3D textures have been available in hardware since the geforce 3 generation, that's four or five years now, but absolutely *nobody* seems to be using them for anything. Ok, so they're huge memory hogs with no good 3D texture compression formats, but surely there has to be some fringe uses for them, right?
For example, the holographic screens in half-life 2 is a couple duplicated layers of a standard transparent texture. If it instead had used a single 3D texture one texel deep and stretched an equivalent amount into the depth direction as the game does now with standard flat polys, I think the effect would have been more successful, especially when up-close. It might even been faster to draw...
Of course, lacking any actual implementations of 3D textures, I don't know what they'd look like when transparent or how fast they'd render... Maybe my idea is completely bogus, who knows.
For example, the holographic screens in half-life 2 is a couple duplicated layers of a standard transparent texture. If it instead had used a single 3D texture one texel deep and stretched an equivalent amount into the depth direction as the game does now with standard flat polys, I think the effect would have been more successful, especially when up-close. It might even been faster to draw...
Of course, lacking any actual implementations of 3D textures, I don't know what they'd look like when transparent or how fast they'd render... Maybe my idea is completely bogus, who knows.
