[PC] RAGE

VirtualBox (with Wine3D there is a chance for DX10 too) or XP-Mode.

 

VMware Workstation. Decent price to.

http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/

 

$141 USD? Wow. That's kinda steep IMHO.

 

kinda...

 

its worth it.
And VMs are just about the only reason to have 12GB or more of RAM on a "Game Box"/workish_station

 

so not only do you have to buy a vm but it runs better if you have 12gb or more of ram

doesnt win7 have a xp mode with its own vm

edit: just read about it and it doesnt do opengl or directx

 

It's not the best VM in the world. It can't do 3D, for example.

 

Didn't the one you used to be able to get for free from MS do directX? I played some games in it under vista and it did fine.

 

I have an OS X VM that does DX9c at reasonable rates for $69 (often on sale for $49) but on the PC I have to shell out $140+. Ouch. Fortunately most of the VM I do is for servers so VirtualBox does me fine, but I'd love to see a W7 version of Parallels for $69.

 

You buy the program. Creating a vm is free and works like installing any other OS except it is withing the program frame. More RAM is better if you will be running multiple virtual machines as they each use RAM as specified by you. I have each of my vm set to use 1GB RAM and my system has total 8GB RAM. I can play BFBC2 while WinXP is installed in a vm and second vm is downloading mod files together with host OS. Multitasking FTW!

 

I consider getting a motherboard with IOMMU, namely the ASRock 890FX Deluxe4 ; IOMMU is present with the 890FX chipset.

With Xen 4.0.x and probably other solutions down the road it appears to offer the holy grail of native graphics on a VM - using the actual drivers. so a single machine can host a linux installation as dom0 (maybe doing some networking and storage tasks), and run an ubuntu desktop guest, a debian server or more along as testing some stuff, and a gaming-only Windows 7 VM with full access to graphics hardware .

if sharing the card back and forth between different desktops is a problem then you might use the ubuntu desktop from the windows one, with VNC going through a virtual network card at a ridiculous bandwith.

a 150€ motherboard is a sacrificial buy though, have other hardware to get first.

 

http://rage.com/en/about-rage
If you see it, you'll shit bricks.

Question: After MT is finished, it will be devided in tiles. So is it possible, that the game uses updated tiles (game patch or so) instead of original tiles?

 

On the PC if the megatexture is stored on a HDD there is no reason it could not be updated.

On the consoles one could update certain areas, but it would be a more tedious process like a decal over the original probably.

 

Im still confused as to why its better to have one huge big ass texture as opposed to for example 20 smaller ones

 

The point is that the artist doesn't know and doesn't care how many textures are there.
They can look at a place that seems low-detail to them, go in there, paint with various tools, and the additional texture detail appears at that spot. They never have to close "one texture" and start editing another one because they met an arbitrary border, e.g. where one building ends and the pavement starts. To them, it's just a texture world; the toolset takes care of chopping this up, processing, compressing, streaming, decompressing and rendering whatever bits are needed.

 

And as game worlds become more complex and detailed, it is imperative to maximize your artists' productivity. Time is money after all.

 

Doom 3 was released in 2004. Rage is being readied for a Sept. 2011 launch. With that in mind, someway, somehow, I doubt whatever technology advancements in the texture artwork creation pipeline were such a great time saver.

Megatexture allows more creativity freedom to texture artists, but I'm not sure that makes the overall time texturing process takes in a development budget any shorter. Because now, the artists are scouting the maps, adding details on top of details, until they're happy with the result. Which might take some time, artists being always eager to tune things out until "perfection." It might take a project lead to remove the map from the hands of the artist. Which wouldn't be much different than any other artwork creation pipeline in terms of time management.

 

There are some cool things that could be done in megatexture that will not be taken advantage of most likely. You could emulate those things using tiles, but then you end up with a lot more tiles, or a bunch of decals being laid on top of tiles.

I like the idea of information being conveyed through the textures at a much higher fidelity than we get now. Watercourses, natural features like caves, roads and so on can contain more information.

 

Dealing with texture seams, sizes and UV mapping takes no time away from the artist? AFAICS artists working with native texels is like programmers working with assembly ...

 

uv mapping is wrapping a texture around polygons - yes ?
I dont understand how only having 1 big texture prevents the need for uv mapping
and why does having only 1 texture allow for higher detail ?