this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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IdTech isn't built for open world gameplay
Rage??? Wasn't Rage open world?
Kind of. It was more smaller locations linked together by loading screens a la Borderlands 2 rather than the typically seamless worlds Bethesda are usually known for. Although you could definitely argue that this was the approach taken by Bethesda for Starfield.
Wasn't the drivable overworld one big map? I honestly can't remember now, it's been so long since I played it.
I do remember them harping on about "megatextures" and what this seemed to mean is that just turning on the spot caused all the textures to have to load back in as they appeared. I dunno if they abandoned that idea or improved it massively, but I don't remember any other game ever doing that.
My memory could also be being fuzzy. Might have been more like Oblivion and Skyrim.
As for the megatexture thing, it's not done anymore because it's not needed. The reason they had to have textures load back in was because the 360/PS3 only had 512MB of total RAM, and while the 360 had shared RAM, the PS3 had two 256MB sticks for the the CPU and GPU respectively. Nowadays even the Xbox 1 is rocking 8GB.
I thought Megatextures were more to avoid the tiled look of many textured landscapes at the time. The idea that the artists can zoom into any point and paint what they need without worrying that it will then appear somewhere else on the map.
Looking around, some people seem to think they were replaced by virtual texturing, but I've been out the loop for a long time so haven't really kept up with what that is. I assume it allows much the same, but far more efficient than a giant texture map. Death Stranding is an example that must use something similar, because as you move about you wear down permanent paths over the landscape.
Right I think I got confused. The megatexture is a huuuuge single texture covering the entire map geometry. It has a ridiculous size (at the time of Rage, it was 32,000 by 32,000). It also holds data for which bits should be treated as what type of terrain for footprints etc.
The problem with this approach is it eats a shit ton of RAM, which the 7th gen consoles didn't have much of. Thus the only high quality textured that were loaded in were the ones the player could see, and loaded out when the player couldn't.
Megatextures are used in all IdTech games since, but because they weren't open world and/or targeted 8th gen consoles and later, with much more RAM, unloading the textures isn't necessary.
Whatever code they used to "unload" the texture was also kept for PC, because the same thing happened there. This would have been on an ATI 5870 that I played that. At least double the VRAM of any console at the time.
Man, remember when flagship GPUs were £300? Wtf happened to those days...
Heh. Good times.
Such a shame poor PC optimisation was what we kept instead of affordable cards.
IdTech 7 does not use megatextures, the last engine to use it is IdTech 6