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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.
The graphics are good enough already.
Speak for yourself. When I can't tell the difference between a rendered character and a live one, then I'll start wondering if graphics are approaching "good enough". Of course better physics and AI is also necessary to improve immersiveness, but there's no way I'd say graphics need no further improvements anytime soon.
Oh no... it's the future.
That's right, why would you want to buy UT which had 7 gameplay modes out of the box and bots that weren't either retarded or cheating, not to mention the easiest mod switching system of seen to date in mutators; when I could have the "innovative" perfection of Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch?
The modding community filled the gap eventually, but that's not points for Q3, that's points for all of the dedicated people who were upset by the lack of options in that fanboy love-fest.
Sorry if I sound bitter about it, but I can recount back to the days when PC Gamer stated, more or less in its review that UT was vastly superior to Q3 in every imaginable way, and then gave it a lower score and handed the editors choice to Q3 instead. They were flooded with mail but never really could explian whose bathwater they were drinking when they either wrote a review that was too good or a score that was too low. I suspect a rolled up wad of hundreds under the table and nothing more.
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Quake 3 Arena
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Unreal Tournament
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System Shock 2
Clearly, System Shock 2 is the best of its time. Wait, what about adjacent years?-
Blood 2
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Half-Life
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Sin
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Shogo: Mobile Armor Division
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Thief: The Dark Project
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Unreal
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No One Lives Forever
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Deus Ex
Oh crap, a huge list of games, most of which are better than Quake 3.Now second, Quake 3 was a brilliant engine. However, there was very little game on top of such a beauty. Looking past the aesthetics, it was the same damn thing as Quake 2. We have a gauntlet, a machinegun, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, a railgun, and an uber weapon. And everybody used rocket launchers so it didn't really matter anyways. Tack on deathmatch and CTF and you have yourself a rehashed multiplayer FPS.
Unreal Tournament had a flurry of guns (I really don't want to list them all), but most importantly, it had unique features. Get tired of domination? There's CTF. Oh wait, CTF is really boring. We have assault. And boy, we have assault.
Don't get me wrong. Quake 3 was technically superior. Better? Debatable. I'm obviously siding with UT here (I love me assault). But Quake 3... innovative? What the hell?
Depends on how ugly the alien is.
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.
What makes Q3 great is its incredibly simple laser-beam focus. There is almost nothing extraneous in the game. It's like a bonzai tree or a zen rock garden.
I've played almost every game you listed. Many of them four or five times (some even more) and they all have more story than Q3, a lot of them have more weapons or more game play modes. Some even look better.
But, Q3 was installed and played almost daily on my computer from the day I bought it (a few weeks after it became available) until about three months ago.
Q3 is deathmatch and maybe capture the flag if you swing that way. It is nothing else and it never claimed to be anything else.
I think that's more because you know exactly what's going to happen than because you're being desensitized to violence. The first time, things that are happening catch you by surprise. Now, I don't care how many times you've seen Saving Private Ryan, if you get placed in a real battle situation, you're going to freak out (unless you've had other training, of course).
The same thing is much more easily seen with comedies. The first time I see a good comedy, I spend most of the time laughing. I'll never laugh as much in subsequent viewings. It doesn't mean I'm getting desensitized to comedy. It means I've seen that scene before.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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.
Indeed. I'll disagree with every single reply so far, and say procedural textures can look very good, especially when used in combination with bitmaps. Perlin noise can be used to make all sorts of textures, such as the usual marble, or more interestingly, granite, woven fabric, fur, rust, wood. Anything rough and irregular. Modern graphics hardware can do a lot of work on a per pixel basis, although at the moment, perlin noise generation is a bit slow. These things really need to have decent noise generation built in. The other bonus is that you get a third dimension thrown in for free.