Nah, he is just reading the article correctly while you are missunderstanding it.

I would assume "both of these" refers to the artefacts, not the firstly/secondly.

Ok, I understand. However, as a linguist I do feel I have to point out that this is not only ambiguous, but the overall paragraph structure strongly suggests that 'Both of these' refers to the first and the second points, not the artifacts. Logical structure summary:1. Megatexture is not perfect2. example 1 of imperfection: problem implementing on HD-less 360 3. example 2 of imperfection: artifacts4. new version of megatexture solves both these imperfectionsIt's made worse by 'couple of artifacts like', suggesting there are more than two artifacts so that 'Both' even in a limited two clause context could be incorrect. Less ambiguos would be: 'this first generation of Megatexture ... suffers from artifacts caused by the 'zoom issue' and the megatexture being mapped on a 2D grid. Both of these artifacts are solved in the new version of MegaTexture coming in id Tech 5 engine. Finally, in a contextual sense, if the 360 is too important to neglect, then how are they going to successfully market the MegaTexture feature of their id Tech 5 engine to multiplatform developers?I feel like I'm splitting hairs though as probably all the tech savvy people here will likely read it the way you guys did. But others may not, and if this was a reading comprehension test, you'd have failed. ;)

Here's the structure as I wrote it:

1. Megatexture is not perfect.
2. Mention of first imperfection. Followed by concrete example.
3. Mention of second imperfection. Followed by note this is fixed in the future.

The first imperfection is a logistical problem, while the second is a technical problem. In page 5 - Disadvantages, where both are listed, the first has a mention that the next version of MT will exacerbate this problem while the second already has a mention of being fixed in the upcoming version of MegaTexture.

Anyway, I've added "artefacts" to the final sentence so that we can get on to discussing the tech proper.

The first imperfection (i.e. requiring more than 1 DVD) only applies to the Xbox 360 so PC/PS3 "multiplatform developers" need not worry. Even for xbox 360 games, it's only a deal breaker if the gameplay precludes storing the game media across two or more discs.

According to the article, in ETQW MegaTexture uses approximately 20 mb of memory. Do comparable non-MegaTexture titles use similar amounts of memory for the ground surface and does it provide mostly a quality improvement, or is it mainly a huge reduction in the required memory footprint?

Does anyone have numbers on how much memory the surface of a typical shooter uses (UT, GoW)?

Thanks for taking the time! It may be small to you, but the implications of this were large enough to me. The way I read it, we were going to see further compression improvements that solved the storage issue, and in that case I'd have wanted definitely to know more about that. Now at least to me it is clear and future readers are (even) less likely to misunderstand.

Anyway, it's an interesting technology, and all in all I'm starting to see that it is more groundbreaking then I initially thought it would be. One aspect in other articles was how this made art creation a lot easier for artists. There are plenty of games that would benefit from that aspect, like Oblivion, or a game like Fallout / Diablo / Champions of Norrath. Regarding the latter, someone suggested that it used a similar technology, which is interesting if true (it did max out a DVD9, as one of the first and probably few games to do so last gen).

You can always design a game using megatextures for PC and PS3 but ship the 360 version with lower resolution enough to fit in its disc. As for the 360 having no standard HDD, well too bad, that's a handicap inherent to the platform. Ps3 and PC also have their problems.

It's a great technique that can improve visuals considerably but saying it's faulty because it doesn't take into consideration Microsoft's lack of vision when designing the 360 it's as moronic as saying this is bad because you can't use in cellphone games.

I can't catch well what's Megatexture. Is just a way to stream textures in a way all the video ram could be used in a frame? And... if uses AGP/PCI streaming... would not be that too slow?
Would not occupy too much space on disk? Why not better to concentrate on procedural realtime textures?

Procedural *realtime* textures are far too difficult to make now. All games that use procedural textures don't process the textures in real time. The textures are either saved to the HDD, or just put into texture memory for when they're needed later.

Based on the Far Cry 2 presentation on PAX I got the impression, that some of the textures they have are done entirely realtime (e.g. tree bark). But yeah, not enough power to do everything RT now. And results are not necessarily realistic.