ID megatexture technology
category: general [glöplog]
What exactly is it and how does it work? I am really curious to know but till now I haven't found a good explanation rather than just hype.
At the beginning I thought it was procedural texturing like in 64k intros or something similar. But someone told me it's not that. But it is to store all the textures of the game in a big file (some 2GB or so) called Megatexture (hence it's name). And somehow from that big data file to be able to create seemless textures with various details on it (rock, dirt, etc) that don't look like a big repeating texture.
So,. what is it? Are there little pieces/tiles of these elements in this big data file that are combined together in various ways to create everything? Or is there something more? Because the first doesn't seem as much revolutionary in this way I imagine it, maybe there is more into it I don't know. Who can explain me in little more detail what is this tech anyways?
At the beginning I thought it was procedural texturing like in 64k intros or something similar. But someone told me it's not that. But it is to store all the textures of the game in a big file (some 2GB or so) called Megatexture (hence it's name). And somehow from that big data file to be able to create seemless textures with various details on it (rock, dirt, etc) that don't look like a big repeating texture.
So,. what is it? Are there little pieces/tiles of these elements in this big data file that are combined together in various ways to create everything? Or is there something more? Because the first doesn't seem as much revolutionary in this way I imagine it, maybe there is more into it I don't know. Who can explain me in little more detail what is this tech anyways?
It's funny, he talks about diversity and on the screenshots all the trees look the same.
prolly SpeedTree's fault, not Carmack's ;)
it's a way of parameterising your world so that every texel in your world can be unique - and that the parameterisation can be automatically generated rather than done by hand. and that the parameterisation keeps spacial localisation - so you can have one massive 20gb texture covering the whole world uniquely, but only need a small piece of that in memory for the visible area of the world. the parameterisation looks something like 3d->2d hash function.
it's a way of solving a) unique texturing of the stuff in the world (particularly useful for normalmaps, lightmaps and so on); b) streaming that in an efficient way. so yes, it's useful for helping to solve a certain problem.
is it super clever? of course! everything carmack does is super clever and we should absolutely worship him whatever he does.*
*in case you didnt realise, im being sarcastic
it's a way of solving a) unique texturing of the stuff in the world (particularly useful for normalmaps, lightmaps and so on); b) streaming that in an efficient way. so yes, it's useful for helping to solve a certain problem.
is it super clever? of course! everything carmack does is super clever and we should absolutely worship him whatever he does.*
*in case you didnt realise, im being sarcastic
