Tech 5 Demonstration done by id Software

[o'dium]

Well, the basic understanding (at least I think, somebody back me up/correct me?), is that it only uses whats needed, in other words, it draws the terrain based on pixel space. You could be looking over terrain and it could still only use 5meg of memory for example. Only the area of the screen that is being drawn fetched from the texture. also got some odd mipping as well, thats why why you load a level you get that slow "pop" of the textures loading in resolution.

Its fantastic tech, and the reason why they can have whatever detail they like.

However Carmack goes off on one about how its so good, but he forgets one thing... Storage space... Why you can fit this into memory quite easily, you cant just keep releasing gigs worth of Mega Texture. Rage is already 2 DVD's on 360, and thats a LOT for a firt person game...

[r3t]

Bluray for the win! Maybe Sony wasn't so wrong after all?

[o'dium]

Thats a different debate though... Its always nice to have more storage space...

The decision MS made was based on a) there being no real high capacity storage medium available at the time and b) even if there was, it would of made the console too expensive.

And lets not forget the other option, wait until the prices dropped before releasing the 360, and lose the lead they have over the PS3.

No, I think MS made spot on the right decision. I don't mind swapping disks for games to be honest. I used to feel good that the game I was buying had multiple CD's. When I heard Metal Gear Solid came on 2, I thought of how cool it must be. It was the talk of the playground when people bought FF8 and it had FOUR CD's. The only reason its looked down on now, is because Sony fanboys keep harping on about "BluRay FTW". Yes, its nice to have the storage space, but your still limited by what can be loaded into memory at once, which means it doesn't matter if you have 1 BluRay or 2 DVD's... The graphics, and more importantly, the gameplay, will remain the same, no?

No the only time I worry about the 360's DVD move is when First Person games need multiple disks... Games like FF? I don't care about getting off my arse to change disks 30 hours in, oh no, that will be a chore... But First Person games that are usually 8 hours long, no matter how long they quote the game being... Meh... thats still doable, but pushing it...

EDIT: doingable? lol, too early in the afternoon...

[Fender]

would of

[+JuggerNaut+]

spun.

[o'dium]

*cares*

[obsidian]

Storage space of megatextures isn't affected as much as you would think. The generated megatextures aren't actually stored on the media per se. Otherwise, it would be 1 megatexture per DVD.

2 DVD's seems pretty reasonable in 2+ years time given the current rate in which game content expands in general.

[Massive Quasars]

They call it compression.

It can do only so much though.

[obsidian]

If megatextures worked based off of compression alone, they wouldn't work at all. Watch the third Id Tech 5 demo video. You can see the source images being applied to the megatexture. So in terms of file sizes, you are looking at the total size of all the source images, not the size of the generated megatextures.

[Grudge]

Aren't all the source textures compiled into a megatexture for use in-game? Of course, they need to ship the source textures with the game if they intend to also ship the modding tools, but then again he also mentioned that the base terrain textures were procedurally generated from smaller samples.

EDIT: oh I read your previous post, so is the megatexture compiled every time when loading the game/map, it's not a one-time compile?

[TheRealZimbabwe]

This texturing thing really reminds me of the way the Company of Heroes Worldbuilder works right now. It also lets you add up stamps, and layers and layers, and really shape your design through the detail texturing it allows. It's really creative!

Of course that all has some effect on performance, which it seems it doesnt here, so thats a big difference.

[obsidian]

EDIT: oh I read your previous post, so is the megatexture compiled every time when loading the game/map, it's not a one-time compile?

As I understand it, it's "precompiled" but put together on the spot. Kind of like how we used to create an alphamap for Quake3 terrain, the megatexture is like a map of where each piece of detail is placed, and when loaded, the resulting image is processed and streamed into memory.

[Kat]

Yes, it's precompiled (not done on the fly); it's basically broken down into two components;

• The actual *image* that is the mega-textures itself, i.e. what you see in game
• The way the MT technology itself works and streams in the data

For the first part all the texture assets used to 'paint' the terrain are 'compiled' down into that single huge *.mega image so, as was mentioned above, when JC boasts about 20 gig of data he's referring to the original source files used to paint the game world, all those separate images and assets. That all gets compiled into a usable format for the technology to then take hold of and 'stream' into the game on the fly.

As an aside, the way MegaT works is going to have a huge impact on modders if they want to go the MT route; you're going to need a pretty powerful workhorse to handle all that data during the dev cycle