Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 3rd October 2007
Comments (38) Stumble

Shader Effects

There are actually two shader options in the games menu, one titled Shader Levels and the other Shader Effects.

We had a fiddle with both but couldn’t really spot the effects of the Shader Levels option, so we decided to focus on just the Shader Effects. This option controls the appearance of things such as water, smoke and heat haze and there are three options to choose from.

The key place to look here is around the bottom of the boat on the right hand side. There’s some very subtle blurring and waviness going on which doesn’t communicate too well in a screenshot and is indicative of the increased effects setting.

True, I don’t think that particular effect looks very good, but the overall water quality on the higher setting does.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Shader Effects and Megatextures Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Shader Effects and Megatextures Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Shader Effects and Megatextures
Shader Effects High (left), Medium (center) and Low (right), click to enlarge

Once again though the first thing on your mind should be performance, not looks. This is a multiplayer game remember, so when the game lags it doesn’t mean the A.I is lagging too – it means you’re probably being shot in the face. If the higher settings effect your performance at all then you should bite the bullet and turn the setting back down.

M-M-M-Megattexture!

The engine used for Quake Wars is an enhanced version of the id Tech 4 engine used in Doom 3, something which is pretty obvious from the overall aesthetic and feel of the game. The main enhancement to the engine is in the addition of the new megatexture technology developed by Carmack and Co.

So, what is a megatexture? Well, to put it simply, a mega texture is an incredibly large texture which covers the entire map and stops developers and gamers from having to worry about terrain textures which don’t match or repeat noticeably. The megatextures themselves are stored on the hard disk and are streamed as needed, meaning that large amounts of terrain detail can be displayed with relatively small amounts of memory.

The megatextures can measure anywhere up to a gigapixel in size (1024 megapixels, 32768x32768 pixels) and take up around three gigabytes in raw form, though they are obviously compressed to more manageable sizes.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Shader Effects and Megatextures
All this is done with a single texture, click to enlarge

Tim and myself ended up discussing the megatextures in some depth during the process of writing this article and we both argued different sides of the issue. To Tim, a graphics whore to the core, things like tiling textures and texture crawling are easily noticeable and utterly unforgivable. To him, the megatexture tech is a great way to ensure he has the smoothest and best experience when he is playing.

Myself though, being more of a gameplay geek, was hard pushed to notice any real differences in the games textures when compared to other recent titles and I struggled to think of any modern games where tiling textures had been a problem for me. After a little bit of discussion and persuasion, I conceded that the megatexture tech does actually add to the game experience by offering up more uniquely created and realistic textures.

Of course I'm a stubborn person by nature and my main concern is still whether or not using megatextures is the easiest way to solve this problem. Unfortunately that's something only time can tell us - will megatextures prove a problem for developers and cause game delays? If not then there isn't a problem, but if so then Tim and I will likely have another chat about it at a later date. Either way, the addition of megatextures here is a nice reassurance that you won't have any texture clashes to worry about and, for now, that's something we can hardly complain about.

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