Latest Quake Wars - Screen, Details

If you look at the way most outdoor textures are done, you wind up with some grass textures, some dirt textures and some mountain textures. You break them up and make some borders, and kind of cross-fade and blend between them. There’s a lot of little strategies you can do for that, but it does wind up with this look of sameness across the areas, and sometimes it looks ugly if you look down closely at it, although sometimes it looks OK if you’re running past it.

When we were originally talking about Enemy Territory, early on, they were pursuing a direction like that, but I suggested a direction that I’ve considered a couple of times over the years, and I’m still surprised no-one has pursued this more aggressively. And that’s instead of trying to take some textures and combine them in some way, just make the entire thing a texture...

To create all that, you obviously can’t have an artist go in and paint four billion pixels, so there are two pieces of technology that combine to let you build all that. There’s a procedural base creation tool, which is kind of like various commercial landscaping technologies, where you’ll say as angles tip up, we’ll get more rocky here, and the grass will be down here... But instead of doing the dumb blending that you have to do in real-time, they can do sophisticated things like have the grass petering out and going into the cracks between the rocks, instead of looking like you spray-painted it on. Then they’ve got the ability to go in and have an artist at any time, anywhere in the level, and to say: “That doesn’t look quite right – that tree is just sticking up out of the grass” – which is what you will see in every other game. But what you’d like to do is scrub away a bit of the grass there, so there’s dirt showing, and you could maybe draw a root. So that’s the other freedom they’ve got.

That’s a finishing tool, but there’s a really cool aspect to it: finishing like that is guaranteed to have no impact on the gameplay. Unlike most of the things that you do when you want to make the game look cool, it won’t make the game slower or alter the gameplay, which makes you go through this iterative tuning process. But the great thing about stamping into a megatexture is that it has no impact on the game – it’s strictly an aesthetic thing.

And you can target it, when you go to play-testing. You can say: “People are congregating here and here, but they never really go up here,” so the artist can go and make a particular area really cool – say with little footprints and tyre tracks, and it can be as good as a movie backdrop.”