The problem is that if THEIR servers go offline, WE lose our games.

Why not "the consumers" in general?

Steeeeeve!

Oh Snap!

This was a little sister, though.

PC?

There are a bunch of difference, but I agree with you. Same concept.

All hail SETECX, King of Horsepower!

DOOMED, I TELL YOU!

Here's a bunch of mine. [www.dropbox.com] all 1920x1200.

Very limited? Nah. You can use this for bunches of things. I've personally used split channels to make a fire effect [ [dl.dropbox.com] [dl.dropbox.com] ], to have detail-textures split by a larger scale map [ [dl.dropbox.com] ], and to have a damage effect [ [dl.dropbox.com] ] (older object gets dirty and scratched)

No this isn't procedural. This is carefully thought out manual labor.

All the links have been changed because this page on a different domain. You can visit them by replacing "kotaku . com" to "www . techspot . com" like such:

It won't speed up performance much. Just some less loading times. (though it could also save time by having one shader over many more objects to combine draw calls) The biggest advantage is that using less textures means you can have them at a higher resolution. Instead of having 4 textures of 512² you can now use a…

Wow. That's a wasteful bunch of images. So much whitespace

If only he had $10 for every such tweet, comment or email. ...oh wait, he probably does have, which might alleviate his spirit.

People don't like to be knife.

100-year shelf life is quite possible today, and 100-year usage life too. Except that everything we use nowadays is designed to break and be re-bought.

You can use normal maps, but they'd have to be modular, too. That is, you only put details and textures (like bumps and cracks) in the normal map and use smoothing groups to get correct shading.

I actually do that from time to time. Here's some fire I did a couple of weeks ago to see how far I could get with a single texture. (yeah, it's actually 3 separate greyscale textures I grabbed from google - didn't have Photoshop at the time)