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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

The same guy, James Lambert, also implemented texture streaming (which would not be invented until two console generations later) in an N64 demo. The textures look uncharacteristically high res: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk

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I think it's overstated that texture streaming didn't happen until two console generations later. Texture streaming was famously used in Crash Bandicoot on the PS1 and extensively on most PS2 titles. However I do understand that with the lens of megatextures it's fun to look at James' accomplishment on the N64 in that light but just know that the N64 doesn't actually have the hardware needed for true modern paged feedback streaming.

I don't think any PS2 games used texture streaming. They used LOD, which is different. (As I argued below, the asset streaming that Crash Bandicoot used was even simpler than LODs because it relied on a fixed camera path.)

That demo also uses 40MB of textures, so I think the effect would be highly impractical (in both cart size and performance) for most commercial N64 games even if the technique did exist at the time.

I wonder whether there could be a way to circumvent this with procedural textures, like the ones we saw in the .kkrieger demo. Alternatively, perhaps the texture streaming could be made to work with PlayStation or Saturn, though I assume the slow latency and transfer speed of the CD drive would make it impractical.

texture streaming was used on Crash Bandicoot on PS1. Look up the interview with Andy Gavin. And here's an excerpt from Game Developer.

"Andy wrote an incredible paging system that would swap in and out 64K data pages as Crash traversed the level. This was a "full stack" tour de force, in that it ran the gamut from high-level memory management to opcode-level DMA coding. Andy even controlled the physical layout of bytes on the CD-ROM disk so that—even at 300KB/sec—the PS1 could load the data for each piece of a given level by the time Crash ended up there."

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/memory-matters-a-s...

That game had a fixed camera on rails though. Theoretically, they could have used a pre-rendered video of the level and just adjust the playback speed. There are some racing games which actually did that. So the asset streaming could be linear and the data arranged accordingly on disk. But that's not how modern texture streaming works, where the camera is assumed to be free. In the worst case scenario, the player can turn the camera around in a second, and the entire texture content has to be replaced in that time.

Like in id softwares RAGE?

Yes, id invented it, but I think they published one slightly earlier game which also had texture streaming. The technique (virtual textures) would not become ubiquitous in most engines until the PS4 era though.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars used an earlier version of it but only for the terrain. I think Rage was the first to use it for everything.

Unfortunately nowadays id Software doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of engine technology anymore. Most interesting new developments now come from Unreal Engine as far as I can tell. Like virtual geometry (Nanite) or efficient ray traced direct illumination (MegaLights).

Doom the Dark Ages uses some pretty advanced (and performance intense) illumination techniques which i believe are comparable ro megalights.

They ripped our Carmacks texture streaming stuff outta the engine years,ago though

No, they are only using ray traced global illumination, which Unreal Engine already had several years prior (Lumen). They are not second place either, because several other engines also had it before id Tech.

> They ripped our Carmacks texture streaming stuff outta the engine years,ago though

I'm pretty sure they are still using texture streaming. There is no alternative to that.

Damn i feel old. The ue5 demo is now 3 years old and lumen is considered old tech now? Jeez...

The original "Lumen in the Land of Nanite" demo is nearly six years old actually (May 2020).

Fuuuuuuccckkk

The id tech 8 engine is a whole lot more performant than the unreal 5 engine and absolutely does what it needs to, fantastically, I would add for the game it was made for.

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