MegaTextures (VirtualTextures) with A8?

Would be a very impressive feature for the new Acknex 8 Version in the future.

Note: "MegaTexture refers to a texture allocation technique facilitating the use of an extremely large terrain texture instead of repeating multiple smaller textures. It is featured in Splash Damage's game, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and was developed by id Software technical director John Carmack.
MegaTexturing employs a single large texture for static terrain. The texture is stored on the hard disk and streamed as needed, allowing large amounts of detail and variation over a large area with comparatively little RAM usage. The upcoming game Rage powered by the id Tech 5 engine uses textures that measure up to 128000 x 128000 pixels."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture
http://s09.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/05-JP_id_Tech_5_Challenges.pdf

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnBPqrhY3hw[/video]

my full agreement...

yes.. would be great. especially for Racing games, where you can see the Street texture really clear..

yes, indeed a great feature.

but there are things with higher priority imo.

Creating these textures seems to me to be a lot work, though.

I imagine(I've seen the video's)this is very "handy" in the end is it not the same as swapping constantly, on one hand you swap a bunch of 512pow2 textures and the other swaps out chunks in 512pows chunks....am I wrong?
The way I understood it, is it was for the artists convenience at level editing time....for the most part.

Do not get me wrong....I want I want.

This will not work greatly without a proper realtime editor and painting tools with the speed.

To implement something like this you need some multi-threaded background loading of models and textures first and a very efficient scene-management. The file and memory management including fast and good compression is the key to implement something like this. The side-effect is that it can run on systems with low memory as well (like game consoles).

We need this!

This technique offers many possibilities and we'll implement streaming textures in a future version. But probably not for A7 - the A7 kernel is not very well suited for this.

nice to hear

I'm not overly interested in "mega_anything"..streaming textures???? could you elaborate JCL?

Big Thanks, that's one small new feature for the Engine, but a giant leap for Game Designers and I wait impatiently for A8 now



@Nowherebrain, Are You a Cynic?
Some Information, (only in German)

also check out this video, a guy has made his owm implementation. incredible detail on the objects:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49vOX-_LyU&feature=related

I am not that interested in it, but I will not say I do not want to a new feature. I am a one man show, I have no time to detail paint everything, model everything, and code everything(I know what mega-textures are)so, to me streaming textures and levels are far more interesting.

i agree with Nowherebrain, i also dont care much for this feature, cant try and jump for every next gen feature we see, i'd also much rather streaming textures, levels and so on, now that would be awesome

And will you be able to create a whole level with lot of very detailled and different textures ??

Caus even today not lot of people create very detailled levels with very detailled textures already ! So why asking more power if you can't even today make very good textures in an AAA looking game ?

Just my personnal thoughts !
Yeah i prefer the planned Streamming textures to avoid the memory limits !

am yet to undertake a full level but am aware of what i'll need when i get there based on tests so far, this thinking is why gs is in the state its in, they say "noone has used the present tools to do it yet so why spend time making more"

mega textures actually are streaming textures. or is there any difference? ...and i think this feature would be quite useless without a state of the art level editor where you can paint and edit those textures.

I actually agree with dark inferno in this case. making a mega texture is actually a very difficult process. do you realize the time it takes to design a texture that huge?

The main reason for using mega-textures is to have multi-texture terrains with unlimited textures. They obviously aren't rendered as multi-texture terrains, but they are produced as such.

Such a feature would be very welcome.

Jibb

Well Streaming textures, are textures loaded when needed only in the fly.
Mega textures is creating (with specific tools i hope), a big texture containing all your level textures without siez limit like a big big File (like the old WAD games file that contained all level and textures if i remember well ?? ) !

Well let's Conitec make it and see if there is someone that will find a good use, not only bad textures put together !