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Thread: Procedural Texturing - the future of gaming?

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    Procedural Texturing - the future of gaming?

    http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2006/...ure_Gam/1.html

    Check this out, it's been much talked about recently in the game development communities. It's a shame you have to be a professional in maths to master the technique, but I'm sure the game industry will adopt this concept for future games.

    Basically for those of you who don't want to read it. It's possible to compress textures up to 90% using maths. It's not really compression, more of a way to portray a texture using pure computation as opposed to storing the data in memory. So they had something like a 500MB game and got it down to 30MB.

    I'm sure many of you here will appreciate this

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    Senior Member greektony's Avatar
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    Thats not 90%
    Well, I can cut it in half!

    www.theeraserheads.com

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    Senior Member pr0p4g4nd4's Avatar
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    Looks pretty amazing. Thanks for posting the link to the article

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by greektony View Post
    Thats not 90%
    Read the article, they mention 90% in there somewhere. And I wasn't stating exact figures either

    *cough* pedantic git *cough*


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    WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! MadduckUK's Avatar
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    http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?t=320

    1st person shooter in less than 100KB?
    Quote Originally Posted by Ephesians
    Do not be drunk with wine, which will ruin you, but be filled with the Spirit
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    Bah Humbug. Dooms's Avatar
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    Looking good and its about time they start working on compression in games again... games have been getting larger and larger with extra sloppyness added in but i think its more of a lazyness thing than anything else.

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dooms View Post
    Looking good and its about time they start working on compression in games again... games have been getting larger and larger with extra sloppyness added in but i think its more of a lazyness thing than anything else.
    That were exactly my thoughts for the more recent games. This is a must for games nowadays as their quality in terms of how the textures look can't improve unless vast hardware upgrades are brought in. This is one of the main reasons why graphics memory is increasing and increasing. If this technique is implemented it's going to improve the size of games. As for performance I can't say it'd increase as procedural texturing seems to need heavy computation.

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MadduckUK View Post
    http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?t=320

    1st person shooter in less than 100KB?
    Yup, I've seen things like this before. A lot of the people just code their small-time games in ASM as opposed to C++. That means the bindings to the native language underneath cause a lot of overhead in terms of size. I know guys at my work who code in ASM to reduce the size issues of some applications.

    It's funny you posted that link actually, because the .kkrieger they were talking about is here: http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger

    Absolutely fantastic if you ask me.
    Last edited by Kezzer; 17-11-2006 at 11:20 AM.

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    Senior Member SilentDeath's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dooms View Post
    Looking good and its about time they start working on compression in games again... games have been getting larger and larger with extra sloppyness added in but i think its more of a lazyness thing than anything else.
    Why does it matter that games are larger? I have a 10mbit connection, in 5 years it will probably be 100mbit or 1gbit..

    Some games are huge, but then Ive yet to see any that need more than 2 dvd's (or more than 1, although im sure it exists..)

    BUT more importantly, if there image compression is so good, they shouldnt be looking at games, but normal picture compression. If they can get a few thousand (or hundred thousand) high-res pictures down to 3mb then would this not be MUCH more usefull as a general standard for internet use?

    I think the added cpu time to uncompress the textures would not be worth the space savings unless it was uncompressed at install time. The maths needed for this uses up a lot of cpu which would slow down the loading time a lot or even the game depending how its done.
    Last edited by SilentDeath; 17-11-2006 at 11:36 AM.

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by |SilentDeath| View Post
    Why does it matter that games are larger? I have a 10mbit connection, in 5 years it will probably be 100mbit or 1gbit..

    Some games are huge, but then Ive yet to see any that need more than 2 dvd's (or more than 1, although im sure it exists..)

    BUT more importantly, if there image compression is so good, they shouldnt be looking at games, but normal picture compression. If they can get a few thousand (or hundred thousand) high-res pictures down to 3mb then would this not be MUCH more usefull as a general standard for internet use?

    I think the added cpu time to uncompress the textures would not be worth the space savings unless it was uncompressed at install time. The maths needed for this uses up a lot of cpu which would slow down the loading time a lot or even the game depending how its done.
    I think you've missed the point entirely. The reason it's important to have high compression on textures is because the texture accommodate graphics memory and bearing in mind that the most we've got at the moment is 1GB (or 2GB with the dual cards). As standard most people will have something ranging from 256MB up to 1GB which still isn't enough even for games nowadays. With less graphics memory needed, the more content we can fit on it at run-time meaning seamless gaming between certain areas of environments.

    On top of this, this particular technique isn't designed for disk storage, it's a computational technique. So it shouldn't be aimed at image compression.

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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    It's less about install size, and more size of memory needed on your graphics card. And even if you've got oodles, it still takes more bandwidth to load up all that texture from the hard drive when requested, and then you've got all the operations you need to perform on it.

    While we in the PC world are blessed with spare capacity for RAM and so on, in consoles this is more of a problem - they even share 512mb for both system ram and graphics card.

    If someone can proceedurally generate textures that have the same quality as textures that are 4096^2 or more, then their game is going to look better than someone who's relying on 1024^2 textures just to fit it in console memory.

    Compression is useful, but it still produces horrible artifacts - look at the normal maps for oblivion if you need proof - a 1024^2 texture compressed with DXT1 is the default. Uncompress that while downsizing to only 512^2 resolution and it still looks much better than the original.

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    kalniel: I'm glad you understood how it works The majority of people I spoke to keep comparing this to compression of textures on the hard disk.

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    The King of Vague Steve B's Avatar
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    fourier transforms /hides

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    Va Va Voom Lowe's Avatar
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    Haven't clicked on the article yet (will read later) but is this how they do some of those craxy 4k and 64k demos on the scene?

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    Senior Member Kezzer's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lowe View Post
    Haven't clicked on the article yet (will read later) but is this how they do some of those craxy 4k and 64k demos on the scene?
    Pretty much yup. All that's really happened is that they've improved their techniques by a great deal. It's not new, but it's something which is more practical for gaming solutions and has already been implemented in the game "Robotnikz" which is available via Steam now (and only around £10 too).

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    The King of Vague Steve B's Avatar
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    i agree that it is more practical to have a smaller file size, but in a market where the larger the numbers, the "better" the object, why would reducing the file size necessarily yield a great impact?

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