Given their decision to stop licensing the full id Tech engines to non-Bethesda developers - should we even be expecting a Rage SDK? I know the two are distinctly different - and I also know the reasons for not licensing the engines. But with the UDK being free and pretty complete, and doing a comparable job to id Tech 5 when it comes to “shiny stuff” - will id even care about modders any more? Granted it’s nothing like a full licensing situation, but releasing an internal SDK and providing at least some level of documentation and support, does still take time and effort. I get the feeling JC may have given up entirely on that kind of thing. To be quite honest with you, I’d probably go for UDK anyway 
Rage didn’t impress me much at all, and I would have traded it in an instant, if that was even possible.
SDK & Map Editor
Unreal won the engine war. Nobody uses idtech and unreal tech is more widespread and much more common.
Unreal3 is the pinnacle of modding/game developing for pc as far as I’m concerned. I’ve played and stuck with so many UE3 games these past few years. Idtech4s only good online game was Quake Wars.
Unreal 4 is going to be aimed for consoles so it will give id a chance to get idtech back into pc, but only if they forced it, and we all know they wont.
It’s quite a shame how idtech5 turned out. The engine has so much potential but we may never see what its actually capable of on pc hardware.
On a side note, prey was the only game that licensed idtech4 outside of id’s influence. Now compare that to idtech3 and it’s pretty sad…
Most of what you said was by choice, Carmack was never a fan of licensing the engines out.
Do you mean that he wasn’t a fan of letting anybody else use the engines until they were irrelevant? This is a serious question. idTech 3 was pretty widely used if I recall, and Carmack’s pushed a lot of id’s stuff into open source, albeit after they released something better under a license.
And yes, idTech 5 is a complete tragedy.
There’s a few interviews where he mentions he just couldn’t be bothered with it, and money certainly wasn’t I driving force to make him release it. With idtech3 he felt he spent more time supporting people that licensed the engine than doing any work himself… from the sounds of it he was coerced into the licensing side rather than it being an optimistic decision. Open sourcing a software and licensing it out are 2 different things, and affect id in entirely different ways.
id Software actually said that they would release the SDK, but have been silent for a while. They also said there would be a hi-res texture patch for PC… and that their artists were upset at what had happened to their work. But then Carmack backtracked and said that the high resolution textures didn’t look any better… (so what were the artists upset about?) I think he just realized that it would have been a 20 gig patch or something.
Anyway, I think the Rage engine is pretty good. I like the artistic variety in Rage and Brink. However, they both suffer the same problem where the bullets don’t interact with the world too well. In Brink there are so many textures that don’t even take bullet decals. In Rage, the effects of shooting a wall are not very impressive… Then there is that sewer scene where you have a long line of columns that are just screaming to be chipped away, but they aren’t destructible at all.
[QUOTE=Codine;300590]The introduction of “downloadable content” on the main menu doesn’t look very promising for this D:
I still have hope for SP though.[/QUOTE]
you mean , Single player right ?