The horror! Yeah, somehow it always goes right into the arch too...

Yeah, on the render to the right you can see wire lines (esp d20). I imagine they used a nice resin 3d printer, then made a mold from that.

No Louis CK? Shennanigans. Best twitter trick: put 'Hey Liz Lemon,' in front of every Kanye West tweet.

You do realize how Kotaku/Gawker makes money, don't you?

Go watch A Boy And His Dog, now. It's on netflix, there's no excuse. Eli apes the fallout3 look, but A Boy and His Dog is pretty much the seed of the main ideas in Fallout.

I don't think there's a strong argument for consoles being a driving force for any of these technologies. The concepts behind 'Mega...' aren't new- virtual texturing, clipmapping etc have been around since the Silicon Graphics days, when they needed to make movie quality CG with machines weaker than the current…

RAM is the reason they're using these techniques- megatextures take up very little RAM- and megageometry should be tunable to remain within bounds.

This 2006 paper by id Software's JMP Van Waveren outlines techniques for streaming megatextures from optical media. Granted, fast streaming limits the kind of compression you use, so streaming may necessitate a less compressed dataset.

Well, most sports segregate the sexes- I think MMA fighting still has a little while before it's accepted by the mainstream sports world, which they very much would like. I think the biggest bone-head move here is not having more females in the game, licensed or fictional.

@R0bster: Depends on the game- idTech5 basically uses the same system (minus a channel for geometry) and it'll fill a blu-ray, or two hd-dvd's. (RAGE is about 50gigs) Hopefully the PC version ships with an even bigger dataset- I'd love to have a 100+ gig version.

@hagren: Megatexturing has issues with transparency- basically, it has to happen through traditional means in another render pass. Good eye!

Much of this is in idTech5- the big takeaway is how they're dealing with geometry, which is awesome. Two big problems with idTech5- UV unwrapping becomes hugely important, and you still get a lot of inconsistencies in texture density because of it. The other, is consoles- they have to create all their models with…

@Brian Crecente: I've heard lots of people say the MP is better than BLOPS, and has awesome PC support. For a genre where many people treat SP like icky garnish, it feels wrong to see reviews focus on SP.

I like to joke that if you knew to call someone a hipster, you probably were one. Or at least i used to, back in the day.

@William Henry Harrison: I gotta say I do love the concept- especially with Human Head's great handling of classic sci-fi themes in the first one.

@earlyman: Huh? Um- you talking about the one in leather jacket and long hair or the career mercenary?

@RagingDoofus: I'm with you completely. They do so much right in these games, but they mess up Harley of all things?

Maybe that was the plan all along- make people close ranks in support of Tommy and weirdness in the face of Sam Fisher here, who's actually just an alien doppleganger the real protagonist hunts down in a sidequest.

Ok, maybe I'm completely crazy, but the last time we really heard anything from Human Head was it was working on a game with Marc Ecko [kotaku.com]

Splash Damage have been doing team shooters for ten years now. So, while TF1 (1996) predates their work on Q3F (2001), they've been doing their own flavor of this genre for quite a while.