Hi,
Before anything, I know support for virtual texturing is in the roadmap without a specific month to be released, but my question is: can you give an estimate in a frame of 2 to 3 months, like “October to December”?
Why I’m asking: I have an indie license of Granite for Unreal. I didn’t test it yet, because when I was about to download their compiled version of UE4 (with Granite added) I saw the news on UE4’s trello roadmap about the upcoming implementation of virtual texturing.
As this will be a native feature, and maintained by Epic Games, I would prefer to use it. No problem with Granite (or any plugin or custom code for that matter). Granite’s tech is awesome and their support, docs are nice. But I think it’s always better to have/use native tools, specially when producing long projects, like a game, for some reasons like plugins sometimes having compatibility issues with new versions, sometimes being discontinued, also some more complicated asset pipelines etc.
I also would like to know any details that the Epic guys can give about the implementation (not too technical, just something like: “It will use tile sets, you will author and export your textures to .tga or whatever, as always, and in the asset browser you’ll click here and there to pack them in a tile set…”).
Also if they think… if I start using Granite in UE4 to pack my textures right now will it be OK (no compatibility issues) in future versions of UE4, with virtual texturing added, to use a mix of both approaches, or gradually transition my materials to use UE4’s native implementation?
I know it may be hard to answer this now, only guessing, but maybe the programmers directly involved with it can have an idea about this kind of details.
Thanks in advance.
