RAGE : It Deserves its own thread now!

[silhouette]

Unfortunately so. I wouldn't mind if it was today already.

Can't wait to see both more of Rage and DeanoC's Brink, which also looks awesome!

Brink Friday, Rage Saturday!

I will be heading to Quakecon tomorrow afternoon for press conf and Carmack's keynote speech! Anyone also coming from here?

 

[betan]

Laa-Yosh, locally variable compression and tiling support will destroy uniformity and predictability, thus remove all the performance benefits on GPU. It will most likely reintroduce texture budget (or some equivalent) concept as well.

 

[Gabrobot]

Is having a bigger game really that much of a disadvantage? What's the opportunity cost of developing a better game more easily and with nearly free multiplatform support? It may make digital distribution harder, and those sales may suffer, but how much are you saving in both time and money?

It's not a trade off for everyone (like indie games that can't afford physical distribution), but looking at most of the AAA titles, why wouldn't they take it?

 

[Richard]

Is having a bigger game really that much of a disadvantage? What's the opportunity cost of developing a better game more easily and with nearly free multiplatform support? It may make digital distribution harder, and those sales may suffer, but how much are you saving in both time and money?

It's not a trade off for everyone (like indie games that can't afford physical distribution), but looking at most of the AAA titles, why wouldn't they take it?

Apart from the DD problem you mentioned, the XBOX's lack of HDD on some SKUs mean some games are not practical. A game like Oblivion/GTA wouldn't work if you had to shuffle discs every time you travelled to the other part of the world. Any open world game really. Racing games where you can pick tracks to race on, and even something like Call of Duty/Gears of War which is as linear as they come would suffer since they allow you to pick any mission that you've beat to play CO-OP, time trial, etc.

If your game only targets PS3/PC and you don't care much for DD, it's not a problem of course.

 

[Scott_Arm]

A megatexture game doesn't necessarily have to be bigger though, does it? My understanding is that only unique tiles are stored, so you can still have tiles that repeat textures as well as reap the benefits of the VRAM efficiency and content creation. Rage uses a huge amount of storage because they're trying to make a game that does not repeat tiles.

Edit: I could be very wrong on this one. I'm trying to figure out where I read that. I'd thought that the virtual texture was a large grid of tiles, and that each grid corresponded to a smaller texture. If two tiles used the same texture, they both referenced the same texture in storage, rather than storing it twice.

 

[Richard]

A megatexture game doesn't necessarily have to be bigger though, does it? My understanding is that only unique tiles are stored, so you can still have tiles that repeat textures as well as reap the benefits of the VRAM efficiency and content creation. Rage uses a huge amount of storage because they're trying to make a game that does not repeat tiles.

Edit: I could be very wrong on this one. I'm trying to figure out where I read that. I'd thought that the virtual texture was a large grid of tiles, and that each grid corresponded to a smaller texture. If two tiles used the same texture, they both referenced the same texture in storage, rather than storing it twice.

MT doesn't work like that. If you use the same MT area for two different surfaces in game, say a door, you can no longer bake the light because they are standing in two potentially different places in the world (one in full shadow, the other basking in the sun).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yeah, but you don't have to bake all the lighting in, even with Rage. Although Carmack said it's considerably slower with full dynamic lighting - but that goes for Rage, so a 30fps game can work differently.

Tiling might also be an issue with the texture atlas thing, as it basicaly means that a large polygon may not fit into the 0-1,0-1 UV space. In this case the single texture would repeat itself over the surface, but you'd have to cut the polygon up to work with a texture atlas layout, because it probably can't handle the texture coordinate conversions for out of range data.
Now manually cutting stuff up to smaller quad polygons is an option, but it may be a problem with large objects like city buildings in GTA type games. You don't want to spend thousands of polygons on a single skyscraper. But you don't neccessarily have to build another GTA with tech 5, and those sandbox games have other special requirements as well anyway.

 

[Scott_Arm]

MT doesn't work like that. If you use the same MT area for two different surfaces in game, say a door, you can no longer bake the light because they are standing in two potentially different places in the world (one in full shadow, the other basking in the sun).

I suppose if you're baking all the lighting, almost all surfaces will end up being unique. Maybe something like a racetrack with repeated grass and roadway could get away with it.

 

[Richard]

Tiling might also be an issue with the texture atlas thing, as it basicaly means that a large polygon may not fit into the 0-1,0-1 UV space. In this case the single texture would repeat itself over the surface, but you'd have to cut the polygon up to work with a texture atlas layout, because it probably can't handle the texture coordinate conversions for out of range data.
Now manually cutting stuff up to smaller quad polygons is an option, but it may be a problem with large objects like city buildings in GTA type games. You don't want to spend thousands of polygons on a single skyscraper. But you don't neccessarily have to build another GTA with tech 5, and those sandbox games have other special requirements as well anyway.

FWIW, ETQW allowed up to 16 UV space repetitions without explicit geometry splits.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yeah but that works kinda differently, Rage uses a texture atlas instead with every kind of stuff in it, not just terrain.

 

[Richard]

Yeah but that works kinda differently, Rage uses a texture atlas instead with every kind of stuff in it, not just terrain.

I was actually talking about the non-terrain ATLAS used by ETQW. You only needed to define whether you wanted horizontal or vertical repeating.