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John Carmack Discuss Mega Texturing
An anonymous readers writes in to say that "id Software has introduced a new technology dubbed Mega Texturing that will allow graphic engines to render large textures and terrains in a more optomized way while also making them look better. Gamer Within has Q & A with John Carmack on Mega Texturing."
It may be insignificant, but I accidently saw two relative commands in Doom3, r_showMegaTexture and r_megaTextureLevel.
FYI:
optomize - v. From Greek optos which means: visible; see AND optimize
So optomize is a new word that means: to optimize the visual effect !
It's not a spelling error You spelling nazis !
John Carmack. He's a pretty famous game programmer, and together with John Romero he made FPS games popular.
will it make 3D games, especially FPS ones, any less tedious?
The graphics are good enough already. Latency is too high for proper internet play - at least, I don't like doing really well at BF2 for ages then getting killed at the last minute because 0.1 secs of lag gets my squashed by my own side's tank - and the AI of bad guys in one player games is laughable.
Less gong, more dinner, please.
This is exactly why Carmack owns my wallet and why ID Software does so well. Gamers rejoice!
0 replies and the site was already moving really slow. Here's the text in case /. kills it.
Publish Date: 01 May 2006
Cain Dornan
One of the most respected and well-known game developers in the world, John Carmack hardly needs any introduction. Having mastered the skill of game programming, Carmack co-founded developer id Software, and has also worked on such classic series as Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D.
In this Question & Answer with Carmack, he discusses the new MegaTexture technology, which will be used in the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for PC. Definitely a worthy read for any programming, designing or general development enthusiast, as well as any gamer slightly interested in the development process behind games.
Q1: What is MegaTexturing technology?
Answer: MegaTexture technology is something that addresses resource limitations in one particular aspect of graphics. The core idea of it is that when you start looking at outdoor rendering and how you want to do terrain and things in general, people almost always wind up with some kind of cross-fade blended approach where you tile your textures over and blend between them and add little bits of detail here and there. A really important thing to realize about just generally tiling textures, that we're so used to accepting it in games, is that when you have one repeated pattern over a bunch of geometry, the texture tiling and repeating is really just a very, very specialized form of data compression where it's allowing you to take a smaller amount of data and have it replicated over multiple surfaces, or multiple parts of the same surface in a game since you generally don't have enough memory to be able to have the exact texture that you'd like everywhere.
The key point of that is what you really want to do is to be able to have as much texture as you want to use where you have something unique everywhere. Now normally, you just can't get away with doing that, because if you allocate a 32,000 by 32,000 texture, the graphics curve can't render directly from that. There's not enough memory in the system to do that, and even when you have normal sized textures, games are always up against the limits of the graphics card memory, and system memory, and eventually you've got hard drive or DVD memory on there, but you wind up with a lot of different swapping schemes, where you'll have a little low-res version of a texture, and then high res versions that you bring in at different times, and a lot of effort goes into trying to manage this one way or the other.
So when Splash Damage was starting on, really early with Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, they were looking at some of these different ways to render the outdoor scenes with different blends and things like that. And one of my early suggestions to them was that they consider looking at an approach where you just use one monumentally large texture, and that turned out to be 32,000 by 32,000. And I - rather then doing it by the conventional way that you would approach something like this (i.e. - chopping up the geometry into different pieces and mapping different textures on to there and incrementally swapping them for low res versus high res versions), just let them treat one uniform geometry mesh and have this effectively unbounded texture side on there, and use a more complicated fragment program to go ahead and pick out exactly what should be on there, just as if the graphics hardware and the system really did support such a huge texture.
In the end what this winds up getting us is the ability to create a great outdoor terrain texture that has far more complex interactions than anything that you would get with any kind of conventional rendering, where you've built it up out of pieces of lots of smaller textures on there, where they do some sophisticated things with growing grass up between bump maps. And then you can go back and do hand touch ups in a lot of different places to accent around features that are coming out of the surf
It's a shame the old id folks all split off and went their own way really, Carmack is indeed the god of graphics programming but although Romero lost the plot and couldn't hack it on his own, id's games have gone downhill since he left along with the loss of American McGee, Paul Steed and so on. The id story is a perfect example of why a good game needs everything and a demonstration that nowadays good graphics don't make a game.
The other day I was watching my son play a FPS game and I thought "Wow, my son in really learning a valuable lesson in the sanctity of life here. Shoot your own guy for his ammo!" I started on 3d FPS with Doom and over time I sort of drifted away from games. Playing Doom I was shooting a bunch of really pixeled bad guys. Now they look and act pretty real.
The creepiness factor kicks in for me after a certain amount of realism. When do we stop with the terrain and model/skin realism, when we can no longer tell the difference between games and live-action movies? I hope for my grandchildrens' sake that FPS violence doesn't come to that.
http://googlefight.com/query.php?word1=optomized&w ord2=optimized
Optimized wins by a landslide
And curiously enough, spell check beats out spellcheck by an even wider margin.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
John Carmack is a Genius in the gaming industry. Quake 3 was by far the best game of its time. Unreal Tournament was fun, but it just wasn't Quake 3. I hope he continues to be innovative and keep the gaming industry steaming forward, and maybe create a few more games thats never been done before.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I tend to agree. The symbolism present in classic Doom and Q1 levels was something that I enjoyed in particular. I guess id picked up its tendency for up-and-down friendships from Trent Reznor.
Do you see what I did there?
Dear god, this was in PC Gamer like 6 months ago!
I live in Id Software's hometown. If you want i can go stalk him for you ^_^
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
... before Creative Labs asserts a patent over this?
This is a very interesting technique for realistic terrain, but I wonder what advantage this approach would have over procedurally rendered textures? I very much like the idea of being able to (effectively) zoom infinitely into a texture being 'generated' as opposed to 'drawn'... and the strengths of modern consoles play to this procedural generation quite well (PowerPC chips, Cell chips). Maybe thats why Carmack isn't so interested?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Carmack is really good as a person who pushes teh technology.
As a game developer, though, it's just not there. anytime I hear about an id game now, I just wait until someone brings out a truly great game using the engine that Carmack has developed.
Seriously - let's review teh last few: Doom3? Enter room. Kill. Lights go out. Kill more. Repeat. Q3A? See also: UT Q2? See Q1. then the origin Doom games. Then Wolfenstein.
id software make great tech demos. Not great games. Beyond the engine, id's games do nothing that hasn't been seen in all the other clones. They get a pass on gameplay though, strictly on name.
I guess I can!
Reading the headline minutes after reading this sure got a chuckle out of me.
>Q10: Why do you think other developers haven't done anything like this before?
FarCry had a very similar technology, which is what allowed it to render vast outdoor spaces at a time when DOOM3 was retricted to claustrophobic dungeon-type environments.
To be fair to Carmack I have read that he's aware of this and mentioned CryTek in an interview where MegaTexture technology was discussed.
Simon Hibbs
Epic MegaTexturing, because the Unreal people wouldn't find it very funny.
Dynomite!
Uniquely texturing entire terrains sounds pretty cool, but the concept isn't entirely new - just an evolution on an already-existing idea.
.plan thing some years ago - anyone want to find it?
I think the Myth RTS games from Bungie used very large textures for the terrain, and this moved on to Halo - terrain there is drawn using a large, low-resolution texture - the red, green and blue channels are used for the colour, while the alpha channel is used to determine which of two detail textures should be used - e.g. grass or sand. It works quite well. I think Far Cry does something similar, but more advanced still.
The former are still low-resolution, though - but the not-a-game Celestia has 'virtual texture' support, for rendering silly levels of detail on planet surfaces. Like, up to 128k by 64k pixels. The textures are split into many, many files for each level of detail, which are streamed in from the hard disk when required. Works fairly well.
Combining the two approaches, though, seems very new - the 'Mega Texturing' from John Carmack is probably dramatically different from an implementation point of view, and sounds rather interesting at any rate - the description of the upgraded, non-Quake-Wars version makes it sound like it could uniquely texture a whole world beyond just terrain, so could work for simulating real cities, as opposed to smoke-and-mirrors game cities.
I'm sure he talked about this in a
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
High quality graphics are great, unless in the process the quality of the game ( story, environment, gameplay, etc) is forgotten. I would rather average graphics and great game-play, over average game-play and great graphics.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I want the option. Not specifically for the gore, but to know that level of detail is possible.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I've already patented placing any texture on any polygon.
What I want to know is whether or not ID will patent this technology, and of course as to whether it actually is patentable. I know John is a major advocate of abolishment of software patents (he famously drew a parallel between software patents and being mugged), but surely with new technology like this he's put in a position where if he doesn't patent it other people will.
The question is: can using a very large texture with fragment shaders on top be patented? I'm not qualified to answer that but if so surely John & ID are put in a difficult position.
Personally, I think software patents are a terrible thing, which could potentially leave software innovation in the hands of the few largest most litigious software companies in the world which benefits nobody (except their stockholders).
Great idea though John!
The development of Duke Nukem Forever can now continue. Believe me, it'll be worth the wait, when you see the results.
I'm all for the "optomized" version, it will "definately" look better, and we "wont" even "loose" quality. I think all of the programmers will adopt it; "there" sure "too".
I want a job where accuracy doesn't matter... just like the Slashdot editors - where do I apply?
This is neat. It's been a shortcoming I've noticed in most games, where landscape textures tend to be lacking.
However, what we really need is gameplay innovation. Actually, what we really need is for developers to stop making every last first person game a damn shooter. Can't they do anything else with a first person perspective. The potential here is enormous and yet it looks like developers have a fetish with gunplay.
There have been games with potentially strong storylines that get mired down by this nonsense. There's little discovery and certainly no problem-solving. These games come down to who has more firepower and occassionally discerning some basic pattern in enemy movement.
Maybe the problem is that these developers invest so much energy in graphics that there's little room to refine the other aspects of the game. Or they just think that the consumer doesn't want to do anything other than destroy things and kill people.
Heh, no need for stalking, but perhaps you could buy him s stiff drink for me? hehehehe!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
What ever happened to voxels? Remember games like Deltaforce, Comanche and Werewolf? That was back in the days when CDs were the big thing and those terrains looked beautiful, and I'm sure with a bit of research were also destructible. Think about it, terrain that will actually explode.
While I've been extremely time-limited lately, I've always wanted to get back into playing with 3d development and I've been looking a lot at sci-fi space-based games. In terms of visuals, one of the biggest problems I've had with many of the ones currently available, is that space games generally tend to go with the "large and looming" aspect. You have these really big objects, such as starports, battlecruisers, or planets. Making a texture that would nicely cover them would be huge (especially the planets). Therefore, when you get close you start seeing lots of nasty pixellation. The same has held true for many games such as FPS's etc with wall-textures. Nice-at-a-distance, crappy up-close. But it's moreso in the space games.
Of course, having nice smooth textures is nice, but the next step would be better mesh-conversion from simple to complex based on distance. I've heard of this being worked on and/or possible used, but I've not yet seen a game that would use it. How about a space-game where you come up on a planet. You get close, textures go pixelly, and then you "crash." What if you could get in nice and close, and then not only do the textures increase in detail realistically, but you so does the mesh. So at this point, you can actually move right in to the 'ol planet and find a nice dock to land on as the round-ball-from-a-distance becomes more realistic with mountains and various human settlements/bases.
Alternately, my plan would be to use MextTextures until you get close, and then maybe use a cutscene where you break atmosphere before ending up nearer the surface (otherwise mapping the geography of a whole planet would be insanely time-consuming for a large space game).
Carmack is a programming genuis, but I'm afraid all this big talk about PLAYABLE unique, detailed outdoor scences and 32-64 player vast outdoor battles are really coming from a company and programmer that has never released an engine capable of these features.
Carmack is continually pushing the envelope for textural detail and geometry, always at the price of map size. The numbers of online player for Doom3 and Quake 4 are proof of failed attempts on Ids last major releases.
I'm very, very skeptical that ET: Quake Wars will be able to deliver cutting edge graphics and massive outdoor scenes.
For multiplayer games, there is a short list of successful games that have delivered quality graphics and massive maps:
Tribes 1-2
BF1942
BFV
BF2
Id is completely missing from the list.
Bigger Boobies at longer distance!
Too bad the shadow technique he used in Doom3 is patented by another company.
is what I'm waiting for. Mega Texturing is so last magnitude.
No kidding. There is a sports bar across from there offices!
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
your half right. better/bigger textures do not make a game better.
The only mega-texturing I'm interested from Carmack is the charred hulks of Armadillo Aerospace craft on the Texas playa. C'mon John, FLY SOMETHING! Build it, fly it, break it! Whatever happened to your X-vehicle?
Who cares about Doom? Build the future!
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Never got the option myself.
Did the game force your kid to shoot his own mates to get their ammo? No? Then what made him do it? Possibly the way he was educated?
I am sick and tired off people blaming their behaviour on games/movies/music/books/cave paintings. If you are an asshole that is because you are an asshole probably raised by assholes.
I often go out of my way to keep the NPC's save just as an extra challenge and because it is so fucking rare to not be the only person around. Apart from the enemies but they don't count since they never stick around for long. Your son aparently doesn't see them as company but as disposable ammo carriers.
Tip, lock your wallet in a safe and make sure he doesn't know the combination or he might just decide to increase his allowance on his own. Yes, over your dead body. After all, those FPS taught him how to shoot and all didn't they?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't see this as anything revolutionary or even big for that matter. The idea that you use a ground texture has been around for a very very long time... recently there has been many different techinques to handle this such as texture blending and many other ways. The idea that you can use such huge image files over a large area is nothing new... it just has never been done with a single image before which doesn't drop off qulity over distances like most engines do. This, in my opinion is just one of the next step logical steps now that game developers have alot more power and space to work with.
Does "optomization" mean "optimization" or is it some slang combination of "opto-" and "optimization" I'm not familiar with? (Since the article is about improving game visuals, "opto-" would almost make sense...)
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
At last.. now I can look forward to Quake 5 offering a previous unparallled highly detailed panorma of three hundred shades of brown.
thank you now i can finally enjoy commander keen with out lag!
..more optomized
Optimized? Do you get paid?
will allow graphic engines to render large textures and terrains in a more optomized way while also making them look better.
Perhaps the submitter and Taco should "optomize" their spell checker software.
my misspelt cock, that is
Here is an interesting article I saw in Doom3World.org: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=1 0673
Check the fourth post. Here are some interesting links about ClipMapping/ClipTexture:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/Courses/2002/BigDa ta/papers/Texturing/Clipmap.pdf
http://www.sgi.com/products/software/performer/pre sentations/clipmap_intro.pdf
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc .cgi?coll=0650&db=bks&srch=&fname=/SGI_Developer/P erf_PG/sgi_html/ch15.html
What about Daikatana? That rocked! The aliens overrunning Earth and only Duke to defend the planet. Oh wait, wrong game. Daikatana sucked.
You may then want to consider an algorithm like ROAM which allows dynamically varying mesh level of detail: in brief, triangles are recursively broken down tree-wise until either maximum triangles or sufficiently low visible error is reached; bump mapping or light mapping really helps because simple vertex lighting leads to disconcerting "pops" as new vertices with different normals are inserted. Pairing ROAM with this texture zooming technique could give some really spectacular results.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
The best info I find about how the next Gen consoles are going to stack up, I find from devs.
Read how the devs that are working on them, and what they are liking, I find provides better incite than PR prelesses, or Pony shows for the press.
Press releases are garbage, reading inbetween the lines of Carmack's or Sweeney's comments provides far more information about where consoles are going.
His software crashes less often than his rockets do :o)
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
"Q14: Do you think that the MegaTexture technology will be accessible to mod teams? I'm making the connection there in terms of thinking of some of the smaller teams out there.
Answer: It doesn't help them. In general, all the technology progress has been essentially reducing the ability of a mod team to do something significant and competitive. We've certainly seen this over the last 10 years, where, in the early days of somebody messing with DOOM or QUAKE, you could take essentially a pure concept idea, put it in, and see how the game play evolved there. But doing a mod now, if you're making new models, new animation, you essentially need to be a game studio doing something for free to do something that's going to be the significant equivalent. And almost nobody even considers doing a total conversion anymore. Anything like this that allows more media effort to be spent, probably does not help the mods."
A pretty honest and insightful answer, if you ask me. This is a feature that'll allow the big boys to make ever-more realistic environments, but it'll mean indie developers and mod developers will have to work that much harder to make anything comparable.
Carmack says:
And one of my early suggestions to them was that they consider looking at an approach where you just use one monumentally large texture, and that turned out to be 32,000 by 32,000. And I - rather then doing it by the conventional way that you would approach something like this (i.e. - chopping up the geometry into different pieces and mapping different textures on to there and incrementally swapping them for low res versus high res versions), just let them treat one uniform geometry mesh and have this effectively unbounded texture side on there, and use a more complicated fragment program to go ahead and pick out exactly what should be on there, just as if the graphics hardware and the system really did support such a huge texture.
What does it mean? Unless I missed something, the closest approach to describe how MegaTexturing works is "a more complicated fragment program to go ahead and pick out exactly what should be on there". So? Carmack talks about how awsome the technique is but he won't tell us how it works in reality. Of course, he has no obligation to tell the world his trade secrets, but the article itself seems mostly just to be there to hype this technology.
If you truly pioneered a technique before anyone else, you shouldn't need to worry about defensively patenting the technique - the publishing of your software sets the prior art date. So, if anyone tried to patent it after him, he could, theoretically, challenge the patents saying he has prior art. (I don't know that the concepts in 'MegaTexture' technology are necessarily unique - someone earlier mentioned FarCry as doing something similar, and halo, so in theory the companies that published those previously might have patented the techniques they used).
Anyhow, the point is, you don't need to patent something to prevent someone else from patenting it. There is a concept of building a portfolio of patents to use defensively, but that's something different. That's a game of tit-for-tat. You try to build up enough patents covering a wide enough swath that anyone trying to sue you for patent infringement will probably be infringing one of your patents. So you make a cross-licensing deal with them to make the problem go away. Unfortunately, to play that game, you probably need thousands of patents, and so you need to be a huge, rich company like Microsoft, IBM, etc.
Something not mentioned is what video cards support the mega texturing technique. The new NVIDIA 7900 hardware (a card aimed specifically at gaming computers enthusiasts) supposedly supports it. However, the only real way to test that is to get a copy of the new Doom.
Joshua McClure
Founder, WidowPC Gaming Computers
"If you want beauty, go play Uru ;-)"
Mysterious Journey II has one thing in common with a FPS. Both use a game engine (Jupiter) to render everything (Tron 2.0 used it too. Fear uses the latest from Lithtec) Uru: Ages beyound Myst also used a game engine as well. So one could look good and play well.* Mind you the graphics still aren't as good as say Myst: Revolution.
*Cryteks latests; Crysis will look good and play even better. Although Unreal 3 will give it a run for the money.
How can anyone say graphics today are good enough? They're damned good compared to what we used to have (check Half-Life against Half-Life 2), but we're nowhere near the realism required for a truly immersive experience.
Sure, gameplay is the most important part of the game, but presentation, including graphics, sound, and general design, play a vital role in creating atmosphere. You could be playing the most amazingly fun game in the universe, but if it's running at 320x240@4bpp/43Hz interlaced with nothing but flat colours and no textures or sprites anywhere, and sound consisting of a single beep at the start of the game, you're looking at a pretty bland experience.
Conversely, you could be playing the most realistic game in the universe, and it might be about as fun as dragging a sack of bricks up a hill. That's why it's important to let the people who are in charge of these separate tasks do what they have to do. The programmers and designers can focus on gameplay, the graphics designers and artists can focus on the graphics, and the sound engineers and composers can focus on the sound. When it all comes together, you can have your cake and eat it, too, as long as each does an equally good job.
Realistic graphics can only add to an already-great gameplay experience. However, high-resolution does not equal realistic graphics. The issue with a lot of the next-gen consoles is that the high resolution absolutely has to be married with massive textures and aggressive filtering in order to create the same effect as their standard-resolution ancestors/competitor. You can have your games running at 1920x1080, but if you can't push the big textures through, you're not going anywhere but to mudsville, population your monitor. The higher the resolution, the more the need for higher resolution textures to create believeable graphics. If the textures are blurry, then you've successfully shot yourself in the foot as far as presentation goes.
Like I said, great gameplay is paramount. Graphics and sound are secondary - However, bad graphics and sound in a modern video game take away from the presentation of the game. If you're playing a first person shooter, and you've got a pistol that, for no real reason, looks like a twig, and the sound it makes is some guy saying "Bang", it'll be funny at first, yes. But it'll also get quite annoying very quickly and you'd end up hating the game for it.
Or at least, I would.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Doesn't someone say this every time game graphics are mentioned?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
games based on Valve's game Engine look graphically more polished and have more realistic effects (fog, light diffusing through fog, moving water ..etc). I have personally played quake2, ut2004, CounterStrike, CounterStrike-Source (or CS2). Haven't played doom3 or quake3.
is it a matter of DirectX vs. OpenGL?
no troll, just a gamer trying to get my head around the engine technology.
Hexen was a Raven Software game.
This hi-res movie of Quake Wars went up recently, and honestly it doesn't look that great. The ground textures looks flat and splotchy. I understand that the "MegaTexture" tech may be about making games run faster, not necessarily a graphical imporvement, but, for example, I've seen screenshots and videos of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. from a couple years ago that looked much more photorealistic (the environment, not the character models which were below average looking) and when I played a leaked version it ran really fast and had huge draw distances and enviroment to explore.
His fundamental argument -- texture tiling is just a form of data compression -- is at the heart of why I think this is not the right direction to go.
... what have you accomplished?
Fundamentally, texturing objects is a way of saying "this object is made of something that looks like this". Using textures as mere "appearances" is a shortcut for representing geometry and physical properties. E.g. if you represent a door in a wall made of bricks and mortar as a rectangle with a picture of bricks and a door on it you are taking a shortcut. If you're going to build highly complex environments, giving artists a 4GB bitmap to paint isn't going to suddenly fix your problems. (Carmack doesn't say that it will either.)
In the end, a balanced use of geometry and textures will get you far more than going hog wild with one or the other.
I also wonder if this is an appropriate way to use artists' time. If you imagine a typical World of Warcraft "zone" suddenly your megatextures aren't going to come close to cutting it anyway. If your artists end up filling megatextures with repeating fill patterns
I've seen bits on mega texture for awhile but I have yet to be able to divine how the hell it is suppose to work.
My best guess is that one starts with a tiled texture like you would in any other game but that some engine allows artists to add modifications to the texture in different areas. Thus you take up less memory than actually having a full texture of that size but each area has it's own unique touchups.
Is this really what it does? I'm getting really frustrated at these stupid little gaming articles that never really explain the tech.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Go and try your luck with the Freespace Source Project. The engine they have is quite pretty but it can always be prettied up even more.
Its nice that finally someone has used this kind of technique in a game, but unless Carmack gives more detail, things like this has been done before. ex. SGI's clipmapping technique
Luxology and Allegorithmic have this really cool concept. They are taking images and using them as the seeds to generate procedural texture shaders.
I can't explain it well enough, so take a look.
I don't know how useful this is in the game realm where things have to be realtime, but it could definitely be very useful for film and video work. I am eager to try it out.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
Sigh. This is clearly not trolling. Someone please meta-moderate the above post up. Over zealous moderators are becoming a real problem around here....
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
Quake: you could have a full-blown singleplayer map, tested and everything done in 2 weeks, by a single person.
Quake 2: basically the same, but the development time increased slightly due to increased complexity of the game worlds
Quake 3: map geometry development time alone pushed to over 2 months, designers now have to turn to other people for help with custom textures and meshes if they can't develop them by themselves (further increasing the dev time).
Doom 3: singleplayer map development time pushed to over 6 months, now you need to make meshes, textures are WAY harder to do than in Quake 3 and be able to write map scripts.
Quake 3 was already pushing the level of patience custom content producers have, because you had to spent a relatively long amount of time working on it before having it reach a state where it would be comparable to "commercial quality". With Doom 3, the situation is even worse. I can only expect that the next generation of FPS games will REQUIRE a full blown team to make even small level packs (let alone Total Conversions). The days of the lone, all-around game map designer are long gone.
Why does everybody always get their panties in a bunch when Carmack "discovers" a technique that has been used before?
I can confirm that we did this "MegaTexture" thing in "Myth: The Fallen Lords."
Same thing a few years back when he "discovered" event journaling.
Been there, done that. Alert the media when Carmack discovers a new game play mechanic that isn't just "Doom rehashed."
-alexr
"Left hand, right hand, it doesn't matter. I'm amphibious."*
* The basketball "Shack" as opposed to "Shaq."
Call me greedy, but I'd kind of like the textures and good gameplay.
Flight sims would benefit from this, since you're often several thousand feet int he air looking down at dozens of square kilometers of texture at any one time. Low resolution or repeating textures soon become very apparent.
How long till we can incorporate something like this into FlightGear? Or is it bogged down with IP issues?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Even rockets need 3D computations. For example, if the rocket explodes on the launch pad, how far way do you need to be out of the blast zone?
Let me get this straight, what he is advocating as MegaTexturing seems to be the use of arbitrary-sized continuous textures which the game engine manages in texture memory on the fly, instead of the normal practice of using layers of fixed-sized tiled texture maps. Isn't this what Google Earth does already?
So basically your complaint is that gamers standards have evolved higher. There's really nothing stopping a modder from using low-poly models, simplistic levels, and two-note sound.
"The days of the lone, all-around game map designer are long gone."
Same with OS kernels. I don't see anyone wanting to go back.
Maybe modders need to take the same steps that kernel developers and enterprise programmers have and develop better tools, instead of wishing for the good old days.
Given John Carmack's recent statement of support for in-game adverts, it will not surprise me to see a gorgeous, mipmapped, mega-textured plug for Coke® or a Hummer® in id's next title.
Do some elementary calculations kiddies.
32,000 x 32,000 is 1024 million pixels. (A gigapixel?)
Presuming 16 bits per pixel, that's a couple of gigabytes. That's not going to be sitting in texture memory. Think about it.
The way I read this is pretty simple. Presume you have a texture that large to work with. Not necessarily just one but potentially many. Now go to town on the art.
Unless I'm completely misreading his intent, I suspect a decent portion of the magic is probably in the pre-processing. From what I can gather he's proposing that instead of getting your artists to do the compression by constructing textures and appying them to geometry, he's proposing the artists go insane and then get the pre-processor to chop it up into optimum texture slices.
Which, when you think about it, is kind of a "duh" moment. Of course code is going to be better at compression than human beings are.
"John Carmack. He's a pretty famous game programmer, and together with John Romero he made FPS games popular."
This is kind of a myth. Romero pretty much had nothing to do with it.
ID's games have been winners because of one simple thing. Technology. In game design terms they've always been example of what NOT to do. Quake was a sweet piece of rendering but other than that it was one boring as hell game. I have never completed it because I cannot do the same thing over and over again in different environments and find it entertaining.
"What about multiplayer?" I hear you cry. Simple. That's another win for tech. Quake multiplayer pretty much lucked out in the gameplay stakes. Nothing out there like it at the time and frankly Team Fortress was a much bigger step in gameplay terms than simple deathmatch ever was.
I have never seen anything which demonstrates that Romero even remotely understands the fundamentals of good gameplay. The guy is a level designer and gameplay is something which goes far beyond simple architecture.
ID creates the engines. And then Raven Software (or Valve) creates good games out of them. Quake was boring, Half_life was brilliant. Quake 2 was marginally better, Soldier of Fortune was vastly superior. Doom 3 was brilliant technologically speaking but the gameplay was a gross disappointment. (Dark thing in corner, BOO! Dark thing in corner, BOO!). Quake 4 was significantly better (although not up to Raven's usual standards).
ID does good tech. ID does good art (environments and creatures), it even does good level design. Id just doesn't do good gameplay and never has. On a fundamental, they just don't get it. They think good gameplay is a single player version of deathmatch. They think it can be dumped down to walking up to stuff and going "activate". They've got a few toys in Doom 3, but there is precious little in the way of actual game DESIGN.
I keep hoping their next game will finally demonstrate that they've got it, but they're stuck in DeathMatch nirvana in which multiplayer is king and single player is just the player shooting at bots with varying scripts.
Fundamentally, the problem with volumetric imaging for a video game is that you expend large amounts of storage space and CPU power tracking parts of the environment that the player will never see or interact with in any way.
The more traditional vertex mesh is a much less data-intensive way of representing the parts of the world that the player actually cares about. Unless tunneling through terrain or slicing objects in half on arbitrary planes is a big part of your gameplay, it's probably not worth the effort. Of course, that ability to arbitrarily slice into a volume is precisely why medical imaging uses the voxel model.
Ok, so we've had the usual "games are not what they used to be" discussions, and we've had the hype. So any ideas on what the nitty-gritty is ?
Sound to me a bit like the old "fractal compression" technique that was all the rage several years ago. Here you would presumably have one (or more) extra levels on indirection in your texture, so that, at a lower res, you could say "get these pixels for over there, using this transform". This matches quite well the hints about how tiling is just a special form of compression. The trick is (as it was for fractial compression) how to optimally generate the transformations.
Level of detail wise, the terrain does not render with any sophisticated geometry morphing situation. That's one of those things that for years I think most of the research that's gone into has been wasted. Geometry level of detail on terrain...there have been thousands of papers written about it, and I honestly don't think it's all that important. The way the hardware works, you're so much better off setting down a static mesh that's all in vertex and index buffers, and just letting the hardware plow through it, rather than going through and having the CPU attempt to do some really clever cross blended interpolation of vertices.
Ahh, the sweet sweet sound of infinite memory! Geometry detail algorithms ARE useful and relevant when you are dealing with tough memory constraints, especially on embedded platforms. Sure, it's nice to be able to just leave all the models in memory and just glDrawElements over and over, but this is only an option for platforms with a lot of memory or those that can quickly load the data over and over.
He was quite clear how it works. Understanding the process and its pitfalls (I'm curious as to how he got around severely warped terrain) is quite basic if you have even an inkling of how 3d graphics are displayed.
Not ID. Not that I dont give props to Carmack for essentially innovating the true first great FPS multiplayer games, but Doom, Quake and everything else that followed were bound by the same model. They were always FPS games that took plce in small enclosed maps.
TRIBES was truly the first great mulitplayer game that took the FPS outside of encloded maps and brought team gameplay Or independent play together in some of the best CTF action to date. In fact, even with dated graphics nothing comes close to Tribes CTF. I look forward to Enemy Territory and Im glad to see Carmack taking it outside teh box. Im sure the graphics will look great, but just like Bf2 Im going to almost guarantee the game will have a height ceiling, and it will have an enclosed boundry and that is where Tribes and Tribes 2 excel. The other awesome aspect about Tribes is that you will discover that the idea of a jetpack was a brilliant one. You could have a game with large maps and yet jetpacks never let the game come to a crawl. Thats wht Bf2, and Im sure Enemy Territory wont get too big with the maps because walking or eben running across large terrain is tedious and there will be only a limited number of vvehicles to take you anywhere.
Myst (and Riven, Myst 3 Exile, Myst 4 Revelation and Myst 5 End of Ages) only had 1st person (which at the time of flat-from-the-side adventures was very unique), but was also pre-rendered (Myst 5 is the exception here), so texturing wasn't a problem :-) You may be referring to Uru, often nicknamed "Myst-online", which is a real-time 3D environment and offers both 1st and 3rd (there is no "2nd", BTW) perspectives, but 3rd is usually preferred (and was in the mind of the designers, 2st was added as an afterthought by popular demand), because of some rather hideous jumping "puzzles".
"2st was added as an afterthought" should've been "1st was added as an afterthought"... That's what I get for typing about my favourite game series early in the morning :-P
Granted, I didnt read through TFA thoroughly, but here's my thoughts on that:
;)
The urge for bigger (and thus more detailed) textures is nothing new. I remember when S3 introduced S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) and they had some tweaked maps for Unreal out - it was a blast.
Then M$ licensed it for the upcoming DirectX and dubbed it DirectX Texture Compression (DXTC).
Devs claimed that DXTC was incredibly slow due to the framework, so it essentially only worked on S3 cards with special S3 graphic libs. (MeTaL) I dont have to talk about the S3 market penetration, do I ?
The maximum texture size advertised was 2048x2048, then. Given a rather limited bandwidth of AGPx4, which i s roughly 1GB / sec. (talking AGP 4x pumped).
A Savage4 had less than 1GB/sec bandwidth. And in said Unreal levels were barely playable.
Nowadays graphic cards utilize as much as 40GB/sec and above.
So, lets assume the following: S3TC compressed textures sized 2048x2048 were compressed at a ratio of 1:8
A texture would take up around 512 KB.
Now, those mega textures would sport 9x the size. Even compressed 1:8 one texture would take up toughly 135 MB.
While the improvement in bandwidth is ca. factor ~50, the difference in actual size is factor ~300.
If it wasnt really viable then, how (or, more interesting: why) would it be feasible now ?
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
All you needed for a Doom monster was 5 bitmaps (front, rear, side, and 2 half way in between). The "models" for ATC (Aliens Total Conversion) looked like photographs of an off-the-shelf Alien model from a comic store. They were rough and faded and poor quality but that didn't matter, because it was all dark anyway. In something like Doom 3 you have sophisticated lighting that is almost designed to show off the quality of the models. Fundamentally, expectations were lower.
their offices.
Kann wi optomize artical speeling to?
"What if you could get in nice and close, and then not only do the textures increase in detail realistically, but you so does the mesh."
You mean like in elite 3 (1995)?
Great. Now Duke Nukem Forever will have to do ANOTHER engine change and their game will be delayed again!
VISSIM guys have been doing this for years! SGI calls it Clip-texturing and Multigen-Paradigm calls it Virtual Textures. I'd be very surprised if Carmack didn't know that this technology is already out there (and patented).
"There's a reason that half the UT servers out there run InstaGib rules. Big guns are fun."
Guys and their penises.
Here is how it works! http://www.multigen-paradigm.com/support/dc_files/ Understanding_Virtual_Texture.pdf
There was at least one game that had something similar - Fronier: first encounters (Elite 3). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Encounters
At huge distances the planets were dots, flying in close made them into (approximate) spheres and and the level of detail dynamically increased until you actually landed on the planet. Due to tech limitations it all looked rather ugly though, basically rough, uncolored geometry with 3d shading.