MegaTexturing With John Carmack

From [H]Console:

GamerWithin.com sends word that they have posted a seventeen question interview with John Carmack that they’d like to share with the world. The subject? MegaTexturing. What the hell is MegaTexturing? GW anticipated you would ask that so that was their very first question to JC (this is but a small snippet of the answer):

MegaTexture technology is something that addresses resource limitations in one particular aspect of graphics. The core idea of it is that when you start looking at outdoor rendering and how you want to do terrain and things in general, people almost always wind up with some kind of cross-fade blended approach where you tile your textures over and blend between them and add little bits of detail here and there. A really important thing to realize about just generally tiling textures, that we’re so used to accepting it in games, is that when you have one repeated pattern over a bunch of geometry, the texture tiling and repeating is really just a very, very specialized form of data compression where it’s allowing you to take a smaller amount of data and have it replicated over multiple surfaces, or multiple parts of the same surface in a game since you generally don’t have enough memory to be able to have the exact texture that you’d like everywhere.