*spin-off* idTech Related Discussion

[patsu]

...

We'll need to look at the specific use cases. It's like people talked about transparency issues with deferred rendering, but GG and others "solved" it with a parallel forward renderer. "Issues" means "opportunities" sometimes you know.

I vaguely remember tessellation was mentioned in one of the PhyreEngine presentations (under LOD).

There is also a set of slides about 2nd gen graphics engine using SPU.

EDIT:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1285392&postcount=31

First slide is an overview of cool SPU techniques in rendering. Still complaining about under-utilitzed SPUs despite the things people supposedly threw at them.

Tessellated geometry in #2 (may be 3 or/and 4, I am not sure anymore).


EDIT 2:
Hey, Mr. Carmack, keep doing what you're doing. The first implementaiton is probably going to have a few rough edges; but your team will improve.
[size=-2]...as if people here don't know already.[/size]

 

[AlNom]

EDIT: Oops sorry Al, saw your reply after I posed

Curses! I oughta delete your fine posts....


... and move em here.

Too bad this isn't just X360/PC however, as then they could leverage tesselation possibly to up the poly budget on most models.

mm... How about a Displacement Megatexture...map. It would be interesting to see them extend the tech for the terrain as well. Ensemble made use of the tessellator to great effect for Halo Wars' terrains.

 

[Richard]

mm... How about a Displacement Megatexture...map.

That'd be an extra DVD.

 

[Arwin]

Would you say Fable 2 looks better than Uncharted and Killzone 2? I seriously doubt anyone on B3D would, but I've put them side by side many times in graphics tests and 'independent' people have frequently picked Fable 2 as the best looking. Ultimately people don't judge pdf tech docs, they judge what they see see on screen, and you just never know what way that can go.

Yes. And I have to agree too - I literally just started to play it, and Fable 2 looks vastly superior to a whole lot of games. And I don't even always like the art, but compared to the art in most 'modern' games it looks so, so good. If Far Cry 2 had some more wildlife, some playing women and children, a few more colors, a rain season, and no missions involving shooting, it would approach what I'm hoping for in a modern FPS game.

Bar one or two bits of architecture, there hasn't been anything pretty in an id software as long as I can remember (but I'm probably overlooking something). I can only hope that Bethesda use megatexturing for a game that's either a direct or spiritual sequel to Oblivion rather than Fallout ...

At least that's something that I've noticed in the various 'unofficial' focus tests I've done. In particular, sunset lighting really gets oooohs and aahhhhs.

Yeah, that makes sense. Lots of examples of that - my biggest one maybe Motorstorm 2, where you can choose four times of day to play your races on, and both dusk and dawn are stunningly beautiful.

 

[V3]

mm... How about a Displacement Megatexture...map.

That's why they are aiming for voxels next.

The textures look a little bit on the low res side when up closed. This is probably acceptable for Consoles, but I wonder if PC gamers will accept such low res textures.

Maybe the fans will make high res texture pack for Rage. Would the engine support that kind of mod ?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

1. Who cares about PC gamers nowadays?

2. High res textures for Rage are more than unlikely, closer to impossible...

 

[V3]

Don't Id have loyal PC gamers following like Valve and Blizzard ?

Do you know for sure that it can't easily support even bigger megatexture like 512k x 512k even if it will consume lots of space both in storage and streaming cache.

 

[PhilB]

1. Who cares about PC gamers nowadays?

Sadly, most developers have this mindset. Can't say I blame them though.

 

[Richard]

Do you know for sure that it can't easily support even bigger megatexture like 512k x 512k even if it will consume lots of space both in storage and streaming cache.

What Laa-Yosh is saying is that if the game takes up 2 DVDs (at least - and you can be sure most of them will be taken up by the MTs) who is going to be working on a higher rez MT, who has the phat pipe to upload it, who has the phat pipe to download it, who can host it, who pays for the bandwidth, etc. JC himself mentioned a "super platinum" version taking up 60GBs. Its not impossible, nothing is, just impractical.

 

[V3]

Most of those high res texture packs are impractical. But my question is can the engine support it, if the community are crazy enough to do it ?

 

[Squilliam]

Isn't talk about the loyalty of a particular platforms userbase off-topic for this thread?

Anyway:

@Joker454:

Can you add anything with regards to a comparison of the Xbox 360 tessellation to the PS3? You gave an excellent description of the PS3 side of things, how does the Xbox 360 relate and how do they relate with regards to multiplatform game development and Rage?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Most of those high res texture packs are impractical. But my question is can the engine support it, if the community are crazy enough to do it ?

How are the community supposed to so it? Rendering the uber-highres MT would require going to the source and pressing the 'generate super high=res file' button and waiting however many hours/days. If iD made the software available to the community, you'd need some seriously dedicated fans here! Creating a unique megatexture for everything is a substantially more time consuming job than creating piecemeal textures, because there's that much more 2D space to decorate. And then you'd need to bake all the lighting. I reckon the effort is an order of magnitude past modding a UE3 game.

The solution would be, as Carmack said, for them to create a specialised highres version. But it'd take id to do it.

 

[Richard]

Creating a unique megatexture for everything is a substantially more time consuming job than creating piecemeal textures, because there's that much more 2D space to decorate.

Yep, also because with MT every pixel is unique if you do a high-rez version of the cinder block over there that's almost like the one standing over here, you still need to re-do this one, whereas with "normal" texturing you'd re-do once and every cinder block in the entire game would be done.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well, I'm sure copy/paste works on MT too.

 

[Arnold Beckenbauer]

Well, I'm sure copy/paste works on MT too.

You are so uncool...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I reckon the effort is an order of magnitude past modding a UE3 game.

I think it's two orders of magnitude more. I mean id has an entire team of artists spending years on this game, and upping the texture resolution would mean four times the pixels, four times the dataset, four times the rendering of the lighting... oh and id has an entire render farm for the pre-calculations.

And the mod would only run on the PC version anyway. And all this is assuming that it would run with 4x the data, which I doubt.

 

[Richard]

I think it's two orders of magnitude more. I mean id has an entire team of artists spending years on this game, and upping the texture resolution would mean four times the pixels, four times the dataset, four times the rendering of the lighting... oh and id has an entire render farm for the pre-calculations.

And the mod would only run on the PC version anyway. And all this is assuming that it would run with 4x the data, which I doubt.

Oh come on, the way you put it sounds like a dare!

 

[V3]

How are the community supposed to so it? Rendering the uber-highres MT would require going to the source and pressing the 'generate super high=res file' button and waiting however many hours/days. If iD made the software available to the community, you'd need some seriously dedicated fans here! Creating a unique megatexture for everything is a substantially more time consuming job than creating piecemeal textures, because there's that much more 2D space to decorate. And then you'd need to bake all the lighting. I reckon the effort is an order of magnitude past modding a UE3 game.

The solution would be, as Carmack said, for them to create a specialised highres version. But it'd take id to do it.

Lets assumed the fans are fanatical enough to do it, can the engine scale ?

The clipmap paper claimed the technique can scale to 65536k x 65536k texture (well it can scale to anything really provided you can store and access it.) I am just curious since idTech is an accelerated and more robust version of the clipmap, I want to know if their method compromised the scalability of the technique.

 

[V3]

Oh come on, the way you put it sounds like a dare!

When 2 TB high res texture pack show up for download, it will look like a dare to anyone with High end rig and fast broadband.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I am just curious since idTech is an accelerated and more robust version of the clipmap, I want to know if their method compromised the scalability of the technique.

Tech 5 isn't a new version of clipmaps, it's something completely different and far more resource hungry.


Understand that the problem here is the sheer scale of the required work. It took at least 20-25 artists several years to build the world, the characters and objects in Rage. It took terrabytes of centralized background storage and an entire render farm to calculate and compress all the data.

What you're talking about is at least four times as much work and hardware capacity. And you can't do it without all the mod team working at the same physical place because of the megatexture approach... they can't just download pieces and replace them on their own.

So it is a colossal project both in terms of time and money, incredibly far beyond anything ever done for, say, Half Life 2 mods. By the way you seem to have trouble in understanding just how much work we're talking about.

And again, we don't even know if the engine would support such an increase in texture resolution at all.