Quake3World

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.

We probably won't be seeing too many mod projects given the hefty amount of resources, manpower and processing required to create quality work, but at least it'll be interesting for those brave enough to tinker with the development tools.

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

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.

Maybe the modding community could work out some kind of "folding" network.




Read the official announcement and download the documents.

Too little too late

obsidian wrote:

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.

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

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

LOL!!!

Now people will know how frustrating a professional Level Design job can be when you're constantly dealing with broken or half-created tools.

Seriously folks, if you have the patience to use these tools and create something at a decent quality and still have the mental fortitude to not strangle tools programmers on sight, then perhaps you're the right fit for being in the games industry.

I think the context in which Carmack is referring to is the sheer amount of assets that is required to actually build a decent map that is on par with the levels of Rage are exceptionally high. As far as tools go, GtkRadiant is pretty bloody bare bones, there isn't anything by way of script editors, asset management, even compiling generally requires the designer to write his own batch file. id Studio does have all those tools built in but it is still harder to build a map for Rage than it is for Quake 3 even though a level designer working on Quake 3 has to jump through a million hoops.

35 gb really? does it come with all the art assets?

And nothing can scare old school mappers who used to deal with IDs tools running vis and light for weeks! (ok, DromEd can)

installing

Does this require a 64 bit computer, I seem to remember reading it did. I'm still on a system that is 32 bits short of the mark if that's the case.

I don't know about that, 64-bit is on the recommended system requirements, but I don't see anywhere listed that it's a must.

It's mentioned in the documentation that if you want to run mods without installing the SDK, then you will need to download and run the 64-bit version of the game executable.



Personally, I'm interested in tinkering with this but the hard drive where I have Steam installed is sitting on a 240GB RAID volume with 6.5GB of free space. Looks like I'll have to invest in some new hard drives soon unless I start deleting games. Dammit Steam and your sales.

obsidian wrote:Dammit Steam and your sales.

Hint: You can "delete local content" of games you're not playing and then simply reinstall/redownload with a click. I've cleared a shit-ton of HD space and if I ever want to play Modern Warfare/Arkham City/Entire HL Product Line/Driver SF/Skyrim/Deus Ex:HR/etc again (holy shit my Steam list is almost as long as my pecker) I just wait 5 minutes.

No shit? I didn't already know that with my collection of 169 games on Steam (yes, I really do have that many games).

nerd

(I only have 33)

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).

I've not, and never will, buy a game from Steam. I only own about 5 games on Steam, all either free or bought for me.

I appreciate id releasing the dev kit, and I'm going to mess around with it a bit.
However, with id tech 3 you could relatively easily develop maps on your own.
But for this tech to be used to its full potential, you really need a large collaborating team.

Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but I don't think id tech 5 will be used a lot.
Especially seeing how a lot of devs succesfully use the unreal engine.

AEon wrote: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).

I love Steam's cloud as it allowed me to play Skyrim both at home and at work without missing a beat.

Regarding the SSD...hell yeah I recommend them with modern/next gen editors. It halved my load times to under 10 minutes.
I'm guessing loading large maps with this SDK will also take a while.

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?

I think I might be being dumb, but I really can't find this in the steam tools section at all

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*

*waves* back at Kat.
Still no Rage tool kit in the tools section. Seems like I'm not the only one with the same problem. Is it maybe not available in all regions?
//edit: just found my own answer. It's not rolled out in all regions yet.
On a side note, an official press release that writes: 'it's DLC' WTF!!!!!!!

Lovely tools, really nice.

But slow as shit, to the point where average joe, slightly experienced joe and even joe the mod builder, really wont give a shit

I like to think I'm fairly experienced with all this, and have a great rig... But oh boy, did this knock me down a peg or seven...

:/

AEon wrote: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?

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.

Kat wrote: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*

Sure, seems like a dick move.
But if they're just preemptively covering their ass for releasing a fanmade map pack, I have no problem with it.

Plus: Hi Kat

Plan B wrote: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.

For professional big budget teams the engine is accessible. It takes away a number of limitations that have always been hurdles to take in game development. That you require a 50 man team and a super computer to build content is a minor detail for AAA studios.

Also, the problem of content creation taking an increasing amount of time is something that has been going on since the 90's. Look at the amount of work it takes to create a Wolf3D map and compare that so a Q3 map. Rage is just yet another step up. It's inevitable as games become more realistic and detailed.

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. Even so, I'm excited to see what comes out of it. Hopefully Doom 4 (if it ever gets done) will have a good multiplayer scene for custom maps. Will definitely check it out myself once i get time (however far off that may be ).