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In a recent interview John Carmack, legendary president of id Software, discussed the next generation graphics technology which will be on display in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for the PC. The new MegaTexture technology will allow for higher levels of complexity than conventional renderings.

Q4: How is the MegaTexture a major step forward for game graphics?

Answer: My core comment here is that any repeating use of a texture is just very specialized data compression. Any time you have one set of texture data, and it’s present in more than one place on the screen, it’s really an approximation to what an ideal infinite resource video game would provide. Because in the real world, there aren’t any repeats—even things that look like they repeat, like bricks or dry wall, are uniquely different. The subtle differences that you get are the things that distinguish a rendering, especially a game rendering, from something that’s very realistic.

The MegaTexture allows us to have terrain in QUAKE Wars that does not require any repeated textures for resource limitation reasons. There may still be some areas where a texture is repeated just because they didn’t feel like doing anything better, but there was no resource limitation that encouraged them or required them to do that. They are perfectly capable of having an artist go in and add 10 million little tiny touches to the level if they chose to do so. It’s taken it from being a resource constraint to something that becomes a design trade off.

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id Software

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