New map format

[bamb]

Btw, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (id technology) is using a big 32000x32000 bumpmapped texture for the terrain. They compress it from many gigs to 500 mb and tile it and it uses little memory or video memory. I don't know if it's possible to use any of the same techniques for spring, or if this interview is too general to give any idea how it's really done.

http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/etqw/

Beyond3D:

Roughly a year ago today id and Splash Damage sent out a press release announcing the game and MegaTexture, a which was described simply as: "Battlefields are perfectly rendered using MegaTexture, a totally new rendering technology developed by id Software that crunches millions of polygons and a gigabyte-scale texture into a single, seamless and un-tiled landscape with unique detail down to the square inch or the un-obscured distant horizon." It has later surfaced that MT has the ability to handle a unique texture of 32,768 x 32,768 pixel size while only using around 8MB of video memory at all times. ETQW uses this for terrains only but John Carmack has stated, during the QuakeCon 2005 keynote, his intent to use this unique texturing capability on everything in the new engine id is currently working on.


Arnout Van Meer, developer, Splash Damage:

Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars features a tool suite for creating MegaTextures called MegaGen. Once the Artist or Level Designer has completed the artwork, MegaGen outputs two entirely unique 4GB textures - a diffuse map containing colour data, and a normal map - and then combines them into a single 5GB data file. This data file is then split into unique tiles suitable for streaming, and then compressed to reduce disk space usage.

The resulting unique MegaTexture is around 500MB in size. This represents a reasonable tradeoff between ETQW├óÔé¼Ôäós visual quality and disk space usage (maintaining a shippable size for the game).

[jcnossen]

MegaTexture is basically SMF with a bumpmap layer and compression (and probably bigger tiles). There's nothing wrong with that, but it's probably a lot larger than acceptable for spring.

[jcnossen]

Are they being converted to greyscale? Cause that's what appears to be happening.

They cause more dark spots, and on average this results in more grey. Smoothing your normal maps even more could help I guess.

[jcnossen]

Here is a new version with specular lighting:
It has a modified two seas version that shows off the lighting, and in particular the specular channel in the bumpmaps.

http://user.supradigital.org/jcnossen/spring-sm3-v4.zip







This shows the specular alpha channel, look for adamrockbump2.tga to see how it's done:


Yes I know, the grass doesn't look like grass anymore...

The specular stuff requires some new tags:

GroundSpecularColor in [LIGHT], defaults to 0.1 0.1 0.1
SpecularExponent in [TERRAIN], this is basically how polished something is. A lower exponent will cause a more blurry specular highlight. Defaults to 8


However no textures with alpha channels and slope based generating yet. There are still quite a few basic unsupported things:
- dynamic shadows
- water reflection rendering
- unit reflection rendering (what you see mirrored in the unit)
- proper feature culling, without the feature support is useless
- grass

The map renderer implemented so far will be included in spring, but I'm not sure if the things mentioned above will be included in the next version. The changelog is so big already it's probably better to stop spending time on this and work more towards a release.

[jcnossen]

Also, I found that some of the Two seas blendmaps can be made better so they are rendered faster. The renderer optimizes rendering on sections of the blendmap that are either < 12 or > 243. I think it's the two seas grass blendmap that can be made completely black instead of a bit gray to optimize this.
I know that changes the texturing a bit, but it really helps speeding up, because the map is rendered with less layers at those points. I have a feeling the newer games such as ut2004 and battlefield are actually using less terrain texturing than we do. It is kindof a big contrast with the game models now
IMO it should be really possible to make a good looking map with less than 3 layers on a single spot, keeping the optimization in mind.

Also I guess as a further optimization, metal patches would have to be done as empty features with a ground decal (Though thats not possible right now).

And can someone make/convert a metal map please? Specular is going to look nice there.

[Forboding Angel]

And this is without changing anything. Hawt sex in a can.

[mufdvr222]

Ok, looks fan bloody tastic will fix that grass blend map.

[Quanto042]

while this does look pretty in all, I am still not impressed enough to be convinced this is the way to go. Not that the old way is perfect either, to be honest, i would like to see a combination of both worlds. Maybe intergrate a bumpmap overlay on top of the existing texturemaps? But in a way to the new format uses, so that rocks reflect the way rocks should and so that organic matter reflects in the way that organic matter should.

My biggest concern with this format is the fact that i as a mapper will loose the ability to simply edit minor tidbits within the texturemap itself, i don't really want to have to create a seperate tile JUST so i can have a tiny patch of whatever thrown in with a whole mess of generic repeating tiles.

I just fail to see where the TRUE improvements are in this format (besides bigger maps w/ smaller file size)

[Forboding Angel]

you should be the most happy, as ota ports will be horrifyingly simple in the new format.

It doesn't simply look pretty, it's fucking amazing, plus everything is controlled via sm3 with NO COMPILING!

Umm look at whakamatunga Riri, does it look like I couldn't edit tidbits?

You should try doing it before making statements against it.

[mufdvr222]

Quanto, this new format, "which is not replacing the current one" will blow it away. Controll over textures will be just as fine as with the current format, its just not the texture itself that your modifying, rather the blend maps.

Hey Forb,, can you explain how I edit these tga images,, What I mean is I don`t know the first thing about the .tga image format or how jcnossen created it, come to think of it I don`t even use layers, I just need to understand the grey areas in the image they don`t show up in the colour palette, fuck Im confusing myself,,, arrgggggggg HELPPPPPP

[Das Bruce]

Win.

[Buggi]

while this does look pretty in all, I am still not impressed enough to be convinced this is the way to go.

Ignorance is bliss eh?

Not only is this the way to go, it is the way it's GOING to go. I couldn't believe your statements... it was like reading something moldy.

Not impressed? Have you spent more than 5 minutes looking at the screenshots? Have you loaded it and looked at a map in the new format?

And why am I wasting time typing this?

[mufdvr222]

I get an error,,
"failed to build fragment shader"

[zwzsg]

http://user.supradigital.org/jcnossen/spring-sm3-v4.zip gives me an error about /aidll/centralbuild.dll being a wrong version.

[Forboding Angel]

you have to delete all your ai's

[zwzsg]

Right. Works now. But I see no bump mapping and no shinyness. I guess my card is too old.

[Forboding Angel]

Care to upload your map zwzsg? I'd be happy to get it running for you, or tell you how to do it... Or both.

[Forboding Angel]

And can someone make/convert a metal map please? Specular is going to look nice there.

Only because you're my hero.





Note, I put absoliutely no work into this. It is the same texture tiled all over the map, however, it shows off specular lighting beautifully.

[mufdvr222]

Correction for my previous post

"What I mean is I don`t know the first thing about the .tga image format or how jcnossen created it"

should read

"What I mean is I don`t know the first thing about the .tga image format or ((how jcnossen created it)) <the edited bump map, saved as a tga, not the tga format">

And those screen shots make the metal tileset look err dare I say good!

[FizWizz]

And can someone make/convert a metal map please? Specular is going to look nice there.

Only because you're my hero.

(awesomeness)

Note, I put absoliutely no work into this. It is the same texture tiled all over the map, however, it shows off specular lighting beautifully.

Wow, just wow. The specular shine might be just a bit strong, but it is still very Wow.