Hi,

How does it work the megatextures thing in RAGE?

For example, you have a room, 4 walls, or a building, they "painted" all the walls at the same time without having 1 texture for each wall and then it's saved as one texture?

Thank you.

Anyone?

I don't know all the exact details, but I believe each character for example has a single large texture and the artist can "paint" however much detail they wish. These textures are then compressed and you download the compressed version to your hard drive.

The idea is to overcome the bandwidth bottlenecks in a computer by using all the extra cpu cores and simplified gpu processors to then decompress the textures at the last minute before displaying them. That way you get larger textures with unique details everywhere you look, but it doesn't slow the game to a crawl. If the game does start to slow down it merely chooses to decompress the textures less until it gets back up to speed.

They basically let the artists make the world without any texture limits, and then made a system to let the textures be drawn within memory limits of the consoles and pc's

Nice!
So, are there any other games using this technique?

Its a unique and proprietary technology, but id plans on putting out a new game every 2-3 years including Doom 4 hopefully sometime next year. All the subsequent games they have planned will shoot for 30fps on consoles and 60 on PC giving more room for graphics improvements and they are somewhat open to licencing the technology to other game developers provided Bethesda gets to publish their games. Their ultimate goal is to use the same trick to provide real time ray casting as well as megatextures. No more wire frames, no more triangles, no more repeating the same shapes and objects everywhere. That would provide the artists with the maximum possible freedom to just draw whatever they want.

Most games use a megatexture for the terrain, but I don't think there are others that do the virtual texturing to the extent that Rage (and future id Tech 5+ games)

This engine has a great advantage over others in future technologies when u'll get the HD video on wireless steam and has the game running on a beasty workstation like server which is able to handle the load of the REALTIME 100+ Gb texture and vertex calculations. Than you will have photo realistic graphics on a hand-held console. Not really far away from now.

Carmack is atleast half-godlike. Nuff said.

id tech 5, yes. But megatextures/virtual texturing is not a proprietary technology and other Studies use the same technology.
Lionhead are working with it, or RedLynx, or as far as I know Dice, too.

Megatexure is fairly new and until now almost no game use it.
In the future very likely, but "most games" most certainly don't use this kind of technology already for terrain.

Megatexture doesn't have any advantage in regards of playing streamed games. The only thing that matters is a steady internet connection.
And 100GB textures wouldn't be a problem for PCs and consoles, you don't need a beasty workstation that's the nice thing about megatextures, but only if most of them had BluRay and fast HDDs...

I do think you would need a beasty server to run the game with uncompressed textures for ten-thousands of handheld clients.

Brink uses essentially the same tech - Virtual Texturing, it's mostly the whole pipeline that id Soft calls Megatexture (from their stamping and baking tools on through).
Except Brink re-uses some sections and still has some run-time decals so they could keep the texture resolution up and still fit on one DVD.

Megatexture for ETQW tech wise is basically Clip-Mapping, something that has been around for ages, but not really used on games, ditto Virtual Texturing is also an old idea but not really used until now.

Look up Virtual Texturing if you want more about the tech, and look up the idTech 5/idStudio videos that are floating around if you want to see some of the workflow/pipeline.

I didn't want to confuse the original poster with details. Others might be working along similar lines, but I don't know any games coming out anytime soon that use the technology other then the planned id games. Personally I find it all fascinating, but between heterogeneous architecture, clouds, neuromorphic circuitry, and now the id tech 5 its getting difficult for even a dedicated PC gamer to follow all of it much less predict where its going for more then a few years in advance.