Hacker News Reader

The technical innovations also began to have no impact or even an adverse one. Doom 3's push for 100% real-time stencil shadows was practically ignored by the industry when HL2 and other competitors came out. MegaTexture was actually removed from the engine in Doom Eternal.

View on HN

While MegaTexture was removed from Doom Eternal because it's just not necessary in a small level-based game like that, the general idea was carried on. It's a big reason you could basically describe the entire PS4 era as the era of texture pop-in. Virtual texturing made it very easy to build massively large worlds, using GPU "page misses" to figure out what textures to stream in.

The problem is, well, the player sees it. As ugly as fuck texture pop-in.

No, mega texture like approaches were almost never used outside of a couple id games. The texture pop in was mip streaming, which persists to this day but memory is a bit less scarce and disk read speeds are much better so you notice it less.

Stencil shadows never had a chance as the primary technique for games targeting realistic graphics as they inherently cannot do soft shadows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com