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by amagumori
3234 days ago
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just to set the record straight, idtech5 uses "megatextures" / sparse virtual texturing, which is actually a very clever performance enhancement - a low-resolution render of the scene is made to determine the needed mip levels for the visible textures, which are streamed from disk into an atlas texture. then there's a redirection texture that maps from the textures needed by models to the UVs of the correctly mip'd texture in the atlas. it's a great solution to disk and API latency in games. to call it bad because it's a big texture instead of 50 textures individually streamed from disk...it's not a lack of compromise. it's a great engineering solution, you dingus! |
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The rationale behind megatexture is that storage capacity increase exponentially but our perception doesn't. There is a limit to what our eyes can see. In fact for his future engines, John Carmack wanted to go even further and specify entire volumes in the same way (sparse voxel octrees).
And sure, the way megatexture is implemented is really clever, and yes it is for a good reason, but it doesn't change the fact that it makes some of the biggest games on the market (Doom is 78GB)
When I said no compromise, it is no compromise for the artists. The whole point of megatexture is to free them from having to deal with some engine limitation. They don't have to be clever and find ways to hide the fact that everything is made of tiles, they just draw. And yes, this is a good thing, but a good thing that costs many gigabytes.