Is Mega-texturing the answer for GRAW outdoor maps?

[rossiski]

MODERATORS: I don't believe this is a modding theme, but I'll leave that to your discretion for possible thread-moving.

This is an interview from John Carmack. Yes, you know him as the creator of such old-timey favorites as Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and the subsequent sequels.

He is mentioning a new texturing procedure using what has been dubbed, "mega-texturing." This new process is being developed to combat the overuse of unique texturing that absorbs more and more system resources.

http://www.gamerwithin.com/?view=article&article=1319&cat=2

Quoting the problem:

"The key point of that is what you really want to do is to be able to have as much texture as you want to use where you have something unique everywhere. Now normally, you just can't get away with doing that, because if you allocate a 32,000 by 32,000 texture, the graphics curve can't render directly from that. There's not enough memory in the system to do that..."

Quoting the solution:

"...one of my early suggestions to them was that they consider looking at an approach where you just use one monumentally large texture, and that turned out to be 32,000 by 32,000. And I - rather then doing it by the conventional way that you would approach something like this (i.e. - chopping up the geometry into different pieces and mapping different textures on to there and incrementally swapping them for low res versus high res versions), just let them treat one uniform geometry mesh..."

My question is as follows:

Could GRiN use this technique to create extremely large outdoor environments for a possible GRAW expansion pack? Rather than drowning our rigs in individual textures, what about a single large texture?

[LT.INSTG8R]

Yeah the stuff they are doing on Quake Wars is pretty innovative but then keep in mind that will be an OpenGL game.