Anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of designing a huge game that must run happily on limited hardware should watch the video in this GDC link It could almost be retitled as design & texturing 101. Well worth passing on to anyone you know who wants to get into this demanding industry, or who looks at a game and ‘wonders how?’
This is all from the viewpoint of the artist designer for Witcher III and deals with the real-world problems of constraints. There are few technical buzzwords and no code or game engine details. I only noticed two terms that some may find new to them and the first is LOD (Level of Detail), this is the ‘cheat’ that is used to save rendering time by using simple portrayal of objects when seen at a distance. The other is UMBRA – this refers to the engine used for intelligent access to the texturing database and management of the texture pipeline. It is a proprietary software tool that CodeRed license.
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