Are you sure? I don't think many details have been released about what exactly the engine being used for Doom (4) really does.
The original plan for id tech 6 was to go a step further than mega texture and to have virtual geometry to go with the virtual textures, allowing for extremely complex models in addition to the extremely detailed textures. Doesn't sound like it would be smaller... Not sure that this is what is in the "id tech 6" used by Doom though.
Nothing in that article says they have ditched mega texture.
The cynic in me says that IdTech 6 isn't really that big a step from tech5 given JC and half of the engine team left to go to oculus before they publicly started saying it was based on tech6 without any comments from anyone technical describing what is novel about tech6.
Clearly doom will be a level up from tech5 in terms of art content (probably meaning bigger), but JC always said that tech 5 could do a lot more than rage really showed. Obviously there would be some tech upgrades given all the rebooting, but I don't expect it to be that different that they will have ditched mega texture.
As far as I know, megatextures and virtual texturing are the same thing. I took a look at the source of your source (http://mrl.cs.vsb.cz/people/gaura/agu/05-JP_i...lenges.pdf) and they don't explain the difference. At this point it's merely a vocabulary issue I guess.
I'm sure a big reason for this is piracy too, what better way to combat it than making the file sizes so huge it makes it much harder to get out there.
in the past we waited for ages to get the game from the internet, it will stop a bit, yes but i don't think this will solve the problem. i guarantee that lots of brazilians for example would download it and wouldn't give a s*** to that. Same as in some other parts of the world. And russians are kings on making pirate compilation of programs etc
In general you don't want to make things that small, as you need to spend too much resources on extracting stuff and calculating where everything has to go.
(as all things in there follow a certain mathematical pattern, which is why all pillars are alligned for instance and you see the same tiles being loose the same way all the time)
Whole game loads in few seconds on my core 2 duo 1.86 GHz
Procedural generation can be seen as specialized compression (in contrast to general like defalte, lzm, jpeg for images etc.) It's very efficient and doesn't necessarily require huge resources.
In most cases reading compressed data from disk and uncompressing it is faster than just reading uncompressed data.
The whole point of kkrieger was to showcase their procedural generation methods and their ability to reduce size. Industry obviously has an interest in exactly the opposite.
You suggest that mathematical patterns need to be somehow regular and repetitive. Except for a possibility to use random number generator - download any Mandelbrot set generator and you have an infinite non-repetitive world compressed to few kBs. Calculate Pi digits and you have a simple mathematical procedure which gives you well defined yet non-repetitive results
I'm sorry but are you're actually trying to argue that math patterns are not regular and repetitive?
That the Mandelbrot set is not repetitive and that random number generators are random?
Sure. Mandelbrot set is not repetitive and if the fact that you can see some repetitions bothers you then think of decimal expansion of Pi.
Random number generators are random. They take randomness from input devices like mouse/keyboard, temperature sensors etc. If you need more entropy then you can buy a specialized device (more - not "of better quality").
Sounds great but as Weird said: if everything is generated at the start of the game it means very long loading times, and people don't want that. Considering how cheap hard drives and storage capacity has become it's more or less a useless feature. (Except maybe to generate extremely large game worlds.)
I know, i read the wikipedia page and effectively it's all built around making it weighting the least possible, i've read a comment saying that he can run starcraft 2 but on this game he has 10 fps due to the extreme calcualtion left to the cpu :-/
Still awesome, the developers says that with traditional tecniques the game would have weighted 200-300 mb, this gives the proportion of how lazy the standards have become to let identical games bulk up so much in so few years. Part of this is probably to fight piracy, as mentioned, but still.
The same thing can be applied to the absurd amount of processing power required to run the last games. Games are intentionally bad optimized to push the vga and cpus market. Disgusting.
I don't see how this would preventing piracy? Most of it is done by bittorrent now anyway, so the file size is shared between everyone.
And the days of physcial media seem to be coming to an end, vast majority of people getting DOOM for the PC will be downloading it using Steam or similar so they are downloading this big file regardless. If anything it wouldbe quicker to downlaod a pirate copy due to sometimes being smaller downloads with either better compression or rips.
i just started playing dishonored. i pledged to myself to never touch it after the hideous in-game ad in quakelive, but apparently i have no self-control
How is it combating piracy? Either I have to download 40gb with full speed from steam or I have to download 40gb with full speed from some random file hoster.