Timothy Lochner

One of the best resources I've had for graphics programming is texture packs. You can program away all the light simulating algorithms, but applying a texture to a model gives much more satisfying results. My 1 gripe is that textures often don't indicate scale. 1/?

One of my pet peeves since I started graphics programming was texel density. This is because I started as a tools programmer and saw designers and environment artists apply HUGE scales to objects to repurpose it for another use. 2/?

I like to ask, what does a texel represent? Because if it's a texture of the moon as seen from earth, it represents miles of distance. If it's a texture of dirt when the player is proned, it represents a much different underlying reality. 3/?

It'd be nice if texture packs adopted standards. Each texture could represent 1 square meter of material. This lets you realistically place it in a world, understand how it should be there. Otherwise, a great looking texture could throw off a scene because it's out of scale. 4/?

And of course, some textures would need to be larger than representing 1 meter, but it should indicate so. I'm thinking of big cliff faces or castle walls. Big level design static geometry, viewed at a distance. 5/?

As an interesting aside, the only project I know of that adopted strict rules about textures and scale was EQ:N. Being voxel driven, textures were pretty much all triplanar mapped, and bricks needed to neatly line up with voxel boundaries to look good. 6/?