I suspect if anyone had thought through this it would be John Carmack. His game design skills can be called into question. His 3D engine skills are second to none[1].
[1] As an individual. I suspect why we haven't see as much from him since Quake 3 is that his skills don't scale to a team.
> I suspect why we haven't see as much from him since Quake 3
Not quite accurate. Since Quake 3 he made Unified lighting and shadowing (for Doom 3) and Megatextures (for Quake 5 and Rage).
I can't really think of any other major paradigm shifts over the last 10-15 in game graphics engines.
There are lots of little improvements everywhere, but they seem more evolutionary than the revolutionary steps we saw in the 90s (textureMapping, raycasting, BSPs, PVS, lightmaps, Sorted edge rasterization, bilinear filtering, bezier-surferaces, shaders, unified lighting/shadowing and beam trees, etc.).
>I can't really think of any other major paradigm shifts over the last 10-15 in game graphics engines.
Deferred shading is a pretty major paradigm shift compared to forward rendering and it's within ~10-15 year range (it wasn't practical on pre MRT hardware which was shader model 3 ?) along with plenty of screen space effects like SSAO.
Rage was gorgeous. The game was terrible, but it was incredibly pretty, mostly because of megatextures. Some pundit (TotalBiscuit?) referred to it looking like a moving painting, and in places it really was that breathtaking.
Again, the game was unfortunately a few fun sections interspersed with really un fun things, but that has nothing to do with the tech.
(FWIW I ran it on AMD and it had major problems, and then a year or so later it was perfect. AFAICT they patched most of the issues away on PC)
Personally, I didn't think Rage looked all that - I thought it was muddy and bland (and not in the good, post-apocalyptic way) and graphically as mediocre as the gameplay.
I think for Rage it was an idea ahead of its time, but they're still used in the new Doom which doesn't seem to have the same issues and has been praised for good optmisation.
I believe the new Doom still uses virtual textures to an extent, but they seem to have given up on the idea of using it to apply unique texture assets to every surface in the game as they did in Rage.
Without globally unique textures Megatexture goes from a paradigm shift to just an implementation detail, unfortunately.
>Let's be honest though, did anyone actually like megatextures?
Phrased this way, this question makes no sense to me. Perhaps you mean specifically the art in Rage. Virtual texture memory strictly increases the capacity for detail, realism, and/or expression.
I meant as a technology in general, given that they pushed it so hard as a killer feature of the game and it ended up being the reason most people couldn't play it.
[1] As an individual. I suspect why we haven't see as much from him since Quake 3 is that his skills don't scale to a team.