[AKIRA_x]

I dont work with making computer games, so might me a dead easy answer to this, but I have a great interest in the area (making them..not playing..hrmph!!) and I also have a great passion for computer hardware and have been following the development of graphics boards since I got my #9 4 MB board. (what happend to #9, they made som kickass 2D boards).

"How big will game textures become"

If you drew and graph of the how big a texture is in a game since the first 3D games up to today, you would see a upwards reaching arch. This is ofcourse good since you get more details into a texture and the games looks better. Also the graphics boards have alot of RAM to handle this. My new RADEON has a wooping 64 MB...I mean..who EVER imagined 2 years ago gameboards with 64 MB!!!..its wild. But it wont stop there..and probably within a year or so you will have entery level graphics boards with 96/128 MB ram, this allows game makers to have larger and larger textures. Will we see in the future textures above 1000 pixels in size??? or will something else happen. Will the art we are making here for print one day be the way you make your textures..with the same level of details. What demands will this have to us as designers..and how we learn to make our art. Or do the people with the know how already work out there..in hollywood. For you in the games industry..you might be holding a freeticket into highend 3D animation in the movie industry.

..so..anyone?

AKIRA

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Whos ya dady!!

[waylon]

There's a limit to how detailed you can make textures before it starts to get redundant. I mean... most games are played in 640x480 or 800x600 nowadays (though obviously that's be increasing with time.) If you have a 1024x1024 texture, that's bigger than your entire screen resolution, and most of the time all that extra detail would be lost (unless, for some reason, you have a game where you zoom WAY in on walls a lot.)

In any case, texture maps WILL probably level out around 1024x1024. (The game I'm currently working on has a texture limit of 512x512.)

What will be increasing more over time will be the number of polygons you can use in a scene, and the special effects you can apply... most notably, multi-texturing stuff like bump mapping, env mapping, etc... and also shaders (which is how they do all the neat animating textures in Quake 3).

In any case, I think the amount of texture detail has just about reached the point where adding more detail isn't going to make things look any better. It's all the other special effects that will make the difference.

[Frost]

The Matrox G400 supports textures up to 2048x2048 in 32bits. The future will only permit more.