*spin-off* idTech Related Discussion

[Sxotty]

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 ...

I think some of the scenery in the screenshots in Rage are already beautiful, but I love the desert SW. On the other comment I agree 100%. The reason I am pumped for megatecture is to see a game like morrowind, or oblivion where you explore and things actually are different everywhere. The procedural stuff in oblivion did ok at hiding repetition, but in the mountains it was fairly bad IMO.

That is one of the funny things to me everyone is upset that Rage is boring and deserty, but stark environments are where MT is most necessary IMO. If you through grass and trees, jungle vegetation all over you can hide the repetition. In a desert or alpine environment there is no place to run and no place to hide.

 

[Sxotty]

Actually it is possible that in the future it can be done Laa-Yosh. You need to go along the lines Carmack mentioned where you have the texture stored online a la google docs and then different people can edit different parts at once. Now I am not saying it will happen, but it would work extremely well if someone was willing to host it.

 

[Richard]

Actually it is possible that in the future it can be done Laa-Yosh. You need to go along the lines Carmack mentioned where you have the texture stored online a la google docs and then different people can edit different parts at once. Now I am not saying it will happen, but it would work extremely well if someone was willing to host it.

I suppose it's doable if they stamp a few adverts in the megatexture to help pay for the bandwidth.

On the topic of whether it is possible. We know Rage has 128k x 128k MTs for the wastelands and some 64k x 64k ones for race tracks, maybe some indoor levels, etc. So even if 128k x 128k is the absolute limit you could still pump up the rez of all the other MTs.

 

[jlippo]

I suppose it's doable if they stamp a few adverts in the megatexture to help pay for the bandwidth.

On the topic of whether it is possible. We know Rage has 128k x 128k MTs for the wastelands and some 64k x 64k ones for race tracks, maybe some indoor levels, etc. So even if 128k x 128k is the absolute limit you could still pump up the rez of all the other MTs.

Rumors state that there can be more than single MT at any time, so the limit of 128k can be bypassed even for a huge landscapes.

 

[Quaz51]

one 128K x 128K map is 16GiB for just one byte deep. it's lot of data! (two Full Dual layer DVD = 15.8GiB)

 

[Laa-Yosh]

They compress the hell out of the megatextures. Let me remind you that it also has normal and specular layers because characters and objects are included as well

 

[Richard]

Rumors state that there can be more than single MT at any time, so the limit of 128k can be bypassed even for a huge landscapes.

It does have more than one MT, but not per surface. I.e. you have your "static & opaque" MT, your "dynamic & opaque" MT and your "translucent" MT (and probably even your "no mips HUD" MT and the "skybox" MT as well but these two are speculation).

 

[V3]

By the way you seem to have trouble in understanding just how much work we're talking about.

I am aware of how much work it is, but this is a tech discussion, I want to know the tech limitation, not the human resource limitation.

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

Are you sure about that ? AFAIK the idea of idTech is not about being resource hungry. It can't be that far more resource hungry than clipmap since console only have 512 MB of RAM.

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

This. Anyone quiz Carmack yet if the engine can handle something larger ?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Only id knows about the theoretical possibilities and noone asked them about it yet. Probably because it's such an unrealistic idea to redo Rage at an increased texture res as a mod project.

And it does take more memory... QW, so tech4, only uses about 10MB of RAM, because of the fixed number of clip maps. AFAIK 4 times 512*512 from each MIP level?
Whereas Rage uses 128x128 as the smallest texture block, so it even sacrifices some level of efficiency, probably to keep the number of loads from the DVD small enough (64x64 blocks would probably at least double the number of seeks and thus spend too much time without actually transfering data).

 

[Arwin]

This. Anyone quiz Carmack yet if the engine can handle something larger ?

Depends on your definition of larger. I don't actually think the source data for the MT is the bottle-neck here ... they could probably make that as large as you'd care to. The tech is all about taking the amount of data from that source that the target can render in such a way that the more the target can handle (be it that the the source media is the bottleneck, or bandwidth, resolution or whatever), the more detail you can show. Surely though streaming 50GB from a harddrive is going to be faster than from an 8-12 speed DVD drive. Right now the reverse is the case for the 360 version - they have a big MT that works fine and probably is about 20GB, and are now having a really tough time getting it compressed enough to fit onto two 7GB drives, which means they have and can render the detail they already have in the 20GB version of the MT just fine, and the storage medium is the biggest bottleneck on the 360 currently.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I think the modding related question is for the PC version.


This is just some speculation now, but let's assume that there's an even higher MIP level for each block on this image:

So each tile is further stored as a 256x256 tile, too.
At this screen resolution (1332*932) only about 8-10 pieces would appear larger then 128 pixels wide, and the closest ones would be about 210 pixels. So from all the high res maps only these would be seen and even their detail would be wasted.
But of course this is resolution dependent, at 1920*1200 on a 24 inch monitor, I'm sure the difference and the number of tiles from the highest MIP level would be a little bigger.

Memory consumption would not be significantly higher in such an average case... the pdf mentions 40k per block, so replacing 10 tiles with 4x as much is still only a 1.2 MB increase.
Obviously when you're facing a wall in an indoor scene, or go up close to a character, you'll need more tiles from the highest MIP level; but then you don't see as much of the game world so less tiles are required to be in memory altogether.

What we have no clue about is the cache size, which could be more of a problem, because when you move around in the world you need to pre-load these highest MIP level tiles...


All in all, it's kinda obvious to me that id has very carefuly balanced the following parameters:
- texture memory consumption, including VRAM and cache
- number of seeks for each different tile per second on the DVD
- tile size
- texel density per game world unit
- compression ratio

The result is that they can reach 60fps using a DVD drive at 720p resolution and (hopefully) just a few cases where you have to look at lowres textures while the game is loading the rest in. But changing any parameter would probably play havoc with the engine's efficiency.

 

[Shompola]

If Bethesda used Tech 5 for a new TES or Fallout game it would mean the end of modding for the series (and most likely a large drop in sales on PC).

Why is that? A genuine question because I do not know much about ID Tech 5 and Gamebryo. Is it because of the nature of mega texturing tech or that Gamebryo is a very open engine? Or something else? Thanks!

 

[Neb]

Why is that? A genuine question because I do not know much about ID Tech 5 and Gamebryo. Is it because of the nature of mega texturing tech or that Gamebryo is a very open engine? Or something else? Thanks!

But I would only think it would hamper texture mods not the rest of mods that would come out for such a game. The problem being the texture packages are enourmous due to megatexture and upping texture res would mean fat 20GB+ downloads.

IIRC CryEngine 3 has some similar feature.

 

[assen]

I don't think you MUST only have one megatexture atlas; on the countrary, I expect the game to have several, then you can bundle all the textures used by objects added by your mod into another, and install several mods.

The "repaint all the textures because we have better PCs now" type of mods will become ever less feasible, idTech5 or not, due to the _original_ textures getting ever larger (and the point of diminishing returns of this type of mod).

 

[TheD]

But I would only think it would hamper texture mods not the rest of mods that would come out for such a game. The problem being the texture packages are enourmous due to megatexture and upping texture res would mean fat 20GB+ downloads.

IIRC CryEngine 3 has some similar feature.

Did someone not say that the textures are all one file that takes hours/days to make from the base art assets?

So if you add anything to the game world it need a whole new megatexture for it?

 

[jlippo]

Did someone not say that the textures are all one file that takes hours/days to make from the base art assets?

So if you add anything to the game world it need a whole new megatexture for it?

This is the case if you bake GI-solution to the mega texture, as one must basically render a 128kx128k image of the world with shadows and global illumination.

I would guess the biggest problem for modding is that the game disk doesn't feature the original source textures for the models, but the already composited and lighted versions for them.
This means that all those nice tiles that you use for stamping and such is only within software developers storage servers.

 

[Panajev2001a]

I am interested to see how much effort does it take Tech 5 to support a fully dynamic lighting system (including 24 hours day/night cycle)... I do not see The Elders' Scroll next game using Tech 5 unless they can provide that feature.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It's probably not as much about the effort but the performance. That megatexture stuff takes quite a few shader instructions and at least an additional pass, and all that at 60 fps.

For 30 fps it could probably support at least some rudimentary full dynamic lighting, but certainly not something like Cryengine3...

 

[Prophecy2k]

Regarding the whole modding issue... IMHO I think we would pretty much already be at deminishing returns by the time the next ID Tech 5 game releases.

Judging by the screens of "Rage" and how that game's gonna look, I can't really think that anyone would even care to produce "better" textures, since the ones already in the game would look so phenominal!

 

[TheD]

But what about new buildings and the like in game? the megatexture would need to be remade which you could not do without the source files and the program to do it.

And lets not forget that TES V might not look very good (hell, Bethesda went backwards from Oblivion to Fallout 3 when it came to textures!)