John Carmack PCGamer interview...next engine to have "unique texturing on everything"

[AlexV]

OTOH Parallax Occlusion Mapping is more complex, looks better AND is quite performance intensiveWould`ve been nice if they supported that, though I doubt it.

 

[amk]

What, a 32,000 by 32,000 pixel texture over the whole mesh?

FWIW, GarageGames' Torque Shader Engine supports "megatexturing" with its terrain engine. They're still working on the art tools though. Apparently the MT and height map can be of arbitrary size, although the JPEG limit is 64k by 64k - search for Garney. Note that TSE is (literally) thousands of times cheaper for indie developers than the engines mentioned elsewhere in this thread. BTW, Ben Garney is my 3D hero .

 

[Junkstyle]

He didn't invent stencil shadow or DOT3 bumpmapping either. Nor do UE3 or cry engine bring any really new stuff. Sure, you can boast about your supporting of parallax mapping and whatever but every other engine will have it as well.

So I guess it's more about the implementation and how you use the features rather than features themselves. (Carmack's reverse and normal mapping everything for instance)


that said I'd like to know how well will run quake wars on my geforce 4!
with every new carmack engine people feel it's time for upgrade and bitch about it and resell their wildly expensive hardware to buy even more expensive hardware..
But as quake 3 based games run fine on a voodoo2, doom3 runs as fine on my gf4 (which is much better than say an X300SE for that). Keep in mind doom3 shadowing and lighting was made to run on NV10.

Carmack does wonders to get the best of what so quickly becomes "outdated" cards and I respect him much for that.

Exactly but in Doom3 he didnt' call it MegaDOT3(TM) technology. My whole point is if they are going to use some gimmicky marketing name for some kindof "new" process it better be new. For Carmack to be calling it MegaTexture(TM) it's just ridiculous.

 

[KimB]

Exactly but in Doom3 he didnt' call it MegaDOT3(TM) technology.

No, I believe he called it Polybump.

 

[AlNom]

I thought that was a Crytek term.

 

[amk]

No, I believe he called it Polybump.

Renderbump? AFAIK a fairly standard term. Polybump is Crytek's.

 

[zed]

That's the one; look where they mention "virtual displacement mapping" which is what Epic calls parallax/offset mapping.

ok thanks, i wasnt aware of the marketing term 'virtual displacement mapping'
i can see where the term comes from
virtual reality == terrible replication of reality that wouldnt fool a 5yr old
virtual displacement mapping == terrible replication of displacement mapping that wouldnt fool a 5yr old

OTOH Parallax Occlusion Mapping is more complex, looks better AND is quite performance intensive

true now thisll be something to boast about, whilst its not much more diffucult to add to an existing engine, it comes at a much greater cost thus the engine has to a lot more streamlined

 

[KimB]

virtual displacement mapping == terrible replication of displacement mapping that wouldnt fool a 5yr old

I would beg to differ, provided it's used in the correct places.

Anyway, it's no more a marketting term than parallax mapping is.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Exactly but in Doom3 he didnt' call it MegaDOT3(TM) technology. My whole point is if they are going to use some gimmicky marketing name for some kindof "new" process it better be new. For Carmack to be calling it MegaTexture(TM) it's just ridiculous.

I get your point.
Still, mega means big/large, the name describes exactly what the stuff is about and it sounds better than "BigAssTexture (TM)". And someone else would have called it Gigatexture

(remember Giga Texel Shading? )

 

[idiom]

Megatexture sounds better than Gigatexture anyway

 

[neliz]

Megatexture sounds better than Gigatexture anyway

MegaTexture shader 1.1

 

[RejZoR]

I get your point.
Still, mega means big/large, the name describes exactly what the stuff is about and it sounds better than "BigAssTexture (TM)". And someone else would have called it Gigatexture

(remember Giga Texel Shading? )

That was used on GF2 GTS (Giga Texel Shading) cards and it's not exactly something that NV made up (exactly). As far as i remember from those days, GF2 GTS was the first GPU capable of outputing 1 gigatexel...

 

[KimB]

That was used on GF2 GTS (Giga Texel Shading) cards and it's not exactly something that NV made up (exactly). As far as i remember from those days, GF2 GTS was the first GPU capable of outputing 1 gigatexel...

Well, I don't think it was actually capable of outputting 1 Gigatexel, but it did have the core clocks for it. It just didn't have the memory bandwidth, and nor did it implement any of the bandwidth savings technologies that are common today (frame/z buffer compression, for example).

 

[sonix666]

I just don't understand that they didn't call the technology BFT (Big Fxcking Texture), which suits the iD terminology much better.

 

[Simon F]

I just don't understand that they didn't call the technology BFT (Big Fxcking Texture), which suits the iD terminology much better.

You forgot to add "9000"

 

[RejZoR]

Well, I don't think it was actually capable of outputting 1 Gigatexel, but it did have the core clocks for it. It just didn't have the memory bandwidth, and nor did it implement any of the bandwidth savings technologies that are common today (frame/z buffer compression, for example).

Yeah, theory and reality are always two different things Yet, it got that name from that hehe

 

[Cypher]

I just don't understand that they didn't call the technology BFT (Big Fxcking Texture), which suits the iD terminology much better.

If it makes you happy, I'm currently doing a little experiment which should produce similar results as MegaTexture (based on all of the information I've scrounged together on it) that I'm calling "RFBTexture" (short for really big texture)

 

[Intel17]

And LOL at the "John Carmack is the guru of all what's 3D".

In terms of real-time game graphics, I'd tend to think he's a guru. Look at what he's written, and the ideas he has. How many games have engines which can render scenes as nice as his stuff?

In anycase, it'd be a dream come true to be as proficient and creative as him.

 

[boltneck]

The thing is Procedural Generated Content doesn't necesarilly imply that it's 100% "algorithmic" based.
You can create procedural content that uses bitmaps, and hand created model, as a part of the generated content.

Just like what some games are actually doing. It's not as memory efficient as what full procedural generation is, but it helps a lot nevertheless. Some games on PS2 actually do that. It pushes the polycount sky high, it doesn't have the habitual "procedural" look to it, and it's, of course, a lot easier than classical PGC to work with for the art team.

And LOL at the "John Carmack is the guru of all what's 3D".

He is one of the fathers of 3D game technology. Without him would there be an Epic, or a valve or a DICE, or crytech?

 

[CosmoKramer]

He is one of the fathers of 3D game technology. Without him would there be an Epic, or a valve or a DICE, or crytech?

Yes. Carmack didn't invent 3d graphics, many ideas are several decades old --> if not Carmack then someone else would have created the 3D killer app.

Further, I'm not even sure everyone agrees that id created the first 3D killer app.