id Software's next game... info?

[Richard]

From the artist perspective or, at least, from the engine persepective, you mean? ?

Both (but see below).

Because in the facts, it's just a lot of tiled 512x512 (or whatever the decided granularity is) textures streamed when needed.

Not quite. It's a single texture that's cut up into several chunks which are then selectively loaded at run-time. So they aren't tiled (as in "repeated") because each chunk is unique. Right-Now™ the engine is loading eight 512x512 chunks but these aren't textures in the regular sense as they hold whatever specific chunks of the MegaTexture that are needed at the time.

Anyway, I would take "too blurry" soft edge SMs over any Volumetric Shadows.

My problem with SM right now isn't the blurriness but the aliasing which can be downright atrocious at certain angles. Walk up to the "apache" in BF2 and circle strafe around it - notice how the shadow edges go from perfectly smooth (nearly as harsh as shadow volumes) to blocky and aliased so resolution is a definite problem. Shadow volumes may be harsh but they are consistently harsh while shadow maps can look better than SV in many situations but can also look worse in as many others.

Btw, a long time ago JC talked about a solution for SM resolution across vast landscapes he was investigating which, in hindsight, seems similar to 3dmark 06's CSMs.

 

[Reverend]

You can alleviate the texture aliasing by smoothing the Shadow Map silhouettes. There's a lot of papers on the subject.

None of them provides a satisfactory solution IMO. It's interesting to note that there aren't that many responses to my rather open-ended question that is related to this.

 

[DudeMiester]

You may want to look into variance shadow maps. It's not without it's problems, but it's got a whole lot of potential. There's a discussion going on at Gamedev.net in their graphics forum about it. Also, you might want to look at the Cone Step Mapping thread too, it's like relief mapping and just as fast, when you add in perfect accuracy and soft self-shadowing lol. It's more then fast enough to be used in games, and afaik has no significant problems. Very cool stuff.