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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.
John Carmack. He's a pretty famous game programmer, and together with John Romero he made FPS games popular.
This is exactly why Carmack owns my wallet and why ID Software does so well. Gamers rejoice!
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...
Get a real internet connection.
- Mr. 4ms ping, never leaving campustown
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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
> Get a real internet connection.
:)
> Mr. 4ms ping, never leaving campustown
Are you sure you're not on a handy little LAN...
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.
The only thing that makes GRAW even playable was the driver upgrade I had to perform. Before the game ran around 10fps with EXTREME input-lag. With the driver upgrade, the game has the bad performance for about 5 seconds before jumping up to around 40fps.
All I'm saying is that game developers should not only push the envelope for graphics quality but also go back and try to optimise rendering of current features (current texture sizes, current post effects such as bloom)
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?
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".
Yeah, but would you really want to shoot or hack and slash a photo-realistic character for fun? That's pretty sick (IMO).
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
I'm at UIUC and the servers are all over. Indiana University, for example. I get single-digit pings on at least 20 CS:S servers.
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If you can get a 4ms ping between, say, Chicago and LA, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Are you sure you're not on a handy little LAN... :)
No, he's a college kid. He's in for a rude awakening when he gets out into the real world with a 40 ms ping. Somehow, I don't feel bad for him.
In any case, I've found BF2 to have really good netcode and totally playable up to a 100ms ping or so.
And speaking of BF2, that new Quake: Enemy Territory looks like a BF2 clone, but with spiffier graphics.
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 played TFC and CS for years with a 1000+ ping until they introduced the 1.6 netcode which basically ended my ability to play period.
It's funny to see how far connections have come since then, and what people now deam as unacceptable.
actually, i never bothered counting before. I have = 6ms pings to FORTY ONE servers.
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Buying the top of the line video card on the market is always a bad idea. Buy the second place card; you'll save a huge bundle at only a tiny cost in performance.
Also, if you commit to playing last year's games, you can also save a bundle of cash in hardware upgrades, since you never have to buy the latest and greatest.
-Z
I'm at uiuc and most of the servers that I get sub-6ms pings on are at other universities or in Chicago.
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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.
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.
Yeah, but would you really want to shoot or hack and slash a photo-realistic character for fun? That's pretty sick (IMO).
Those sick sick horror/thriller/crime moviegoers!
will it make 3D games, especially FPS ones, any less tedious?
It's Id, so no. This is the company that has spent the past 13 years remaking Doom. The funny thing is you'd think a company that focuses solely on graphics would be lightyears ahead of the competition, but honestly the cutting edge engines sort of hover near each other performance-wise.
Isn't that the point?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yeah, but would you really want to shoot or hack and slash a photo-realistic character for fun? That's pretty sick (IMO).
Your not looking at the whole picture... by then Duke Nukem Forever will be out and photo-realistic stripers for the win!
Not all games are shoot/hack and slash.
Just because we become capable of photorealism doesn't mean the technology is going to be applyed that way.
At the very least, developers might be able to abuse the new tech in a way that lets them spend more time on the other parts of the game.
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!
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.
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".
I think either point of view is based on the assumption that there's a uniform tradeoff. You don't do work on the graphics to the detriment of the playability unless you're on some very odd crack. You develop a game that you think will suit the market.
Of course, anyone that's armchair quarterbacking Carmack's choices on development effort at this point is probably not thinking in terms of reality, anyway.
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).
Once hardware acceleration took over from software, that pretty much ended the days of one rendering engine being substantially any better than another.
Maybe you're being a little nostalgic, because I don't know how anybody could have a fun time playing with a one second ping. I used to play with a 300 ping back in '97 or so, and that was fine.
1. Photorealistic... alien... yeah, right...
2. speciest bigot, you probably think it's ok to shoot NAZIs, too
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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
Doom 3's multiplayer was also limited severely by the fact that it used per-pixel, not hitbox, detection. In multiplayer, anything more than a few players and that creates an insane amount of calculations that the server has to cram through.
Especially in a larger firefights.
Registered Linux user #421033
At last.. now I can look forward to Quake 5 offering a previous unparallled highly detailed panorma of three hundred shades of brown.
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.
While I understand that some people are fanatic about games, it just seems like (according to the previous poster) there should be more financially attractive options for nearly the same level of performance.
Of course, if you're nVidia or ATI, you thank your stars for people who willingly spend $850 on a video card.
All your sig are belong to us.
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
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
Please, give it a rest already. People still know the difference between a video game and real life. If they think that what's acceptable in a video game is acceptable in real life, then you have failed to do your job as a parent.
I played all the games that the congressment were upset about in the mid to late 90s quite a bit. In real life, I've never attacked anyone.
I've just been loboptimized ...
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"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.
Can you explain exactly what these engines are doing? I read this article and it's not very specific. How does it allow you to approximate an arbitrarily large and detailed texture? How is it fundamentally different from the swapping schemes he mentions?
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
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....
I claim prior art, based on my use of crayons on colouring books when I was two years old.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
He's your son: don't allow him to play these games, then.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
You missed the point. Lag is caused in part by the fact that it takes light a certain time to travel a certain distance- this is a fundamental limit that advancing technology will not remove for the foreseeable future. Chicago is not all that far from the UIUC as these things go, so a 6ms ping can be attained there. But if you tried playing on servers in California, New York, or other countries, the minimum ping will always be much higher and there is nothing anyone can do about this, so your call for reduced lag is not ever going to be answered.
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.
:P
When games become indistinguishable from reality, why would someone waste time killing somebody in reality when you could do the same in a virtual setting without fear of getting thrown in jail? Presumably one would not need to commit crime for financial reasons, as it would be hard to afford a computer otherwise. Personally I enjoy computer games because I can do things otherwise impossible/too dangerous, unless someone invents a real life load/save (or I get insanely rich).
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.
You must be doing something wrong. You can play BF2 on a PC that's barely minimum specs and lagging as hell and still play decent. Not great and especially not sniping but you can still work as a support, engineer, anti-tank or medic, for example.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Some gameplay vs. graphics tradeoffs exist, e.g. "Do we place the camera low so the player can appreciate all the detailsin the world or high so he can see more?" "Should this explosion have all of those particle effects or should we make it simpler so it doesn't obscure the player's view as much?" but yes, they're not on the scale they're sometimes made out to be.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Small map size and crowd = fun.
I never liked people going on a 5 minute trek in Delta Force to reach the far away hill for sniper camping.\
Small map + knife, saw = much more fun.
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:
+ 5 informative? Mod the parent down! Sure, Farcry uses one giant lightmap for the whole island but it stores the texture in memory all at once, this is not what Megatexture is all about. For all the rest Crytek uses up to 8 layers of alpha blending, but you still use tiled textures, you cannot paint one big texture on the whole level terrain. Check your facts before posting.
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.
$850 would be buying it when it is just released and in short supply. The retailers jack up the price due to high demand. Regular price was supposed to be around $500.
I usually go for a card one step down from the top - I still pay $350 or so, which is a lot, but I get a card that will handle new games pretty well for at least 2 years. Of course at the end of that I'll need to start turning off some of the highest end features. A good example is Oblivion which runs like crap on my 6800GT with HDR lighting enabled, turn that off and it works fine.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.
Cause as we all know, ID software did unreal...
"Left hand, right hand, it doesn't matter. I'm amphibious."*
* The basketball "Shack" as opposed to "Shaq."
Actually, you can just play on nearby servers. Duh. Multiplayer doesn't have to mean "play with anyone in the world with low latency". And actually light could travel the distance from Chicago to LA in about 10ms. There are over 500 CS:S servers with 50ms pings from my university connection.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
Quake 3 on dialup with a 300ms ping was atrocious. The only way to hit anyone was sheer luck or if they were standing still or moving in a straight line.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
Yes, I was mistaken, it was per-polygon. Thanks
Registered Linux user #421033
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Call me greedy, but I'd kind of like the textures and good gameplay.
Hehe I used to crack up whenever I saw a scout (TFC) heroically jump into the air with the flag... and then freeze mid-jump, shaking violently because of the lag, while everyone opportunistically unloaded their clips at him.
Free electronic music for you!
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.
Just curious why per-polygon would be slower? I'm new to GL, so bear with me. From what I've learned, you can render the scene into the selection buffer, then get a small viewport around where your mouse is, and return the names of the objects within your sight. So would a hitbox method, as oppose to a per-polygon where everything is rendered, just render the hitbox itself and nothing more?
If this is a concern for you, may I suggest some extra education in the differences between fiction and reality? Actually he is learning a very valuable lesson in life if you think about it. He's learned that the guy that shoots him or his buddy is not necessarily evil incarnate, or self rightous, or crazy. But, that their presence being inconvient to someone else can result in being wronged, justified or not.
It is, in fact, a sad, but very important lesson in life, that others value their wellbeing over yours. To varying extents of course, but it is still important to point out. One reason comes to mind: war. War is very rarely actually faught for a good versus evil style reason, althought that is almost always how it is drumed up. War is usually faught because the presence of a competing government/religion/race or other group is inconvienent for the presence of another.
I would worry, however, if he acts as if this is the way things should be, or how he should act. This "Fuck everyone else, I'm getting mine!" attitude, I mean.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
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.
Because you cannot trust anything the client sends back. The client could be lying to gain an advantage.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
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.
Yet.
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.
Oh, bass. I figured he meant Christian rockers.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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
1 on 1 fighting was impossible, I always got totally rocked in CS. However, I could still defend a flag like nobody's business and flag running is all about routes more than reaction.
"gay sex" also beats "straight sex" by a landslide.
= %5C%22straight%20sex%5C%22&word2=%5C%22gay%20sex%5 C%22
http://googlefight.com/query.php?lang=en_GB&word1
Obviously gay sex is greatly preferred over straight sex.
Doom 3 is not restricted to claustrophobic dungeon-type environments at all. The game was built to the design they had made, and to accomodate the power of PC's at the time.
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.
Yeah, but would you really want to shoot or hack and slash a photo-realistic character for fun?
No, but I might want to have sex with them.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
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.
Kann wi optomize artical speeling to?
Wow, nice troll.
Care to back up that assertion with some fact? I thought not.
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).
Here is how it works! http://www.multigen-paradigm.com/support/dc_files/ Understanding_Virtual_Texture.pdf
"My problem with game relism is not just about my son and his age (he is 17 btw.) It is the that people are being desensitized to violence. As games have gotten more realistic they have allowed people to dismiss the tragedy of violence against humans. Aliens and monsters not withstanding! Kill them!"
Good lord, it's not as if we've had VIOLENCE in our communities since the dawn of time, throughout every age, and have had the popular media cover anger, strife, war, and all violence through art, music, plays, movies, television. These popular media make us *FEEL*. The effect any emotional media has on you lessens through time and repeated watching, whether it's a romantic flick, a gutburster horror flick, a stirring tale of personal bravery, or a violent "revenge" flick.
Thanks Tipper, but take your "for the children" rot and go somewhere where you can't damage society through the attempts to control all media, let alone the escapist ones.
Bad, lazy parenting lets kids run wild, not videogames alone.
If you're just playing a troll-role, try something a little crazier or more interesting, I'd give that persona a C.
I hope you're not saying that anyone who could afford a computer would have no financial incentive to commit a crime, because that would be retarded. But I'm sure that's not what you're saying.
:P
True. But in the context of parent-worried-for-videogaming-childrens-sanity it is kind of far fetched. I don't think videogames play a part in murders committed for financial gain.
Fair call.
:(
It was meant as a joke, but I can certainly see why you'd take it otherwise. No offence intended
Ahh sorry, yes I missed it. Hard to tell tone with just one word :-) Sorry for jumping on your statement.