New Technologies: Introducing MegaTexture

From a technical point of view, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars runs on the Doom 3 engine in the OpenGL 2.0 environment, although the engine has been seriously redesigned to meet the modern 3D graphics standards.

The most notable innovation in ET: Quake Wars is the new MegaTexture technology developed by id Software. The traditional method of texture mapping is not ideal as it often leaves visual artifacts like a visible seam between two textures or a repeating texture pattern on large surfaces. The new technology is meant to solve all the problems associated with this traditional method. As its name suggests, the point of MegaTexture is in using one gigantic texture for the entire game level. This texture contains not only scenery data, but also special effects like destruction from bullets and shells, traces of tank tracks, etc.

Each mega-texture ensures a unique, non-repeating landscape for a territory of over 1 square mile without fog. With dimensions of 32768x32768 pixels it takes about 3GB of memory in uncompressed form, but existing compression methods help reduce its size to more acceptable. Moreover, this mega-texture can be loaded dynamically from the hard disk during play.

The use of mega-textures doesn’t push the quality of graphics in ET: Quake Wars to a new level, but makes it neat and free from the defects of the traditional texture-mapping method. It also provides conditions for large-scale and continuous battles.