Texture Solution for ArmA2!

[kridian 33]

Bohemia, hire this guy Brad and get his texture technology implemented as soon as humanly possible.

-Love

Kridian :D

[Pyronick 21]

It is released under the MPL (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Public Licence) which means it's public property.

In other words, it's open source and maybe be used for non-open source/proprietary software for free as long as the copyrights are in the game.

This could be implemented if the code base is the same. It would take some engine alteration as it will have to serve as a backend to an existing rendering engine.

[kridian 33]

This could be implemented if the code base is the same. It would take some engine alteration as it will have to serve as a backend to an existing rendering engine.

Yeah, what's the chance that is the case? Probably nil but one can only hope.

Ran his demo and was utterly amazed at how fast it is. That knife texture is 'mouth-watering'.

From the PDF:

This is an implementation of Virtual Texturing (also known as MegaTexture in id Tech 5). It is written in C# and uses Direct3D 10 with the help of SlimDX.

I'm releasing it under the MIT license. If you find bugs or fix any problems please let me know!

Virtual texturing is analogous to virtual memory. A large texture (potentially larger than can fit in memory) is split into blocks of pixels called pages in a preprocessing step. During runtime the frame is rendered to determine which pages are required. The information is downloaded to the CPU, analyzed, then the required pages are scheduled to load in the background. Loaded pages are uploaded into a texture atlas. Pages are tracked in a quad tree which is used to build a page table. When rendering the scene, the page table is used to map from normal texture coordinates to the page stored in the texture atlas.

[RavoC 10]

I never thought textures could look so realistic!^^

[Dwarden 1125]

i'm sure lot of indie titles will use variations of this ...

[johncage 30]

this game kind of needs it.

[=wfl= sgt bilko 10]

Agree it looks nice, but afaik he is mainly showcasing ground texturing.

There are few objects in that "world". Would be interesting to see how it performs with a kazillion trees, bushes, houses etc

[Ish 11]

Bohemia, hire this guy Brad and get his texture technology implemented as soon as humanly possible.

-Love

Kridian :D

What do you mean solution? I thought this was a solution to slow loading textures.. :confused:

[Flash Thunder 10]

Sadly it uses Idtech 5 Megatexturing as its base C# :(

[Dead3yez 0]

It's direct3d 10 ?

arma 2 uses direct3d 9, right?

[Maddmatt 1]

I think you can forget about seeing this in ArmA 2. Maybe in some future game.

Many PCs already struggle to stream the objects in the ArmA 2 world. Now if they all had massive textures how do you expect them to cope ;)

[ActionMan 10]

This texturing technique was first used in Enemy Territory : Quake Wars, the idea behind it actually dates all the way back to 1996 at Silicon Graphics Incorporated =D

ID Software / John Carmack (the Quake people) call it "MegaTexturing". Academics call it "Sparse Virtual Texturing"

More info on google:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=sparse+virtual+textures

What it does is let you use ridiculously high-resolution textures, and stream them from your hard-drive as they are needed (kind of like what Arma does already!).

IMO, Arma2 does enough streaming as is ;)

[johncage 30]

I think you can forget about seeing this in ArmA 2. Maybe in some future game.

Many PCs already struggle to stream the objects in the ArmA 2 world. Now if they all had massive textures how do you expect them to cope ;)

the point is that this technology makes streaming textures less straining.

quake4/doom3 uses a variation (old version) of this and they run absolutely smooth.

[dm 9]

quake4/doom3 uses a variation (old version) of this and they run absolutely smooth.

Yes, lets compare small scale shoe-box rail shooter to openworld "sim". Good to see people are still going strong in this department... :j:

[MulleDK19 21]

Get ready to buy super computers. A huge game world as present in ARMA 2, with these huge textures would require one mother fucking super computer.

[Flash Thunder 10]

Yes, lets compare small scale shoe-box rail shooter to openworld "sim". Good to see people are still going strong in this department... :j:

Couldn't have said it better DM.

Look peeps, alot of people already have problems streaming Geometry. How do you expect these 2056x2056 whatever they're sized textures in synch with the geometry and mesh?

Graphics cards would have to have high data tranfers and alot of f'ing memory more than my standard 512mb :D

[johncage 30]

the new id game will use this technology to its advantage. it is an open world game with expansive terrain.

you all seem to ignore my point. this not only enables large textures, it makes it so large textures don't lag as much.

[max power 21]

the new id game will use this technology to its advantage. it is an open world game with expansive terrain.

you all seem to ignore my point. this not only enables large textures, it makes it so large textures don't lag as much.

Linky?

nm. I found some info. :)

Edited December 22, 2009 by Max Power

[fincuan 0]

an open world game with expansive terrain.

Frankly I'm very sceptic on hearing these words. The same thing has been said about for example Fallout 3 and Oblivion, and the worlds are just a fraction of Chernarus in size. Compared to the corridor-shooters they're perhaps "open world", but compared to Arma-series they're very limited.

[Binkowski 26]

Now that was cool.

[CarlGustaffa 4]

@Fincuan: Not completely true, i think. If Chernarus landscape was made with the same cell size as Fallout 3 and Oblivion, I believe it would shrink considerably in physical size. The microscale terrain in Arma2 isn't exactly terrific, OFDR is in fact better. And Oblivion and Fallout 3. For sheer size, nothing beats Daggerfall, but I wouldn't like to play Arma2 in Daggerfalls landscape. Data size restricts it for obvious reasons.

The only solution is to have all or some of that data "generated" on first launch of the game, with a good seed value. This generates a huge file used by streaming technology to access. Automatic generation of cities, road network, locations, signs, trees, vegetation, undergrowth, rivers, lakes, seas, sound effects, everything. Like, size on distribution media: 6-8GB. Size on disk after install: 50GB due to procedural creation of island.

[Manareth 0]

If anybody has tried the newer beta patches they will know that the texture loading has come a LONG way since 1.04. If Arma 2 had gigantic textures to load this would be useful, but I don't want to install with 4 dvd's or a blu-ray disc in order to have enough disc space for that much texture data.

[Cultivator 0]

mhhh.. this looks hammermäßig *dreaming*