About MegaTexture

(stalkerr) #1

A straight extract from a John Carmack’s interview:

It’s an internally developed project which actually uses a newer version of that technology. I did the stuff for Splash Damage maybe a year and a half ago. At the time, it was only useful for the terrain, which is a special case with this kind of deformed flat surface, and you couldn’t use that technology for the buildings and the vehicles, and stuff like that. They’re still kind of struggling to get the memory requirements for that down right, because the terrain is still managed by a small block of memory for the megatexture, but everything else is still dealing with static allocations on things.

Source: http://spong.com/detail/editorial.jsp?eid=10109375&cid=&tid=&pid=&plid=&page=2&cb=203

So, John Carmack developed a MegaTexture technology for QuakeWars a long time ago and now they have a newer version of this technology but are they going to share it with Splash Damage? Will Quake Wars use this “old” version of MegaTexture techology? Would’t the game be better if it used the newest version?

(raztafar1an) #2

If Quake Wars switched to the new technology, it would probably further push the release of the game back because they’d have to redo all the maps in order to work with it. There comes a time when a project just needs to accept the technology they have available and with with it. Duke Nukem Forever couldn’t accept this and that’s why its known as vaporware these days. They’ve gone from using 5-6 different engines if I’m correct.

(Nail) #3

it was all explained elsewhere in these forums when that interview came out, I’m too lazy to search it out

(Joe999) #4

words … i’m asking myself how something can be old when it hasn’t even been released yet? and how can something be new if it doesn’t exist, i. e. nobody has ever seen it in action? maybe the new stuff is only experimental or theory? who knows. who cares. quake wars looks pretty much awesome the way it is.

has anyone heard if a beta will be released in 2006? they said “in 2006 sides will be chosen”. well, they can still keep word by releasing a one map beta, they didn’t say on how many maps sides would be chosen :smiley:

(SCDS_reyalP) #5

Just because something isn’t public doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or people haven’t seen it in action. I doubt that Carmack and the other ID guys were lying when they talked about it.

(ouroboro) #6

I don’t see how it could matter much. It sounds like the new id IP will be able to use Megatexture on more stuff, rather than being limited to the land mass as in the case of ET:QW. But WTF else would it be good for anyway? Who in hell needs a megatexture for a jeep or a house? In any case, the SD version will be new to me and nearly everyone else here…

As for DNF, I predict another engine change and ground-up rebuild. Unreal 2.5 is already looking crusty next to some of the whizbang stuff out there, and those guys are clearly so afraid of releasing anything short of the best game in history that they won’t be able to tolerate having fewer shadows/lights/specular-bumpmapped-'splosions than the competition on release day.

(FireFly) #7

This is old news as Carmack mentioned this before:
ET:QW will use megatextures for terrain only…
The next gen ( occording to carmack) will use the megatexture on both terrain as on buildings…
SD is not going to use this “new” stuff

(Lanz) #8

I just wanted to tell about a small thing I’ve learned in life: There’s always something new and better around the corner, but sometimes you just have to accept what you got right now and move on.

ps. I actually wrote half a page here with lots of filosofical thoughts, decided that people would call me crazy and that removing it was a good idea. Sitting at home all alone on a Saturday evening without my girlfriend might have something to do with it.

(Joe999) #9

nobody said they were lying, but mentioning it is similar to sony speaking of a playstation 4 (concept?) while the playstation 3 isn’t even out yet. there’ll be always a better one, question is: when?

(Nail) #10

better question might be: in what ?
Carmack is into phone games now :wink:

(richmanrush) #11

fun games I might add :wink:

(Tron-) #12

Go look at a wall of a house or something similar ingame and see the tiling in the texture.

You traditionally have a choice, very tiling textures, or massive textures that eat through memory quickly. Not only would megatexturing the entire world allow you to improve the visual detail of scenes, it could potentially make a game run smoother by lowering its texture memory requirements.

nobody said they were lying, but mentioning it is similar to sony speaking of a playstation 4 (concept?) while the playstation 3 isn’t even out yet. there’ll be always a better one, question is: when?[/quote]

Not really, because as has been said this isn’t Carmack talking about what he plans to do in the future, this is discussion of what has already been done and what they are building their games on right now. If you’d prefer they could just not tell us anything at all?

(Lanz) #13

This is so fucking simple to put it bluntly since my small wink earlier didn’t catch on. It was developed to late for it to be of interest for QW, as in already being in full production and not worth switching over to. It’s that simple, anything else worth talking about? I mean there’s probably a big story back there somewhere about how they lied to us that can be facinating to debate.

(Black_Forky) #14

Hmmm, I’m confused. If the megatexture would be for vehicles/buildings as well, would that make the textures independent of every map or would there be like 2 megatextures? One for vehicles and stuff and one for the maps.

(Hakuryu) #15

Normally a model has a texture that is X by Y large. The limitations of this are that the larger the texture gets (and more detailed) the larger the amount of memory is needed to handle it.

Megatextures supposedly only use a small fraction of memory; in the case of QW terrain I think they said 20MB of video memory. The compressed megatexture for QW terrain is said to be around 500MB. A 500MB texture would not be feasible to keep in memory along with other assets, but a 20MB texture is nothing.

To answer your question, every single item would have its own megatexture. All terrain, player models, vehicles, static objects, etc. The benefit is that you can have extremely detailed textures on everything, without a huge memory hit.

(Obli) #16

I thought that the figure was about 8MB of video ram, which is even more incredible