team is the QA team (they're not, they have a dedicated in-house QA team now) none of these homages are a conflict with QA time. The issues you are most likely alluding to are a consequence of a bare spot in their environmental testing for a multiplatform release. Most QA budgets aren't large enough for a proper compatibility lab so much of the compatibility testing is done on the QA work machines where they also craft their test cases, log bugs and so on. In theory they could have hired someone like VMC (blegh) to get large shallow coverage, but judging by the prevalence of the QA failings, I suspect the test plan just didn't take that into consideration. Good automation and a dozen or so different images with different driver configs and four machines could have possibly foreseen a lot of this, sadly.

[ceriux]

wow, so does rage actually load quake content? it looks as if it does?

[Chip]

wow, so does rage actually load quake content? it looks as if it does?

I'm sure the map is recreated in RAGE, either manually, or using an in-house conversion script/software.

[goldenboy]

I guess it's copy and pasted, or converted. Which is why I don't think it cost a lot of resources to do it.

As for sharing the megatexture space, if Rage does the same thing as ETQW (which also uses megatextures), then I'm not sure - IIRC ETQW allowed indoor areas to be "slotted into" the megatextured terrain. I don't think these actually used the megatexture. If this is what it is, then it might just be copy&pastage in radiant. In which case they could easily have c&p'd a little more, which is what I was alluding to earlier.

Look through the ETQW documentation by Splash Damage, it's in there somewhere. I'd be pretty interested to know if Rage's stuff is basically a continuation of ETQW with more details, or if it's different.

[mh]

My understanding is that Rage is 100% megatexture and there are no differences between indoor and outdoor spaces (if megatexture works the way I think it does behind the scenes then it should also be able to handle tiling textures quite easily). It's obvious from running around some of the indoor environments in the game that their texturing is unique too.

[scar3crow]

It doesn't load Quake content, they recreated the start map first chunk, much like their recreation of the beginning of e1m1 for the Doom easter egg, and the prison cell closet from Wolf 3d. I am not aware of any content in all of RAGE that is not megatexture.

[leileilol]

who the hell would assume that carmack would spend dev time bloating the code to load legacy for----oh, nevermind.