During the Q&A session at QuakeCon 2013, John Carmack was asked whether he plans to use mega-textures in future games developed by id Software, to which he gave a pretty long explanation, detailing the benefits of using mega textures.

“So the performance issues on the PC, we had the disastrous driver problem and we still have driver problems that crop up. Some of that is also the fault of doing something that nobody else was doing. There is value to doing exactly what everyone else does, that is a well tested path, nobody will accidentally break something that everyone is doing. We were clearly doing something off the beaten road with the mega-texture, the continuous texture uploading and all that entire pipeline of things. It hit the goals that we were looking for on the consoles. On the PCs it should have been superior to that but we had the disastrous driver problem which colored a lot of people’s views on it and we still now occasionally have problems where Rage starts running crappy on somebody’s system.”

“As it stands right now, yes we are still using mega-textures, higher densities, having more in the back which we can call as needed even if we can’t ship them necessarily. The step that I would like to take data wise and we just can’t afford to ship it on optical media (current generation) is if we can ship a defused map along with a pre-baked light, then we have the best of both worlds. We have no downsides to dynamic lights, where right now we have to approximate them but you can also have the full glory of the completely baked world view. We are still far from tapping out all we can get it out from there. We have technologies that let people map paint directly on the mega-textures. We should be able to fix every crossing edge in the world which is something that is not at all plausible to do in any other way. Every time you have two things meeting, don’t have that edge seeing there that nothing get rid of but actually cross fade a little support texture around it. ”

He also explained that  the use of mega-textures have resulted in fantastic results with no performance issues.

“The ability where we have used it with stamping has allowed fantastic advances something that has no stability or performance issues. There were big wins to be had there that we didn’t make the most of and we are still trying to make more out of them. In the end when you say long term, data always wins. So something like mega-texture will win in the end, whether it is dominant in the coming generation or its takes the transition towards cloud gaming.”

“When you take the case of cloud gaming, where you are running on a data set of servers, its completely credible considering having a petabyte of data for this entire glorious world that is build with cloud resource, over and over and in almost all cases, cleverness and compression technologies eventually falls to just put the damn data there. It’s possible that we were pushing a little bit too early on the mega texture because it  barely worked on current generation, but I think inevitably that’ where things will be,” he added.

There is no doubt that Rage was a technical mess on the PC but now that everything is done and dusted, Carmack should be appluaded for trying out something different. Personally, I think mega-texture is going one of the biggest deals in the next generation consoles, given how powerful they are. Let’s hope they fix the driver problems and compatibility issues across the board.

Source: QuakeCon 2013 Keynote

“I think Kinect still has some fundamental limitations with the latency and frame rate on it. Interacting with it is still…when you interact with Kinect, some of the standard interactions – position and hold, waiting for different things – it’s fundamentally a poor interaction.

“One way that I look at it is – I used to give Apple a lot of grief about the one button mouse. Anybody working with a mouse really wants more buttons – [they’re] helpful there. Kinect is sort of like a zero button mouse with a lot of latency on it.”

Considering that Kinect will be always-on with the Xbox One, that can’t be good news for Microsoft. It’s always possible they release patches to improve the same though – maybe we’ll see the same on launch day?

(Source)

Get ready for QuakeCon’s 2013 online pre-registration starting next week on Monday April 15th 2013.

All attendees can gain entry to QuakeCon for free. However, when pre-registration opens up the company will be offering premium packages. Premium packages will be limited and only available on a first-come first-server basis. Here is an entire list of all the premium packages below:

BYOC Select-a-Seat | Includes Guaranteed Reserved Seating: $30 (Limit of 1,250 packages available)

• Select and Reserve a guaranteed seat of your choice in the BYOC area
• An Official QuakeCon 2013 BYOC T-Shirt

BYOC Select-a-Seat and Swag Pack | Full of Limited Edition Items and Guaranteed Reserved Seating: $90 (Limit of 500 packages available)

• Select and Reserve a guaranteed seat of your choice in the BYOC area
• An Official QuakeCon 2013 T-Shirt
• An Official QuakeCon 2013 BYOC T-Shirt
• A QuakeCon Branded Logitech G400 Mouse
• A $5 Voucher for the on-site Bethesda Retail Store; we’ll have a selection of items from the online store store.bethsoft.com available at QuakeCon, as well as a number of show exclusives
• Reserved Seating Until 7:00pm Friday

BYOC Select-a-Seat and QuakeCon done Quick | Includes Fast Passes for the Duration of the Event: $50 (Limit of 250 packages available)

• Select and Reserve a guaranteed seat of your choice in the BYOC area
• Express lane fast-pass registration for the BYOC
• Express lane fast-pass to every speaker, panel, and public event at QuakeCon
• Limited reserved access seating for all panels, presentations, and events
• An Official QuakeCon 2013 BYOC T-Shirt
• Reserved Seating Until 7:00pm Friday

Swag Pack | Full of Limited Edition Items: $60 (Limit of 250 packages available)

• An Official QuakeCon 2013 T-Shirt
• An Elder Scrolls Online Ouroboros T-Shirt
• Another Special Limited Edition T-Shirt
• A QuakeCon Branded Logitech G400 Mouse
• A $5 Voucher for the on-site Bethesda Retail Store; we’ll have a selection of items from the online store store.bethsoft.com available at QuakeCon, as well as a number of show exclusives