So after the mammoth installation the nightmare started with the bundled Steam. Why does every game these days have to have Steam? It was not mentioned on any retail site that this was required, so I didn’t know until it arrived. Just after installing my Internet died due to a BT fault, leading to the game not launching because Steam would try offline mode and then quit as I had no Internet to update something.

So, even though I’ve paid for the game full price, I can’t play it. How is this a better experience than pirating the game? I’m a big supporter of the gaming industry, but they really are not helping themselves with these requirements. Clearly a big part of the Steam requirement is for DRM, and yet that’s already been circumvented.

24 hours later my Internet was finally restored and I booted up Rage. Initial loading screens look nice but then the next nightmare started. The game launches and it looks like a 1990’s attempt – oh wait, there pops in the textures. Turn the camera and textures pop again. However, now I’ve noticed the worst thing; screen tearing. Yes, it tears so badly that the game is pretty much unplayable. You’d think that iD developing an FPS would realize that people like to move and turn around.

A little more information came to light when I went to find out how to fix this and there was plenty of information how to tweak the game to run better. Following suggestions for RAGE on Nvidia’s Geforce site, I set the texture mapping to 8k, hard set v-sync via Nvidia control panel and then I was off!

The game was pretty good after all that and I was really starting to enjoy it until the next day. Steam forced down an update which should fix the game and instead it renders the game unplayable. It wasn’t until I did a bit of digging to find out that the changes I had made caused the game to create another config file called video.cfg in my home folder. After removing this, the game was functioning again. Why they could not have reset everything to defaults, I’ve no idea.

Now iD have said they are working with AMD and Nvidia for the problems that are on going past the initial patch which is great, but how did it get this far? I can definitely understand the difficulty in supporting the massive amounts of PC hardware but this seems to be make it clear the PC version was an afterthought. One go was all it took for most people to see the problems. Did the iD QA team not play the game on a normal PC? Or are they running such high end systems that they didn’t even notice?

Yesterday, Kotaku ran a response from John Carmack explaining some of this:

“The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$,” he wrote. “We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions.

“We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn’t work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn’t help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms.”
Brian Crecente – Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A “Cluster!@#$”?, Kotaku

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a game so panned upon launch. The forums are full of people having problems. Even the Amazon rating has been hammered – just take a look at some of the one-star reviews.

I am having a great time in the PC version, I just don’t think you should take the risk until they have fixed all the issues. If you really want to play it now, I’d suggest going to buy the console version.

We’ll have a full review of the PS3 version of RAGE up next week. RAGE is out now on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Screenshots (after finally getting the damn thing to work)

Q – Are you hoping to emulate the success of WipEout HD on the PSN? Any plans for expansion packs in the future?

Dave Parsons (DP): We’ve really been too busy to see how well WipEout has done, and I have no idea how many units it’s sold.
We’d love for Gravity Crash to be really successful, but really have no idea how well it will resonate with the user base. We’ve had some very encouraging noises from quite a few people now, but they tend to be in the same age range as ourselves, who all grew up in the 8-bit era, and moved on from there. As for expansion packs, we do hope to be doing some extra stuff in the future. Maybe some new levels, and a few other extras, but we’re not going to commit to anything right now.

Stewart Gilray (SG): To echo what Dave said we want Gravity Crash to do well, only time will tell guess. Again, we’ve had idea for DLC for a while now, but that does depend on whether the sales warrant people wanting more. And also if we want to revisit it.

Q – The CoLD SToRAGE music really suits the game. Who’s brilliant idea was getting him involved?

DP: This was thanks to Stewart. He’s known Tim (Wright) for over twenty years, so got in touch to see if he’d be interested. He was, so we had a meeting with him back in February, and Tim just got on and produced the music, which we’re very happy with.

SG: Tim and I first worked together when I was hired to create the introduction sequence for PowerMonger back in the 16bit days, so yeah 20/21 years. I placed the call, since a) I knew him very well, and b) he’s obviously worked with Sony before on WipEout etc.

Q – Were there any particular technical challenges you faced during development?

DP: There were a number of tricky issues in the early days of development regarding collision, but they were mostly sorted out a long time ago. As always, the TRCs (for those unfamiliar with the term, it’s the checking of platform standards, e.g. the PlayStation button on the controller always working etc) issues can be painful to resolve, but we understand the importance of making sure all games on the platform behave in a consistent manner, so we just had to get on and sort things out, but it’s always a bit fiddly.

Dugan Jackson (DJ): The way we ended up creating the in-game art was quite unusual, although you see all the objects presented in a 2D neon style, they are actually made in 3D. We worked out a system in the end that allowed us to easily create and manage the geometry, as well as smooth export process to let everyone see it working in-game.

SG: One of the challenging things we had to work on was creating a system that allowed us to use the PSN for level sharing. We are the first PSN-only title to do this, and as such there was a fair amount of “invention” we had to do.

Q – Which bit of the game are you most happy with/proud of?

DP: I think it’s probably the basic flight mechanics. When I started making the game (over 3 years ago now), there was a lot of tweaking with thrust / rotation / gravity values, but that has now been fixed for a long time. The very nature of the game means the craft control is crucially important, and I’m pretty pleased with the way it works and feels. I’m also quite pleased with the glow effect we have. It has taken a lot of tweaking and tuning during development, but it’s working pretty well, and the game looks really dull in comparison if it’s turned off.

DJ: I think the editor is pretty amazing, you forget when you are deep in it creating levels, but the tool is really easy for novices to pick up as well as having technical depths for more experienced users – allowing infinite possibilities to creative gamers. I can’t wait to see what people come up with, crazier stuff the better!

SG: If I’m completely honest – the whole thing. The guys have done an astounding job, and they’ve made me exceptionally proud.

Q – Why PSN and not Xbox Live Arcade? What was so attractive about PSN as a platform?

DP: We showed the game to Sony – and they said they were interested almost straight away. I had sent an earlier version to Microsoft some time ago, when it was just myself developing it. They expressed some interest, but wanted online multiplayer, and this was simply not possible on a financial basis (for me to buy the required development kits) or to get all the work done on my own. So, we’re pretty happy we went with Sony – they’ve shown a lot of faith in us getting the job done, and mostly just left us to get on with it.

SG: Sony are incredibly open about working with small independent developers, be it offering development support, or just plain opportunity to work on the Platform. Whereas Microsoft are a tougher nut to crack. We’ve dealt with Microsoft on multiple occasions and to be honest, unless you know the right people there you can’t even get in the door. That alone is enough for me to want to continue our relationship with Sony at this time.

Gravity Crash is released on the 24th Nov 09 on the PlayStation Network.

Q – Firstly, what’s the inspiration behind Gravity Crash?

Dave Parsons (DP): Well, I suppose it ultimately goes back to a mis-spent youth spending a long time playing 8-bit games on early home computers. This introduced me to games such as “Thrust”, and a variety of other gravity/inertia games, and I was always charmed by the simple mechanics which were fun to play with regardless of the rest of the game. I had been wanting to make a proper game of that type for a long time, so when I had some time off in between jobs, I made a start on a PC game which eventually led to the PS3 version.

Q – What was the thinking behind including a level editor?

DP: I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the idea, but I know the designer we had at the time was pretty keen on the idea. We knew that inclusion of an editor would be a great feature to include, but obviously it has entailed a lot of work for us. But we also knew that we’d need some way of constructing levels for our own use (the original editor which I had been using for level construction had gone through 3 different iterations, but was still extremely fiddly and slow to use). So, all of our game levels were created using the very same editor people will have access to. We did have a few extra features available to us, but nothing major.

Stewart Gilray (SG): From my perspective it seems the perfect way to introduce some of the players to this type of game, and indeed into what makes up games like this, via them using the editor. It was something that sat in the back of my mind from day one.

Q – How long will it take on average to knock together a decent level using the editor?

DP: A simple level can be put together in a matter of a few minutes. To make a level really good takes a lot of testing and tweaking though. This is something that we can’t really assist with the editor, so we have just tried to make everything as simple as possible to use. I’m sure an interesting, playable level could be put together in less than an hour.

Q – How difficult was it to come up with the trophy challenges? Were you trying to avoid the boring, reach x number of points trophies?

DP: Initially the problem was simply finding the time to think of them. Once we got started however, it wasn’t too difficult to come up with a lot of ideas – we could easily have done more if allowed. We have only one silver, and all the rest are bronze, because we’d rather have lots of trophies than a few high-value ones. I suppose I had in mind an idea of roughly the sort of things we wanted, so it became a question of choosing challenges to fit.
SG: I have to agree with Dave, however there were a few stops and starts, we had some ideas, but they were either too simplistic or too trite in that everyone else has done that type of trophy objective.

Q – How easy was it to port the game over to the PSP?

DP: Well, when the code was originally started, it was aimed at low-spec PCs. However, even a modern low-spec PC has a lot of processing power. The general game code isn’t too demanding, but things like the numbers of particles have needed tweaking. Our PSP guy, Paul Carter, has been doing a great job with the conversion, and the biggest task has been to re-write all the rendering code for PSP.

Dugan Jackson (DJ): From an art perspective, a number of the more complex objects have had some subtle refinement to suit the PSP better, and many levels have been modified to suit the PSP’s screen and view, but you get all the objects the PS3 version has.

Update 23rd Nov 09: You can read part II of this developer Q & A here.

Gravity Crash is released on the 24th Nov 09 on the PlayStation Network.