Later today on Steam we will be releasing the official tool kit for RAGE – the same tools used to create RAGE and it’s DLC, The Scorchers. From the game’s world building tool, idStudio, to game maps and assets, the kit provides everything you need to get started with modding the first-ever idTech 5 title.

Interested? Before you start downloading the hefty 35+ GB file, the RAGE team has provided some documents to read. As described in the welcome document, these tools provided are complex and aimed towards “technically sophisticated and adventurous” modders.

The toolkit release is not something that we consider consumer friendly, but it does let you get a look inside the construction process...

Doing significant work will require patience, because internally we use a 300 core renderfarm for megatexture creation.

There's also a few rather daunting tweets from John Carmack:

Dammit Steam and your sales.

Off topic: Steam cloud, when supported by the game will even remember your save (game files) state . Though I would recommend looking up where the save games are stored locally and backup those manually before you deinstall any game. E.g. for RPGs like Witcher. For Valve games (Half-Life 2 engine) the local configs (autoexec.cfg etc.) should you have custom ones, are left behind locally and not deleted. (I have 125 games, 35 installed presently, over 10 to play, including 3 of the Stalker RPG series, sigh, wonder when and I will ever play those. Max Payne 3, Witcher II, Prototype, and Ridge Racer Unbounded also on the unplayed list.)

On topic: Very interesting thread... keep us posted how things work out. It seems to me a really large SSD drive for the SDK would be a good thing to have (in the 300+GB region; mine is only 80 GB with Win7 on it, so nothing doing). USB 3.0 and a fast 2 TB external drive might be recommendable as well, I have the 2 TB drive but not USB 3.0 (main board is 34 months old, USB 2.0 is not really fast enough for large files).

Plan B,
the question probably is: Does a dev team want to use a "normal" amount of time to create content that looks "pretty much detailed", or do they want to "waste" an unforgivable amount of time on "excessively detailed" (beautiful, I admit) content.

I suspect that many dev teams will shy away from requiring that much man/woman-power to get something looking that good. This will be even more true for mod teams.

Rage still has that "wow, I cannot believe this level of texture detail"-factor, but will that entice folks to go for it? As a player, I would love to see more games using that engine, but other than id titles I don't expect that to happen.

On hardware: I "only" have 6 GB RAM. I am guessing the SDK will take all and any RAM you have, so 12 GB or more may not be optional, but more of a must?

Keep in mind that if you were to do something serious, the licensing terms we've been used to are different.. if you publish, you grant Bethesda an unrestricted license to do what they want with the material; iirc that's not been the case with previous id games(?), they own the game assets (naturally) but have never laid claim to our creations (caveat: this needs to be double-checked but I've not found anything contrary to that as of yet).

And .. hullooo *waves*

What it all boils down to; I'm afraid it's just not worth investing a lot of time on developing for id tech 5.
Mainly because system requirements are ridiculous; You need a fucking crunch farm to get your shit compiled.
What I expect to see is some simple individually developed maps, just to see what the tech is all about. Box maps, nothing serious.
That's a shame. Carmack should have focussed on making id's latest tech more accessible.

Might be worth noting that it's not likely any studios outside of the Zenimax family will ever use idtech5 anyway, since they are no longer liscensing their engines.

... and have a great rig...

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