Here is what Quake looks like megatextured. It's uniquely textured (well, 95%) but it's not one physical texture, rather,
nineteen of them (not including the door texture and accompanying shader). Shader? Oh yeah, this isn't BSP29 either, it's FBSP (q3map2/qfusion). "Megatexturing" for vanilla quake is pretty laborious, which caused me to abandon
my first megatexturing project. However, I did get some useful
graybox textures out of the deal.
The most notable benefits of switching map formats are:
1. No palette!
2. No WAD repacking and map recompile to update them in-game.
3. Textures must only be divisible by 2 rather than 16.
The room took me about three solid evenings to make, quite a bit of that time was spent fiddling around and getting the hang of things. One who is experienced could do a better job in less time. I say this because it pertains to my initial question: is megatexturing Quake, or a derivative, viable? Based upon my findings, my answer is ABSOLUTLEY.
Of course, certain variables alter it's 'viability'. For instance, opting for textures with a greater pixel density than Quake will result in much more texture data. My test, KP14, has exactly 3mb of textures. If I were to make a map 100x larger and megatexture it, it would only use approximately 300mb in textures, which is nothing.
This is the workflow and benefits of texturing this way that I imagine:
Concept art is the anchor, the unifying element that both the level designer and level artist will use. This is key. The level designer lays out a map focusing almost exclusively on gameplay, the level designer does not texture the map, he only grayboxes it. The map is continually refined until it plays great, I mean beautifully, as this is the designers main focus. Now that we have a great playing map, the artist goes in and draws all over it, focusing only on making it look great. The end result is a map that looks AND plays great.
I feel that by narrowing the focus on these two elements, the end result is of much higher quality. Both the level designer and artist have a much higher level of freedom than they would if using traditional texture sets.
There are other details, but this is the gist. It sounds good on paper, at least.
Anyway, here are some pics of KP14 being assembled.
bam and
boom