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jute

Megatextures?

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I'm not sure, but the gameplay footage seemed to have tiling textures instead of megatextures. Has id gotten rid of megatextures for idtech 6?

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I still don't understand megatextures and why they're better. I know someone has explained it to me on this forum, but I'm a little dense.

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Not just megatextures...but unique stamping put on those mega-virtuall texture pages. Well....those are better if you make something like Rage's wasteland or any similar setting and just making anything to give it unique gorgeus look...if someone don't understand the value of this tech...well then it's just I'm affraid a matter of taste and lack of education!

For now Doom looks very cinematic and high tech, but it really hard to tell if they still using unique stamping there...all we saw were stains of blood on walls, floors but no signs of any grundge, rust, dirt or anything that points on unique stamping....so I think no, there's no megatextures...everything is real time - dynamic and the reason is SNAPMAP I think....you construct your map, press build and it's done instantly. This is NOT POSSIBLE WITH id tech 5 megatextures.

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geo said:

I still don't understand megatextures and why they're better. I know someone has explained it to me on this forum, but I'm a little dense.

I understand the thinking behind megatextures, but I never really got why they were necessary. IMO it addressed a problem which didn't need addressing, because I don't even notice tiling textures as long as the level designers and artists know what they're doing. Look at the 99.9% of games which DON'T use megatextures, and see how often tiling textures are an obvious issue. The OP has a keener eye for detail than mine, because I never noticed it once in all of the Doom 4 footage.

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In a game like Rage where there are lots of outdoor Monument Valley-Esque rocky vistas, the nonrepeating textures are an enormous boon, but I'm not sure how much difference they would make in a mostly interior setting. That said, I understand that The Evil Within and the new Wolfenstein use megatextures, and those games seem to be set primarily indoors (I haven't played either).

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id Tech 5's texture quality was fucking dreadful no matter what you set it to so maybe that's why they did away with them.

I mean really, the textures on characters seem ok but the environment looks absolutely disgusting. This is the only screenshot I have that properly demonstrates my point but I assure you the whole game looks like this

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DoomUK said:

I understand the thinking behind megatextures, but I never really got why they were necessary. IMO it addressed a problem which didn't need addressing, because I don't even notice tiling textures as long as the level designers and artists know what they're doing. Look at the 99.9% of games which DON'T use megatextures, and see how often tiling textures are an obvious issue. The OP has a keener eye for detail than mine, because I never noticed it once in all of the Doom 4 footage.

From what I understand, the main benefit of megatexturing in idtech5 was the ability for artists to add additional detail and paint over texture seams directly in the editor, after the map has already been textured normally. It's a tremendous feature to have for artists, and I wish something similar was in GZDoom Builder. ;P

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From https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1157/how-does-megatexture-work :

You can think of Megatexture as a sort "streaming" texture. One massive, fully detailed texture image (put simply) that is read in as sections of it are needed to be displayed


So, as I understand it, instead of being covered in multiple tiling textures, each map simply has one huge, nontiling texture laid over the geometry like a sheet. As I said, I'm not sure how it looks in newer games like Wolfenstein TNO and The Evil Within, but in Rage, the results are beautiful in organic, outdoor areas:



EDIT: Ed has a blog here discussing his use of megatextures for his Putrefier wad: http://putrefier.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-mega-texture-option.html This image is really cool:

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While the beauty shot looks nice, you get up close and the textures look incredibly gnarly like I pointed out. Doom 4 isn't going to have these large lush environments and is going to be more focused on small enclosed spaces by the looks of it similar to Doom 3, where poor texture quality is going to be noticed more.

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Guest DILDOMASTER666
SavageCorona said:

While the beauty shot looks nice, you get up close and the textures look incredibly gnarly like I pointed out. Doom 4 isn't going to have these large lush environments and is going to be more focused on small enclosed spaces by the looks of it similar to Doom 3, where poor texture quality is going to be noticed more.


So texture resolution can be increased. Keep in mind that RAGE came out for Xbox 360 and PS3, where the least common denominator was the PS3 with its 256MB of VRAM. That is no longer the case for the modern consoles, so much larger texture pages can be cached at a time. That may not be what's happening in Doom 4, but I don't know, either.

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I'd say a hybrid design that allows you to use both megatextures and tiles as needed would be optimal, with megatextures for far off geometry and traditional tiling textures for things you're capable of mashing your face up against.

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I remember Total Biscuit with Advanced Warfare examining the walls close up. Stuff like that matters when you have titans. I only notice textures when they're tiled too quickly like let's say a 128 area with 32 tiles instead of 128.

Its a game, not a museum. Move along wall noser.

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Guest DILDOMASTER666
Jaxxoon R said:

I'd say a hybrid design that allows you to use both megatextures and tiles as needed would be optimal, with megatextures for far off geometry and traditional tiling textures for things you're capable of mashing your face up against.


Megatextures do technically allow for tiling textures already, though how this would be done in id Tech 5 escapes me.

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Presumably if you wanted to use tiling textures in your megatexture you would just copy and paste that part of the image. You would probably end up adding variety to the tiling sections anyway, since otherwise it's a waste of the benefits of megatexturing. Ed seem to have used tiling textures as a base for his Putrifier megatexture, adding details and variety on top:

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Fisk said:

Megatextures do technically allow for tiling textures already, though how this would be done in id Tech 5 escapes me.


Rage's sewer DLC levels are the combination of unique and tile based texturing. When you explore eight different sewel levels of the DLC, you can find many rooms and walls look exactly the same. And they indeed have the same texture coordinate. The positive side of this is that sewer levels take up storage space much more effeciently, but on the negative side, The engine had poor real-time lighting and shadows so many of these repeated parts look a bit off. (compared to pre-baked parts of the map)

I believe Doom 4 still uses MegaTexture to some extent, at least for guns and demons, and possibly for organic outdoor levels.

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I think the megatexture thing is largely misunderstood. There's definitely still tiling and reusing of the same image space in RAGE and the other games on idtech 5. I actually sort of suspect that all it is is a super mega huge atlas texture for EVERYTHING which is just painted upon stuff. Like, not every polygon in the world has unique texturing, they just all use their own parts of one huge multipurpose atlas, and many reuse said parts, blending between them and what have you. Engines like Unity for example tend to benefit a lot from using huge atlas textures instead of many tiling ones like we're all used to, because it decreases the number of drawcalls significantly.

And it's not like games even have many polygons large enough to tile a texture nowadays. Well, some might, like GTA with their buildings, but even then developers can more than afford to cut every flat surface into faces on which to plaster a texture as is, without tiling, and they can do that to use huge-ass atlas textures and whatnot.

Speaking of RAGE, the texture resonlution was indeed horrendous in that game, but honestly... I'd much, much rather have lower res textures than obvious tiling like every other game. I mean, sometimes it's masked well, but as soon as I notice some stain, or glass crack, or just rock formation repeated several times on a big wall, my immersion drops super fast. Honestly in RAGE I was never bothered by the resolution and by the occasional texture pop-in, because I accepted it as a necessity to make the entire game look so gorgeous. It's probably partly thanks to the megatexture technology that RAGE, to me, is much easier to look at despite being very detailed - usually I have trouble just taking in everything in a scene from a modern game, but in RAGE it all looked very organic and discernible.

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During the post-show interview, Marty Stratton described id Tech 6 as a significant departure from 5. From what I can see, the new Doom is not using megatextures. I don't get any impression of the painterly quality of megatextures in the demo. Instead, I notice a lot of atmospheric effects and lighting.

I'm very disappointed by this. I'm a big fan of id Tech 5 and enjoyed immensely the games made with it (RAGE, Wolfenstein, and Evil Within). The amazing detail the engine allows breathes so much life and character into its worlds. I find games like Crysis 3, with all its bells and whistles, to be quite dull by comparison. I was hoping they would continue to iterate on this technology, which seemed to get better (less pop-in, fewer blurry textures) with each game using it.

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TheGamePhilosophe said:

During the post-show interview, Marty Stratton described id Tech 6 as a significant departure from 5. From what I can see, the new Doom is not using megatextures. I don't get any impression of the painterly quality of megatextures in the demo. Instead, I notice a lot of atmospheric effects and lighting.

I'm very disappointed by this. I'm a big fan of id Tech 5 and enjoyed immensely the games made with it (RAGE, Wolfenstein, and Evil Within). The amazing detail the engine allows breathes so much life and character into its worlds. I find games like Crysis 3, with all its bells and whistles, to be quite dull by comparison. I was hoping they would continue to iterate on this technology, which seemed to get better (less pop-in, fewer blurry textures) with each game using it.


can't really say I'm a huge fan of megatexturepop-in myself.

don't get me wrong... it was cool tech, destroyed by vram limitations and gpu limitations that still would have issues with it on today's cards.

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