   Megatexture in action
  Did you see the ETQW demo?The megatexture in action...It is nice, good detail in distance, very nice painted mountains (maybe this is the main strength of the technology), but mediocre at close range, about 10m to 20m, until it loads needed texture blocks.Visually it looks like - you walk into invisible so far area, then turn around the corner - and 10m away you see large texels. Some time passes (second, two, three) and it smoothly blends (?) with the hi-res version.It would be great, if their terrain has hi-res geometry as well.However, far from Crysis pictures - in terms of shadowing, water quality and enviromental geometry density around the level.Althought, Megatexture compensates a bit.For me, Megatexture is natural extension of the well known truth, that the most beautifull part of CG scenes are skyboxes - because they are drawn by artists or photographed/photoshopped. Extend that on terrains, and the concentration of beautifull pixels on the screen will increase dramatically.   
  The main texture is still blurry even up close though...and it has to be blended with a detail texture to look better.. this looks like a mess. I would have hoped that the texture would be higher resolution.. However, the videos from Id's 'Rage' seem to show a more detailed texture, so I assume that either the megatexture was scaled down from the demo release, or the tech used in Quake Wars couldn't handle more appropriate texture sizes...as it is now, it looks bad and I wouldnt have considered it ready for a commercial release. Frankly I would prefer a blending approach with perlin noise and so on instead of the blurry megatexture with detail textures. Is it fair to compare Quake Wars with Crysis? Crysis is a next gen engine, whereas QW is esentially using DirectX 8 technology as far I can tell. It still has horrible stencil buffer shadows with hard edges.. even for terrain! I am amazed they consider this competitive.   ;Quote:Original post by Matt AufderheideIs it fair to compare Quake Wars with Crysis? Crysis is a next gen engine, whereas QW is esentially using DirectX 8 technology as far I can tell. It still has horrible stencil buffer shadows with hard edges.. even for terrain! I am amazed they consider this competitive.Umm... DX8?  Not even close.  I believe it's using the Quake 4 engine, therefore OpenGL.  What are your settings at?Also, what hardware are you running, it looks, to me at least, a lot better then you guys have made it out to be, but I have things maxed out.  Then again I don't think it looks amazing up close either, but it's not horrid.  This is also a prototype technology of whats in Rage and Carmack has said it's a lot weaker then whats in Rage currently.I'm still looking forward to seeing how good Crysis is on DX9 hardware, looks like a fun game (short sadly, what 10 hours?  It better only be $29.99 for 10 hours lol).   ;Quote:Umm... DX8?  Not even close.  I believe it's using the Quake 4 engine, therefore OpenGL.  What are your settings at?Obviously you misunderstood.. I mean directX 8 level hardware functionality...even though it uses openGl its still analogous to directX 8-type shaders..simple diffuse and specular, no parallax or other things, no shadow maps, etc. While I assume it actually supports ps 2.0 shaders, it doesnt do a lot with this.I run a GeForce 8800 with all settings maxed btw.;  I'm running at medium, and the textures that are 10-50m away are absolutely crap. Don't even look like textures, just color. And the transition from up close to these mid distance isn't good either. Heck BF2 does a much better job for lod on textures.   ;Quote:Original post by glaekenI'm running at medium, and the textures that are 10-50m away are absolutely crap. Don't even look like textures, just color. And the transition from up close to these mid distance isn't good either. Heck BF2 does a much better job for lod on textures.I'm talking about tech, rather the game itself. Yes, that application of the megatexture maybe a bit ugly, but try to see its benefits.The hand-painted unique terrain rocks!   ;  Quake Wars proves you're wrong.The tech itself is meaningless, only the end result counts. For the sake of Id I hope their next iteration of megatexture is light years beyond current one.   ;Quote:Original post by KreKQuake Wars proves you're wrong.The tech itself is meaningless, only the end result counts. For the sake of Id I hope their next iteration of megatexture is light years beyond current one.The tech itself is meaningless, only if it is not planned to used and/or advanced in the future. Which is not the case, afaik.Thus the topic about the tech and its first application, when talking specifically about Megatexture, not clipmaps or other similarities.   