John Carmack on Megatextures

[metalliandy]

Hi Everyone,

After a long delay, I've finally got megatextures rendering in the Sapphire 3D renderer. Screenshots and notes are over here, and a dev build is coming next week or so.

Still on the subject of megatextures, here is some more Carmack/YouTube magic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuTtrkVtns

Cheers,
Aaron.

The Screenies look great!
What were the settings that you used for this map? (more specifically the settings on the design map GUI)
Could you post the html summary please?

I want to try rendering this baby myself. with mynew computer
Feel that CPU burn!

[Aaron]

Hi Metalliandy,

I mostly used the default settings. I'll upload all the project info with design map and heightfield later today (not texture though; that was 500MB of jpgs). The general settings were 16x16 design map (with all default settings in GUI), 16x attributes map, regular 1x normals, 32x light map, 32x texture map. For the water map, I flooded the water table using default parameters. For lighting I did oversaturate slightly (~1.2 brightness), and I made the sun slightly more orange than default. For texturing, I used 4x anti-aliasing.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[metalliandy]

Hey Aaron,
Thanks for the reply
Cant wait till the files are uploaded,
I am amazed by your constant progress, L3DT is by far the best landscape gen program i have ever used...Wow!
Good work man

[Aaron]

Hi Metalliandy,

The files are up here:

http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/downloads/examples/temp17_redist.zip [~1.5MB]

This includes the project file, project settings, HTML summary, design map and heightfield. The project should load as-is, so you can open all the wizards to see the settings I've used.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[metalliandy]

Thanks for uploading it Aaron
It looks like it will take a long time to render...lol
How long did it take you to get the whole thing done and dusted?

[Aaron]

Hi Metalliandy,

I think start to finish it was about two and a half days in L3DT. I just queued everything up, clicked go and hoped for the best. It's quite a testament to the hardware manufacturers that I can still take a computer that's now ~5 years old and run it at 100% CPU usage for days on end without a glitch.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[metalliandy]

wow that's a long time...
I just can keep my computer running for more than a day....it just crashes...its not the hardware...i think there are some programs which are coded poorly which kill it....im always getting explorer crashes...sigh...the joys of software.

I guess i will have to wait for the pause/resume function to be implemented

But the light at the end of the tunnel is near..lol

...maybe i should just make smaller maps...hmmm

[monks]

Holy smokes, and I thought I was pushing it with a x8 - just running one now. Guess I'll have to go again with a super duper whopper. I'd like to try out some new textures first though.

monks

[Aaron]

its not the hardware...i think there are some programs which are coded poorly which kill it....

Hmmm...maybe I'm naive, but I was fairly sure that bad programming in userland can't cause a hard crash with the NT kernel. Bad software will usually crash itself, but crashing the entire system is rather special. I think the only time I've had XP hard-reboot was a) when the power supply blew up, and b) when the CPU heatsink accumulated too much dust, causing an overheat when ramped to 100% usage for extended periods (easily fixed with the periodic application of a vacuum cleaner). Are you sure it's not hardware? During calculations L3DT will utterly thrash your computer, so it will pick up any minor instabilities in CPU cooling, RAM, disk controllers, etc. Indeed, it is usually L3DT that tells me it's again time to vacuum my heatsink by ever-so-subtly causing an overheat and hard-reboot (note you can use L3DT's CPU throttle to make it nicer). Anyway, just a thought, or random collection thereof.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

[metalliandy]

Hey Aaron,
I had this problem on my old computer (AMD 2600+, GeForce 6600) too,
My new system is liquid cooled and runs allot cooler than my old CPU did.
I have an av. temp of about 40-45 deg c when the cpu is maxed out.
Check out the specs here
I figured it was program based because i can play Oblivion for hours at full settings with now problems.
Im not sure what it is, but Windows explorer does crash all the time, maybe even 3 or 4 times a session....maybe more...though its hard to tell as i have gotten ised to it by now..Like i said it happed oin my old cpu to.
The PC never reboots or BSOD's...It just tends to freeze.

Any ideas?

[Craig]

I absolutely love this idea.

I was just about to implement texture splatting and I honestly was not looking forward to it, due to a lack of tools and lack of time.

But with mega-textures I can just initially use a 4096x4096 texture, get it looking reasonable, not have to worry about implementing texture lodding early, not have to worry about the performance hit of rendering terrain triangles may times, and just get on with the real work of making a good game, and send off the real mega-texture to a few mates so they can make it look good. Then later once the game is playable, look at implementing the texture lodding.

I guess I could do this with texture splatting too, but it just seems harder for some reason