There are a couple of emerging next-gen texture approaches that we've been monitoring at BHG. One is Alegorithmic's ProFX. It's a procedural based system that allows textures to be stored using only a few kilobytes rather than several megabytes per the usual bitmap method. It was used extensively in Naked Sky's RoboBlitz, recently released on XBOX Live Arcade. XBLA comes with a fairly stringent download size limitation which is where small file sizes come in handy. More info at ProFX Engine.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are Megatextures, the brainchild of John Carmack. It's being unveiled in ID's upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Carmack claims that by overcoming graphics card memory constraints and using a single 32,000 x 32,000 pixel texture the terrain can be created without the need for tiling textures. If successful this could open up the door for much more convincing and varied terrain visuals (as long as the project has a budget that allows for an artist, or team of artists, the time to handcraft such a large image). Read more on Megatextures in Gamer Within's interview with Carmack.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
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2 comments:
What are your thoughts on ProFX? Positive, negative, neutral? Kinda curious what you found. They dropped by NC yesterday to demo it for us but I didn't have a chance to check it out, but the general impression I get is that there's no real time savings, the learning curve is steep and that it's pretty cost-prohibitive. But that's all secondhand info. :)
I haven't had much incentive to look into it because my project has no real need for it. But I'm still curious.
Neutral thus far. It's main use seems to be texture-compression-savings on size-restricted Xbox Live Arcade titles. In the future should Big Huge pursue XBLA beyond our current title (Settlers of Catan, being released in a few months) then we'll likely take a more extensive second look.
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