Procedural Textures the Future of Games?

An anonymous reader writes "bit-tech has posted an interview, with the head of Allegorithmic, Sebastian DeGuy. In it DeGuy again makes the statement that his software (which was used to make the Roboblitz game released on Steam recently) will be used to make games 90% smaller than what they currently are. He comments on why his procedural texturing technique is an evolution of the infamous .kkreiger. demo and how procedural texturing compares to Carmack's 'megatexturing'. The article includes some pretty extraordinary pictures of scenes rendered with just a few bytes as opposed to the ridiculous sizes of modern games." From the article: "Despite some similarities, technique-wise, we are quite different in several ways. First, the inner technology (the maths) that we use is based on modern maths. We use 'Wavelets', instead of classic maths method of 'Fourier Transform', which was the mathematical technique used in the past by all the procedural texturing techniques (including .kkrieger). Our technique works on a new mathematical model that I developed whilst studying for my PhD."

Comments

Re:Creation issue

[RightSaidFred99]

The ironing is delicious. You do know that traditional textures are often created in, you guessed it, Photoshop? Ergo, his question is perfectly valid, and his point is more valid. Do you need to sit down and write code to do these procedural textures, or can ordinary tools be modified to create them.

Please try to keep up with the conversation before you mock someone else.

Re:Quality

[Chris Burke]

Of course, there is a downside. Real-time procedural texturing is costly. So if the hardware isn't up to it, the advantages of the texturing will go unrealized. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the first generation merely generates static textures on load, then uses them as if they were bitmaps included with the game. Still, once the box is opened, the potential will be too tempting to ignore.

Yeah, I bet it will be a while until they are generating the textures on the fly every frame. However, as an intermediate step one could imagine being able to easily generate a larger number of textures for varying levels of detail, rather than having to pre-determine what levels you're going to include on the disk.