Suggestion: QuakeWars silent/out-of-game/p2p updates


(jimb0) #21

Procedural is just a very generic name for a myriad of techniques to generate stuff (like saying “rasterized” when you mean “painted it in photoshop”). It means that unless you try and compress something, you’re generating something dynamically. But it can’t be used for everything, quite the contrary.

On .kkrieger case, for example, textures are generated by code - instead of graphical files, they have some functions that generate the images. For example, a guy draws a square (by code), applies noise, some emboss, change color, voila - it’s metal, done on whatever size you want, with like 100 bytes (sans graphical api). Then he duplicates it and changes the color and that’s a “brick”. The same can be done for wood, some kinds of grass, water, walls, etc.

But of course that’s really limited, If you look at kkrieger’s generated textures you’ll notice they’re fairly ‘simple’. So it’s a programmer playing the part of what a designer would do on, say, photoshop. It’s not practical for real games because you have to code the entire steps taken to draw that thing. For textures that are hand-painted, there’s no mathematical equivalent.

On megatextures’ case, apparently it’s procedurally generated on the tool (so you can lay some kind of textures fast, like drawing grass until a certain height, snow and water to other height, stuff like that). It’s done like that to save design time, but the end result is just a flatten image because if you want to add some touches to it, you can.


(carnage) #22

But of course that’s really limited, If you look at kkrieger’s generated textures you’ll notice they’re fairly ‘simple’. So it’s a programmer playing the part of what a designer would do on, say, photoshop. It’s not practical for real games because you have to code the entire steps taken to draw that thing. For textures that are hand-painted, there’s no mathematical equivalent.

not nesaserily, a tool can still be used to make the textures then automaticaly record a history of events the artist/designer did and export that rather then the actual texture so no coders getting the hads dirty. depending on the tools avaidable in the texture design tool i think some pretty uniqe textures could be made with some practice

and hand panted textures could be used sparingly in JPG format to save on disk space. and maby even used as stages in the texture creation allowing the artist to blend over a hand painted texture in several images so its get more use and still looks unique in each use

and if alpha chanels could be saved as JPG or even seperate that would save so much memory. it realy iritates me in ET that to apply and alpha channel you have to save another three channels with 8bit per pixel each. it would be cool if you could save alpha channel as a seperate 8bit per pixel image and attatch it via shader to a JPG

…but there isnt any point realy sounds like a lot more work then actualy just creating textures the conventinal way and when in run time the images will use just as much RAM. i double you would want to replace the mega texture with something like this. it might be posible to generate images in this way for the basic texture and apply them but it would involve a massive porcessing time at the start of every map and since most people dont have 6GB of RAM they would be file swaping while the texture was converted to a format that was streamable before compresion. also the mega texture holds a lot more inforamtion than the actual texture

it might be posible to use the mega texture just to hold the info about groudn type and apply texture the old fasionaed way removing the need for a mega texture. by the looks since the maps are made in radient (???) then apply textures the old way would be posible but component of the game might not be compatable without a mega texture e.g. structures might only be placeable on the megatexture


(jimb0) #23

Yeah, but at what cost? Unless it’s something simple (ie: vector drawings plus some special effects like the uses normally used on photoshop), it’s not feasible either. You would have to build a complete system and add needed features to it… then the game would need to redo all that when loading stuff instead of only loading a raster image. Everything just to save space? Imagine doing what a texture designer normally do today, that’s using several different source images then a lot of manual stuff to get it right. The end image is a lot smaller than any ‘procedural’ description of what he had just done, because it would have to take source material in account to.

For games like .kkrieger, or when you’re submitting something for a demo compo where every byte count, having these vector-based textures is a great solution. But not for a real game; the feature threshold is too low.

Procedural is just a generic name so in the end there’s a lot of stuff that CAN be done or generated procedurally, it depends a lot on each case. I just think that generating textures like .kkrieger does will never be doable on any real because it’s not worth the effort - it’s too limited and to hard to do for little to no advantage.


(McAfee) #24

Sometimes you have to wait for problems to come to you, before you hunt them down. If you try to solve every problem before it arrives you will go nuts.

We don’t even know release dates…


(jah) #25

nice video interview with paul from SplashDamage @ gamespot:
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/video_player/popup.php?sid=6150902&pid=928340

almost at the end he talks about this megatexture tech. maybe you techy guys get something out of it. i didn’t want to believe in maps with 500mb’s so sorry for my rants on previous posts. it will be hard for mappers to get their custom maps published and recognized (it’s a lot of bandwith and most users will think if a custom map is really worth to download before hitting the ‘get file’ button - i know i will).

imo

J


(Chruker) #26

it will be hard for mappers to get their custom maps published and recognized (it’s a lot of bandwith and most users will think if a custom map is really worth to download before hitting the ‘get file’ button - i know i will).

Perhaps the game will come with some extra texture packs. That would be neat.


(mortis) #27

If they include at least one texture pack for each kind of terrain, that would be awesome. For example, some prefabs in the following terrains:

Arctic
Boreal (Northern forest)
Desert
Steppe
Grassland
Old Growth Forest
Seaside
Alpine
Volcanic
Tropical
Badlands
Lunar (moon base, or something)
Post-holocaust (a smoking city devastated by a nuclear strike)


(carnage) #28

i think that you misunderstand how the mega texture works

the texture is initialy applied in the same sorta way as tiling textures. then in the megatexture the program then can add some more detail dependant on angles rock formations etc to make it more unique. then the artist cna go over and have there go with it. but when eported it comes out as ONE texture. ONE totaly unique texture. not made up from texture packs or terrain styles its an actual texture. if you included pre made ones your texture would be stuck and would look stupid cos it would not suit the shape of your terrain

this is what i can gather from the carmack interviews

the initial terrain could be made up from texture pacsk but the end product will be a large image. cant say this for definate but the interview surgest this


(mortis) #29

Yes, upon further reading, I tend to agree. That’s a shame.

I love the idea of megatextures, but until FIOS is in every home, it’s going to be a challenge.


(Black_Forky) #30

I have two questions. If you wanted to save map download size by just tiling the same texture over and over could it still take the same ammount of memory (8 mb)? And would it still be possible to use the MegaTexture tech to differentiate between rock, road, gravel etc? I know the map would not look nearly as good but it would seem to save people a lot of downloading by just having the one portion of the Megatexture that detemines how the ground reacts and no image data.