by prestidigitator » Fri Mar 29, 2013 04:53
You know what would be really neat? (The moon rock/sand textures and the issue of tiling someone mentioned made me think of this.) Procedural textures, like in Blender. Might not be too difficult to add them to the "[cmd..." style texture formats, either, so the client/server communication wouldn't have to change a bit. I think the only real thing that would have to be added is code to the client to render the textures. As long as it was a requirement that the texture noise functions have a period that is a multiple of 1 (that is, a whole number of blocks on a side), the client could cache texture blocks to help performance. Eventually the procedural textures could even be implemented in GLSL for little to no performance hit.
The great benefit here would be that not every block of the same type (dirt, grass, etc.) would have to look exactly the same. The eye would detect much fewer periodically repeating patterns. It's also very easy to make noise-based textures automatically tile seamlessly.
Last edited by
prestidigitator on Fri Mar 29, 2013 04:54, edited 1 time in total.