A silly question about Carmack's Megatexture

[micron]

The question....

Why didnt anybody think of this before?, this revelation surely had to have crossed the mind of some other game programmer at one time or another. Was it not possible previously or something?.....will it do away with unsightly effects like we're seeing in games like oblivion, and BF2, where objects magically appear off in the distance as we approach them?

One big texture, with unique objects, instead using identical, redundant objects in a scene to save memory......why is this a new thing?

 

[Polygon Crusher]

The question....

Why didnt anybody think of this before?, this revelation surely had to have crossed the mind of some other game programmer at one time or another. Was it not possible previously or something?.....will it do away with unsightly effects like we're seeing in games like oblivion, and BF2, where objects magically appear off in the distance as we approach them?

One big texture, with unique objects, instead using identical, redundant objects in a scene to save memory......why is this a new thing?

What you are reffering to with BF2 is not the same. BF2 objects disappear quite near becouse of the horrible LOD settings for each object. Oblivion has horible texture LOD for distant land textures and objects becouse it renders in a "ring" and each increase in diameter is a huge increase in added rendering.

 

[micron]

We see that in a lot of games

Will the megatexture method have that also?

 

[Saem]

Well you'd want the texture to be easily stored in memory and not incur huge performance hits. I think this delves into the way that video cards and their drivers handle (or don't) moving textures from vram and system ram.

 

[zsouthboy]

The reason it really hasn't happened before is, IMO, the virtualization of video card memory hasn't existed until now.

That makes it much easier to do effeciently.

Also, the install base of 256MB (and up!) cards has made it a more realistic endeavor anyway.

 

[Reverend]

Why didnt anybody think of this before?

See your very next comment below.

this revelation surely had to have crossed the mind of some other game programmer at one time or another.

Which means you're saying someone probably must have thought of this before.

I don't think we'll ever know if JC was/is the first person to think and implement it, which I believe is what you're essentially asking.

Also, there are so many game programmers, so many areas of focus, so many different targets to meet, etc.

Was it not possible previously or something?

Oh, it was possible, just not very practical. Depends also on what you mean by "previously".

 

[hughJ]

Oblivion has horible texture LOD for distant land textures and objects becouse it renders in a "ring" and each increase in diameter is a huge increase in added rendering.

I thought its LOD was setup in cells/squares. Objects inside the rendered cells get the full LOD, objects outside get the crappy distance-LOD. Which is why there's a very sharp and sudden quality drop at the boundry?

 

[Polygon Crusher]

I thought its LOD was setup in cells/squares. Objects inside the rendered cells get the full LOD, objects outside get the crappy distance-LOD. Which is why there's a very sharp and sudden quality drop at the boundry?

Yes it uses cells but it places them in a ring or oval. This is to keep down the memory usage down and save some rendering power (actually not if it would only draw detailed textures for ground at distance). Neverthless this is to prevent loads whenever you turn due to the limited amount of RAM in the consoles and sadly they used the same cell crap in the PC version (how sad to see a gig of RAM not being in use in this game of my 2 gigs ).