We don't generate the entire texture and store it. We use what Sean Barret calls a Sparse Virtual Texture and what Carmack calls MegaTexture. Our implementation is 100% procedural so pages are generated when requested and then thrown away when they go out of the cache. They get generated through a combination of brush elements on the terrain surface which create the terrain geometry and decals that render into the virtual texture space to provide additional texturing information. We maintain two separate overlapping layers one for diffuse and one for normals. We don't use a height map approach or a voxel approach. We use a realtime csg approach. I have a blog post almost ready to go on this whole system (I've been holding off because I need to take some screenshots but maybe I'll just fire it off sooner without that).
since kryo seems to be offline I'll be playing proxy to post the response now: oh and btw our clanmate didn't know that there is a public form, maybe somebody could move this to the public forums so he can read and post directly? Personally I also want to read that blogpost, just skip the screenshots and release it
That blog post went up if you missed it, BTW. Some of that's over my head, but it was an interesting read and sounds very promising. http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/plan ... ngine.html
I'm especially glad that forests will be able to catch fire. This was a wonderful feature of TA and i missed it in Supcom. I hope that firey forests will be visible when zoomed out.
Anyone can write code that catches fire and burns everything to the ground. Heck, it comes standard on half my hardware!
