Procedural Textures the Future of Games?

An anonymous reader writes "bit-tech has posted an interview, with the head of Allegorithmic, Sebastian DeGuy. In it DeGuy again makes the statement that his software (which was used to make the Roboblitz game released on Steam recently) will be used to make games 90% smaller than what they currently are. He comments on why his procedural texturing technique is an evolution of the infamous .kkreiger. demo and how procedural texturing compares to Carmack's 'megatexturing'. The article includes some pretty extraordinary pictures of scenes rendered with just a few bytes as opposed to the ridiculous sizes of modern games." From the article: "Despite some similarities, technique-wise, we are quite different in several ways. First, the inner technology (the maths) that we use is based on modern maths. We use 'Wavelets', instead of classic maths method of 'Fourier Transform', which was the mathematical technique used in the past by all the procedural texturing techniques (including .kkrieger). Our technique works on a new mathematical model that I developed whilst studying for my PhD."

Quality

[AKAImBatman]

One thing the article doesn't quite touch on is the fact that procedural texturing can produce superior quality. We currently use tricks like trilinear mipmapping and ansitropic filtering to produce the best quality out of a resampling of a static image. However, this doesn't remove the fact that the textures are still of a fixed size, and will break up or look wrong depending on how close you come to the texture.

Procedural textures don't suffer from this. If greater detail is needed, it can simply be calculated from the texturing formula. As a result, a woodgrain will continue to look like a woodgrain (to the limits of the resolution), no matter how close or far away you get. Raytraced scenery has used this advantage to good effect in the last few decades. If procedural texturing finally makes the jump to gaming, the results could be incredible.

Of course, there is a downside. Real-time procedural texturing is costly. So if the hardware isn't up to it, the advantages of the texturing will go unrealized. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the first generation merely generates static textures on load, then uses them as if they were bitmaps included with the game. Still, once the box is opened, the potential will be too tempting to ignore.

"Elite" used this technique over 20 years ago

[Andy_R]

Way back in 1984, the game "Elite" used procedural techniques to generate it's galaxy maps, allowing 8 galaxies with 256 individally named and described stars to fit in a tiny fraction of it's 32k memory. A derivative of the fibonnaci sequence saved the BBC's 1Mhz processor having to do FFTs. The idea of using procedures to generate 3D graphics has been around since another BBC game, "The Sentinel", where 9999 levels of 3D landscape were generated at up to 1fps (if you were lucky!)

Sony has been hyping procedural texturing recently, the PS3's Cell architecture is supposedly ideal for doing this kind of thing.

Re:Quality

[Bieeanda]

Of course, there is a downside. Real-time procedural texturing is costly. So if the hardware isn't up to it, the advantages of the texturing will go unrealized. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the first generation merely generates static textures on load, then uses them as if they were bitmaps included with the game.

Having played through the Roboblitz demo, and having sat through about five to ten minutes of it claiming to unpack procedural textures before the game actually began, it's pretty clear that that's what these guys are doing with it. I imagine that it'd be a real boon to something like Vanguard, whose installer purportedly weighs in at 16 gigabytes and expands to over 20, due to massive textures.

Re:Creation issue

[AKAImBatman]

The ironing is delicious.

Indeed it is. I always liked waffles.

You do know that traditional textures are often created in, you guessed it, Photoshop?

You're still missing the point. Procedural textures are procedural. There is no bitmap to edit, only a set of parameters to pass to the function of your choice. Converting the result of the procedure to a bitmap would be superfluous, as it would defeat the size gains provided by doing procedural texturing!

What you usually find in procedural texturing is a tool with various sliders and controls to modify the parameters (e.g. roughness, marbling, scaling, color, etc.) of the texture. When the artist obtains the look he's going for, he saves those parameters out. There is no need for a bitmap until runtime.

The really great thing about procedural texturing is that texture libraries become even more useful. Want a marble floor? Grab a library texture. Applied to the final product, it will look like a fresh texture rather than a rehash of an existing bitmap. The texture can be as large or as small as you need, so there's no obviously tiling like the type that makes traditional textures stand out so much. When the full potential of procedural texturing is realized in gaming, it will all but remove the need for a dedicated texture artist.