MegaTexture
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MegaTexture refers to a texture mapping technique used in Splash Damage's upcoming game, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It was developed by id Software technical director John Carmack.
MegaTexture is designed to eliminate repeating textures over an environment. The original version of the Doom 3 engine was criticized by the gaming press over its inability to handle landscapes and large outdoor areas. The MegaTexture technology addresses this issue by introducing a means to create expansive outdoor scenes. By painting a single massive texture (about 32000×32000 pixels, or 1 gigapixel) covering the entire polygon map and highly detailed terrain, the desired effects can be achieved. The MegaTexture can also store physical information about the terrain such as the amount of traction in certain areas or indicate what sound effect should be played when walking over specific terrain types on the map. i.e. walking on rock will sound different from walking on grass. Id Software and Splash Damage expect that this will result in a considerably more detailed scene than the majority of existing technologies, using tiled textures, allow.
The next version of MegaTexture will support larger scenes about 128000x128000 pixels.
