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After watching John Carmacks keynote at Quakecon, I cant help but dream of how awesome a game like daggerfall would look with MegaTexture (or what ever it's called). No more tiling textures.

Dr Carmack? He dropped out of university! He's just stupidly good at what he does both because he is extremely intelligent and because he works his ass off when he finds something interesting to do.

Anyway, Daggerfall with mega-textured terrain sounds awesome, but how would it ever get built? How many man hours would it take to paint the whole game? This is something that would probably best be achieved after doing more with the rest of the content. For example, the addition of interesting geography (roads, rivers, mountains, etc). Big project!

Megatextures is something invented to kill off modding communities. When you need a hundred professional texture artists working as a full time job for six years to finish an area about the size of Vivec City in Morrowind, you know that the amateur modding community is never going to have the means to keep up with the quality of the base game.

Megatexturing Daggerfall? Don't make me laugh.

He probably has a honorary doctorate somewhere. All you need is to be famous or have $$$$.


I'd rather have this

Eh, Lucius and I don't like that.
They're taking voxels, slapping "UNLIMITED DETAIL" on top of it and then getting a shit load of publicity.
(DaggerXL could have voxel LODs)

To be honest, this "unlimited details" thing looks like a scam to me.

If you notice, they have well-detailed objects... which are copy-pasted everywhere. Because that way, all the objects in the scene can use the same representation in memory. Which makes the unlimited aspect laughably pointless. It's all very well and good that you have a game with an elephant statue where you can zoom in at the atomic level and see procedurally-generated stuff for it; but it's still a game that consists of a camera moving around an elephant statue. There could be twelve billion elephant statues, they're all clones of each other. You damage one? All others mimic the damage exactly because they share the same representation in memory.

It makes for pretty tech demo; but it's useless for games. You can't build a game out of looking at elephant statues.

The simple thing is that voxels are incredibly gluttonous. They gobble RAM like nothing else. They are, after all, 3D images. Take a 1024x1024 picture in RGBA: it takes up 1024x1024x4x8 bits in memory, or 4 megabytes. Now instead of a picture with pixels, make it a volume with voxels. 1024x1024x1024x4x8 = 4 gigabytes. Ouch!

Sure, there are ways to make voxel use up less memory. The approach generally used is through octal trees: you have a rough, low-detail three-dimensional grid (like, 2x2x2) and each of the blocks in that grid can be either entirely empty and stop here, entirely full and also stop here, or partly empty and partly full and then it has eight children in a 2x2x2 grid too. This approach is useful because it allows you to save some space in most cases and it also gives you a quick, built-in way to vary the level of detail by simply choosing the depth at which you stop going down the branches and instead just average a node from the values of its children. But doing so has a big disadvantage: the volumes can no longer be dynamically altered, unless you load them in full and recalculate them entirely. Which means either keeping the maximum level of detail quite low, and thereby renouncing any attempt at creating convincing "infinite details" from them; or dropping that idea and keeping voxels for static geometry.

This is the approach Carmack is taking for Idtech 6, the next engine after Rage and Doom 4. Static geometry such as terrain -- generally represented by height maps currently -- will be voxel, allowing to make cliffs and caves without having to use meshes for that. Everything dynamic as well as smaller but more varied static objects will stay as polygons.