Just wondering

[Hyper]

When I see al those highres textures, I wonder why there are so few games, even today, that ship with this kind of highres textures. It really does an outstanding job of making things look real. It does not need any expensive (in terms of rendering power) shader effects or other artificial details and nowadays it's compatible with all graphics cards.

I'm so glad that we as Unreal community have been privilleged with this detail. It really blows games like UT2004 away. I wonder what the people of the original Unreal developemnt team would experience when they would play the game again with S3TC on.

[DieHard SCWS]

And the stupid part is, i asume that like me the textures for almost any game are drawn already in high resolution, because you need a minimum size to work from. But apart from that i have no clue, maybe its just the engine itself is too expensive to either buy or develope ?

I wonder what the people of the original Unreal developemnt team would experience when they would play the game again with S3TC on

By now i am wondering too, maybe ill go ask them, i still never contacted them to go ask for additional textures, if they still have them, speciffically the textures from Shane Caudle.
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[jackrabbit]

i think they would be blown away.. really do..

[Turboman.]

When I see al those highres textures, I wonder why there are so few games, even today, that ship with this kind of highres textures. It really does an outstanding job of making things look real. It does not need any expensive (in terms of rendering power) shader effects or other artificial details and nowadays it's compatible with all graphics cards.

its because high res textures take alot more memory then you think, infact if you dont have a video card with at least 64 megs of video ram you're pc will die a horrible death.

the reason why high res textures run so well in unreal i believe is because unreal doesnt have many tasks performed by the GPU because the entire game is still rendered by the CPU (hardware T&L was still 4 years away back then) and the GPU only performs simple tasks as texture filtering and mipmapping etc.
newer games take a whole bigger load on your video card, since nowadays games entirely rely on your video card, with minimal video memory left for textures, so developers go to alternatives as detailtexturing and multi segmented/layered textures.

although high res textures might come back in the next carmack game this or next year (ET: quake wars?), since carmack has been working on some new technology called "megatexture" which gives the possibility to have insanely huge textures (probably at scales like 2000000x2000000) with minimal memory usage. no more repetetive patterns FTW!